Mission Eleven, the quantum cybersecurity startup backed by Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Citadel Island Ventures, and Variant, awarded a one bitcoin (BTC) prize final week to a researcher who claimed to have damaged a 15-bit elliptic curve key on IBM Quantum {hardware}.
Nevertheless, regardless of a Mission Eleven press launch framing it as the biggest public quantum assault on the cryptography securing “Bitcoin, Ethereum, and over $2.5 trillion in Elliptic Curve Cryptography-secured digital assets,” a number of unbiased reviewers managed to duplicate the feat utilizing non-quantum, classical computing techniques like random quantity technology.
Utilizing no quantum computing, they confirmed that the prize winner mainly repurposed a flowery random quantity generator.
Mission Eleven paid 1 BTC for a “quantum break” of Bitcoin-style crypto.
The quantum pc contributed NOTHING (noise)!
The reply was recovered by a classical checker sifting random noise. I reproduced the entire thing in 20 traces of Python with no quantum pc in any respect. https://t.co/TA2ANdX30H
— Jonas Schnelli (@_jonasschnelli_) April 24, 2026
Replicating a quantum prize win with residence {hardware}
Researcher Yuval Adam ran one of many replication experiments utilizing the general public code of prize winner Giancarlo Lelli, a specialist whose GitHub repository hosts the successful submission.
Nevertheless, Adam swapped Lelli’s IBM Quantum backend for a much more fundamental random quantity supply, Linux kernel’s /dev/urandom.
Adam largely left the remainder of the setup alone, then opened a pull request in opposition to Lelli’s repository, documenting the end result.
Lastly, Adam asserted that random knowledge from a non-quantum laptop computer offered a classical pc as a lot brute drive vitality as Lelli’s “IBM Quantum” backend for the objective of recovering a cryptographic personal key from a public key.
He posted the abstract on X: “I replaced the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. It still recovers the key.”
Ultimately, Linux’s urandom helped a daily pc get better the important thing in an comparable variety of makes an attempt to the supposed quantum backend.
Classical computations carrying quantum costumes
Former Bitcoin Core maintainer Jonas Schnelli claimed to have reproduced the prize-winning pipeline in roughly 20 traces of Python with none quantum {hardware}.
Schnelli summarized, “The quantum computer contributed nothing (noise)! The answer was recovered by a classical checker sifting random noise.”
Coldcard founder NVK learn the supply code and reached the identical verdict, calling the demonstrations “classical computations wearing quantum costumes.”
Lelli’s personal README conceded the purpose in plain textual content: “When shots >> n, random noise alone can recover d with high probability.”
Mission Eleven’s three-judge panel awarded the BTC anyway.
A Neighborhood Word and a enterprise spherical
Mission Eleven’s announcement on X now carries a Neighborhood Word fact-check, arguing that the restoration technique works even when the quantum output is changed with random knowledge and a classical pc, offering no quantum benefit over classical computing.
Ark Labs engineer Alex Bergeron was blunter, saying, “TLDR; zero accountability. We shopped a parlor trick around to media publications because our goal isn’t really to help Bitcoin, it’s to raise another round.”
The potential battle of curiosity is tough to miss. Mission Eleven, based by Stanford graduate Alex Pruden, closed a $20 million Sequence A in January at a $120 million valuation.
The corporate sells post-quantum migration tooling. It designed the Q-Day Prize, picked the judges, awarded the bounty, and issued the press launch warning that 6.9 million BTC sit in wallets uncovered to quantum assault.
After studying quite a few social media complaints, Pruden later conceded on X that the demonstration represented “incremental progress in a noisy, early field,” whereas complaining that critics in some way “moving goalposts” had been the actual drawback.
His personal press launch had described the supposed breakthrough as the biggest public demonstration of an assault threatening trillions of {dollars}.
As Protos has beforehand documented, fears about quantum breakthroughs are ramping up attributable to accelerating post-quantum deadlines from Cloudflare, Google, and IBM.
Newly accelerated deadlines cluster across the yr 2029 to the very early 2030s. Sadly, Mission Eleven’s prize cash rewarded publicity over cybersecurity progress towards assembly these deadlines.
Undeterred, the corporate is now growing its subsequent contest.
