Project Eleven raises $20M to prepare cryptoasset blockchains for the quantum era – News

Project Eleven, a pioneer leading the post-quantum security migration for digital assets, said Wednesday it raised $20 million in early-stage funding to fuel its mission to protect blockchain infrastructure.

Castle Island Ventures led the round, joined by Coinbase Ventures, Fin Capital, Variant, Quantonation, Nebular, Formation, Lattice Fund, Satstreet Ventures, Nascent Ventures and Balaji Srinivasan.

The company is raising this funding as quantum computers continue to improve. In 2025, the field saw higher-profile “quantum advantage” claims on specialized tasks and notable progress in error correction — though practical, general-purpose quantum computing remains a longer-term proposition.

Currently, many blockchains are secured by elliptic-curve digital signatures, a cryptographic standard used to prove a transaction was authorized by the holder of a private key. Each new block is layered on top of the last and cryptographic hashes link that history together into a resilient record of past events.

The quantum risk is that a sufficiently large, fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could break widely used public-key systems by solving the underlying math problems. That could allow an attacker to recover a private key from a public key and forge signatures. Many researchers believe this may happen sometime in the 2030s.

Project Eleven dubbed this era “Q-Day.”

“As quantum capabilities advance, the stakes couldn’t be higher. We can’t afford to ignore this existential risk posed to the digital asset ecosystem,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Alex Pruden. “Trillions in value depend on these cryptographic assumptions. Networks like Bitcoin take years to upgrade because they’re governed cautiously by design.”

To stay ahead of the threat, Project Eleven is collaborating with the Solana Foundation other protocols, and Layer 1 blockchain ecosystems on post-quantum readiness planning and technical work.

Part of this work is yellowpages, which the company said is currently the only solution deployed in production for Bitcoin that provides a solution with a mechanism to generate post-quantum keys.

The company raised $6 million in seed funding in June 2025, led by Variant and Quantonation, with additional participation from Castle Island Ventures, Nebular and Formation.

Project Eleven said it plans to unveil a major release in early 2026, including a roadmap for migrating away from today’s cryptographic assumptions and adding capabilities for institutions, protocols and end users seeking more robust, future-proof cryptographic systems.

Image: News/Microsoft Designer