Announcing Our $6M Seed Round to Build a Quantum-Ready Future
Project Eleven announces a $6M seed round to accelerate post-quantum cryptography for Bitcoin, wallets, and digital assets—starting with yellowpages, a proof of quantum-resistant ownership.
Quantum computing is poised to be one of the most profound technological shifts of our lifetimes–one that will redefine how we communicate and transact in the digital world.
In the coming decade, everything we trust online: your bank account, your identity; could be compromised in seconds. Not because of a bug, but because quantum computing will make today’s cryptography obsolete. No where is this threat more acute than for Bitcoin, and the $3T digital asset industry.
A cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) will break the foundational security assumptions of Bitcoin and nearly every digital asset. With rapid progress from companies like IBM and Google, that future is no longer hypothetical. It’s coming fast and there isn’t long to prepare.
That’s why we started Project Eleven. We’re passionate builders in the crypto space who have been working on this technology for the last ten years. We believe in the inherent value of cryptography and blockchains to create trust in digital interactions.
The problem is more urgent than ever, and for blockchains like Bitcoin, we can’t wait until a quantum computer has already arrived, because by then the “not your keys, not your crypto” tenant that differentiates and defines cryptocurrencies will be invalidated.
Future-Proofing What Exists
Our first priority is applying post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to existing protocols, starting with Bitcoin. This will ensure they remain secure even when classical cryptography fails.
But migrating a protocol is only half the battle. Every wallet, every account holder, every smart contract key – all of it – must upgrade to new, quantum-safe cryptography. This will be the most disruptive transformation crypto has ever faced.
Our first solution is yellowpages, the first post-quantum proof of Bitcoin ownership. yellowpages is a free, audited, and open-source tool which allows you to generate quantum-resistant keys today and securely link them to your existing Bitcoin addresses. There’s no need to move your coins on-chain or wait for protocol upgrades. By creating this secure fallback now, yellowpages preserves provable Bitcoin ownership in a post-quantum world, while also buying crucial time for the Bitcoin community to propose, debate, develop, and thoroughly test essential protocol upgrades.
Future-Building What Comes Next
Quantum computing isn’t just a threat–it’s an opportunity to build better, more secure digital financial rails for the future.
Some of the most promising applications include:
- Quantum Key Distribution (QKD): Leveraging quantum entanglement to share cryptographic material with unhackable guarantees.
- Certified Randomness: Harnessing quantum uncertainty to produce verifiably unpredictable randomness, a cornerstone of secure systems.
- Quantum Money: Using the no-cloning theorem to build one-time signature schemes and new forms of peer-to-peer cash–without miners or a public ledger.
These breakthroughs are just the beginning. As quantum hardware advances, entirely new classes of protocols will emerge–enabling more private, trust-minimized, and censorship-resistant systems than ever before.
Today, we’re proud to announce a $6 million seed round, co-led by Variant and Quantonation, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Nebular, and Formation. This funding will help us deliver on our mission: to prepare for the quantum era by future-proofing what exists and future-building what comes next.
Thirty years ago, Netscape laid the foundation for the modern web with the invention of SSL. As we enter the quantum era, Project Eleven aims to do the same: to secure today’s digital infrastructure–and to design new products and protocols for what comes next.
We’re just getting started.
Alex & Conor
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Project Eleven welcomes cybersecurity and quantum security expert Marin Ivezic as an advisor. As the Founder of Applied Quantum and author of PostQuantum.com, Marin brings decades of experience helping enterprises, governments, and critical infrastructure organizations prepare for emerging cryptographic risks and the transition to post-quantum security.
Project Eleven open-sources libqc and quantum-vault, audited reference implementations for post-quantum crypto migration, ERC-4337 account abstraction, Bitcoin vault security, and crypto-agile wallet infrastructure designed for a quantum-safe future.
