Project 11 offers 1 BTC for cracking a bitcoin key using a quantum computer

What’s new? Research firm Project Eleven has launched a competition called the Q-Day Prize to find out what threat quantum computing currently poses to the bitcoin blockchain and to find quantum-resistant solutions to protect it in the long term. The company has offered a 1 BTC reward to whoever cracks the largest bitcoin key fragment using a quantum computer within the next year.

Source: X.com

What else is known? Contestants are tasked with cracking the largest possible number of bits of an Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based bitcoin key by running Shor’s algorithm on a quantum computer.

ECC is used in Bitcoin and a number of other blockchains to generate public and private key pairs and to sign transactions. With its initiative, Project Eleven aims to prove or disprove that the method can scale to crack the full 256-bit bitcoin key once the necessary computing power is available.

The company noted that more than 10 million bitcoin addresses have public keys, but despite the development of quantum computing, no one has yet fully investigated the threat.

Thus, if quantum computers become powerful enough to crack ECC keys, more than 6 million BTC, whose value at the current exchange rate exceeds $508 billion, could be in danger.

The Project Eleven team emphasizes that no ECC key used in real-world applications has yet been cracked, and the winner could “go down in cryptography history.”

Access to quantum computing is offered by several online platforms, such as Amazon Web Services and IBM. Current estimates suggest that about 2000 logical qubits (with error correction) are enough to crack a 256-bit ECC key, Project Eleven noted.

IBM’s Heron and Google’s Willow chips can currently handle 156 and 105 qubits, respectively. According to Project Eleven, these are significant enough numbers to be of concern. The company believes that a 2000-qubit quantum system could be built in the next ten years.

Q-Day Prize participants can register as individuals or teams and complete the challenge by April 5, 2026.

In March, cypherpunk Jameson Lopp said the question of how concerned the industry should be about quantum computing is currently “unanswerable.” “I think it’s far from a crisis, but given the difficulty in changing Bitcoin it’s worth starting to seriously discuss,” Lopp said.

In February, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the concerns are valid, but he believes Bitcoin’s quantum-resistant addresses will be realized long before any “serious threat” arises.