Startup Launches With Plan to Shield Blockchains From Quantum Threat

Insider Brief

• A new venture, Project Eleven, has launched to secure Bitcoin and other digital assets against the future threat of quantum computing.
• The company warns that over $600 billion in Bitcoin stored in wallets with exposed public keys is already vulnerable to quantum attacks.
• Project Eleven has created a Q-Day Clock to track quantum computing progress and plans to develop tools for post-quantum cryptography and secure digital infrastructure.

A new venture aims to protect the world’s most valuable digital asset from the looming risk posed by quantum computing.

Alex Pruden, a former military officer and longtime cryptography advocate, has been named founding CEO of Project Eleven, a new applied lab focused on securing digital financial infrastructure against future quantum threats. Announced on a LinkedIn post, the company was formed in 2024 to address what it sees as the inevitable collision between quantum computing and classical cryptography.

Quantum computers — machines that use the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems conventional computers cannot — have long been considered a distant curiosity. But that perception is shifting fast, the Project 11 team points out. Several machines now contain hundreds of quantum bits, or qubits, and recent progress in error correction, including Google’s Willow chip project, signals that the technology is approaching cryptographically relevant thresholds.

The Project Eleven team has launched a public dashboard called the Q-Day Clock, which tracks the pace of quantum computing progress against the timeline for when such systems could break widely used encryption. Once a quantum machine can efficiently run Shor’s algorithm — a quantum method for factoring large numbers — it could render today’s public-key cryptography obsolete, affecting everything from banking to email.

Few digital systems are as exposed to this risk as Bitcoin, according to Project Eleven. Unlike most centralized systems that can be updated behind the scenes, Bitcoin’s decentralized protocol and fixed cryptographic foundations make any transition slow and contentious.

“Quantum computing may be the most disruptive technology of our generation. Its impact on blockchains — which rely on classical cryptography — will be especially profound,” Pruden writes in the post.

The company warns on its website that more than $600 billion in BTC, stored in wallets with exposed public keys, is already vulnerable.

The threat isn’t hypothetical. The Bitcoin protocol’s reliance on classical cryptography — mainly the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) — means that once a quantum machine reaches sufficient scale and stability, it could retroactively extract private keys from publicly visible transaction data. That would allow an attacker to seize coins without needing the owner’s credentials.

Adapting Bitcoin to withstand this quantum threat involves two challenges: upgrading the protocol and migrating at-risk coins. According to Project Eleven’s estimates, migrating all vulnerable unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) would take at least 90 days assuming every block contained only migration transactions. In practice, the process would be much slower and require global coordination.

“Securing Bitcoin for the future will create enormous value for the entire ecosystem, and open
new opportunities for Project Eleven to help secure other networks and digital assets,” Project Eleven announced.

While Project Eleven is starting with Bitcoin, it does not intend to stop there. The company aims to become a leader in quantum-secure applications across digital communications and decentralized networks. According to its mission, the lab is focused not just on mitigating quantum risks but also on harnessing quantum mechanics to build “the digital financial rails of the future.”

Pruden emphasized the strategic importance of this work in his announcement.

“I’m deeply passionate about cryptography. I believe in the promise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies and the importance of securing them for the future,” he writes. “As a former service member, I recognize that national leadership in quantum technologies is critical for our security and long-term prosperity.”