Startup Pays $60K for 'Quantum Break' That Was Easily Replicated Classically

Quantum cybersecurity startup Project Eleven, backed by Coinbase Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Castle Island Ventures, and Variant, awarded a 1 bitcoin (BTC) prize last week to researcher Giancarlo Lelli for what it called the largest public quantum attack on cryptography securing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and over $2.5 trillion in digital assets.

However, the claim collapsed under scrutiny. Multiple independent reviewers demonstrated that the so-called quantum breakthrough could be replicated using classical computing tactics, including random number generation. Within hours, independent Bitcoin developers reproduced the result on home computers, showing that the prize winner had essentially repurposed a random number generator.

"Project Eleven paid 1 BTC for a 'quantum break' of Bitcoin-style crypto. The quantum computer contributed NOTHING (noise)! The answer was recovered by a classical checker sifting random noise. I reproduced the whole thing in 20 lines of Python with no quantum computer at all."
— Jonas Schnelli (@_jonasschnelli_), April 24, 2026

Replicating the Prize Win with Home Hardware

Researcher Yuval Adam conducted one of the replication experiments by using the public code from prize winner Giancarlo Lelli. Adam replaced Lelli’s IBM Quantum backend with Linux kernel’s /dev/urandom, a basic random number source, while leaving the rest of the setup unchanged. He then documented the outcome in a pull request against Lelli’s repository, asserting that random data from a non-quantum laptop provided the same brute-force capability as Lelli’s IBM Quantum backend for recovering a cryptographic private key from a public key.

Adam summarized the result on X:

"I replaced the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. It still recovers the key."

Classical Computations Wearing Quantum Costumes

Former Bitcoin Core maintainer Jonas Schnelli claimed to have replicated the prize-winning pipeline in roughly 20 lines of Python without any quantum hardware. Schnelli concluded,

"The quantum computer contributed nothing (noise)! The answer was recovered by a classical checker sifting random noise."

Coldcard founder NVK reviewed the source code and concurred, describing the demonstrations as "classical computations wearing quantum costumes."

Even Lelli’s own README file acknowledged the limitation in plain text:

"When shots n, random noise alone can recover d with high probability."

Despite these findings, Project Eleven’s three-judge panel awarded the BTC prize regardless.

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A Community Note and a Venture Round

Project Eleven’s announcement on X now includes a Community Note fact-check, which states that the recovery method works even when the quantum output is replaced with random data and a classical computer, providing no quantum advantage over classical computing.

Ark Labs engineer Alex Bergeron was more direct, tweeting,

"TLDR; zero accountability. We shopped a parlor trick."