Independent researcher Giancarlo Lelli received 1 BTC “Q-Day Prize” for successfully breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve cryptographic key using publicly accessible quantum hardware, marking the largest public demonstration of a quantum attack on ECC to date.

The result represents a 512x improvement over previous public demonstrations, signaling that the technical barriers to such attacks are gradually decreasing.

However, the demonstrated attack targeted a simplified 15-bit key, far below the 256-bit cryptography used in real-world systems, indicating that threats to live networks remain distant for now.