Researcher wins 1 BTC bounty for escalating quantum threat timeline

Today, April 24, Giancarlo Lelli, an Italian researcher, was awarded a one-Bitcoin prize after the world’s largest demonstration of the possible quantum attacks elliptic curve keys could face. 

This type of attack could not only threaten Bitcoin but also Ethereum, leading to a possible loss of more than $2.5 trillion in digital assets protected by elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).

Over the last couple of years, there have been speculations about the security risks that quantum computers pose to elliptic curve cryptography. It has been described severally as a theoretical and distant problem, but that reality seems a lot less distant after today’s success.

What Lelli actually did

Elliptic curve cryptography is the math behind crypto wallets being able to handle user funds without revealing the private keys. To break through it, Lelli made use of Shor’s algorithm alongside a powerful quantum computer to derive the private key from its public key.

By using a variant of Shor’s algorithm, Lellii was able to derive the private key across a search gap of 32,767 by targeting the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP). This allowed him access to the mathematical formula that supports the security systems that secure Bitcoin.

The most notable part of this accomplishment is the accessibility itself. Project Eleven’s bounty program, launched last year, was created to break elliptic curve keys ranging from 1 to 25 bits by April this year. 

Lelli was able to achieve this task on cloud-accessible hardware, no special equipment, no institution funding his research, and nothing illegal. He was able to carry out the attack with equipment available to any motivated researcher today.

How fast is the gap closing?

The last recorded public break was a 6-bit demonstration by Steve Tippeconnic in September 2025 using IBM’s 133-qubit quantum computer. Lelli’s recent accomplishment, however, has expanded that factor by 512 in just seven months.

Aside from the practical success, the theoretical aspect is also growing as fast, with Google’s April 2026 whitepaper putting the requirement for a full 256-bit (Bitcoin’s scale) attack at about 500,000 physical qubits, down from the initial estimate of several million. 

Building on the white paper, a subsequent paper from Caltech and Oratomic brought the number to as low as 10,000 qubits in a neutral-atom architecture.

What Lelli’s success signifies is a practical side to the theoretical findings. Proving that the hardware aspect and the theoretical aspect are both moving in the right directions. While the jump from 15 bits to 256 bits still remains large, the possibilities look closer than ever, and could now be only a matter of time

Who should be worried?

Major users at risk are wallets whose public keys are already on-chain. An estimated 6.9 million Bitcoins are stored in such addresses, including Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated 1 million Bitcoins, which have been left untouched since the network’s inception. 

In response to this possible threat, Bitcoin developers have begun reviewing multiple proposals. Cryptopolitan has reported on some solutions, such as BIP-360, which looks to introduce a quantum-resistant transaction format, while BIP-361 looks to phase out older systems and freeze tokens that fail to migrate.

Additionally, an Ethereum post-quantum security team has also been formed in an attempt to find and replace vulnerable parts of the Ethereum crypto network. 

While many are taking recent developments seriously, a few still believe it to be a fire alarm that people are overreacting to, making Lelli’s result all the more important. His success shows just how much the attack class is progressing, showing that it is moving much faster than we could have predicted.

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