BroadChain learned that at 19:16 on April 27, according to Bitcoinist, Project Eleven's 1 BTC Q-Day award aims to explore the risks of quantum computing to ECC encrypted assets like Bitcoin, but sharp criticism from Google quantum researcher Craig Gidney has thrust the competition itself into the spotlight. In an April 25 blog post, Gidney pointed out that the winning results did not substantially demonstrate progress in cryptography-related quantum attacks, with his core argument being that the competition benchmark is unsuitable for current quantum computers.
Project Eleven previously announced that Giancarlo Lelli cracked a 15-bit elliptic curve key on public quantum hardware, calling it the "largest quantum attack to date" and linking it to the security assumptions of over $2.5 trillion in ECC assets, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, Gidney believes the test has limited significance: Shor's algorithm requires quantum error correction to handle cryptographic instances, while current quantum computers experience about one error per thousand gate operations, and cryptography-related instances require billions of gate operations, creating a vast gap.
Gidney further noted that small Shor problems might "succeed" even if quantum hardware contributes no computational value, similar to the randomness-reproducible results demonstrated in his SIGBOVIK 2025 paper. He warned that in the coming years, luck will far outweigh the actual contributions of quantum computers, and winners may simply be "cleverly masking inevitable luck." GitHub user Yuval Adam found that after replacing quantum calls in the winning solution with random calls, the results were "indistinguishable."
Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden defended the results, stating that the winning achievement demonstrates a continuous decline in attack resource requirements, and the experiment used public cloud hardware, lowering the barrier. The team cited Google's 2026 estimate (fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could complete a 256-bit attack) and a Caltech paper (neutral atom architecture requires only 10,000 qubits), arguing that the gap from 15 bits to 256 bits is shifting from a physics problem to an engineering problem.