Back
Project Eleven funds quantum-era wallet ownership proof running in 243 milliseconds

Project Eleven funds quantum-era wallet ownership proof running in 243 milliseconds

Project Eleven’s zero-knowledge prototype offers a possible recovery path for some Bitcoin holders after a quantum threat, but it works only with BIP-32 hierarchical wallets and would not rescue early coins such as those attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.

BTC

Fact Check
All claim elements are confirmed by Project Eleven's own blog post 'Proving Crypto Ownership After Q-Day' and corroborated by CoinDesk and DailyCoin. The 243 ms proving time (Apple M5, 4 cores), the BIP-361 linkage (a proposed Bitcoin change from April 2026 with a ZK recovery path), the use of BIP-32 hierarchical derivation data, and the exclusion of early independently generated keys (Satoshi's pre-2011 random individual keys with no seed/parent key) all match. The only minor nuance is that BIP-361 is a proposed change with a promised recovery path rather than being the exact tool Project Eleven built — but the claim's phrasing ('tied to proposed Bitcoin change BIP-361') accurately captures this relationship.
    Reference: 123
Summary

Project Eleven said it has built and funded a zero-knowledge proof system for a future scenario in which quantum computers could forge Bitcoin wallet signatures, giving some holders a way to prove ownership using a seed phrase-derived wallet structure rather than a signature alone. The prototype, built on the Binius proof system, lets users prove knowledge of key material above an address in a wallet’s derivation tree without revealing it. Project Eleven said the latest version runs 16 times faster, with proof generation taking 243 milliseconds and verification 40 milliseconds on an M5 MacBook Air, using about 2GB of memory and no GPU. The idea is linked to proposed BIP-361, which would phase out Bitcoin’s older signature system by blocking new deposits to quantum-vulnerable addresses after three years and freezing remaining coins after five. That proposal has drawn criticism because coins that never move, including early holdings linked to Satoshi Nakamoto, could be locked permanently. Project Eleven argues its proof addresses that objection for BIP-32 hierarchical wallets, first adopted in 2012, because a quantum attacker may derive a private key from an exposed public key but cannot reverse the one-way hashing used higher in the wallet’s derivation tree. The approach does not work for older wallets whose keys were generated independently, leaving early exposed coins among the easiest quantum targets and the hardest to recover.

Terms & Concepts
  • BIP-361: A proposed Bitcoin change that would restrict new deposits to quantum-vulnerable addresses and later freeze coins left there.
  • zero-knowledge proof system: A cryptographic method that lets someone prove a claim without revealing the underlying information.
  • BIP-32: A Bitcoin wallet standard that derives many keys from a hierarchical tree rooted in shared seed material.