Imagine waking up in a decade to find your Bitcoin wallet drained. Not because of a hack, but because the math that once protected it has silently broken down. No alerts. No patch. Just physics, catching up.

The financial world — both traditional and decentralized — runs on cryptography. But that foundation is under threat from quantum computing.

In 2024, Google’s Willow chip solved in minutes a problem that would take the best classical supercomputer longer than the age of the universe to crack. Experts estimate that quantum computers will reach the threshold to break today’s cryptographic systems sometime between 2035 and 2050. Close enough to matter now.

The U.S. government is pushing federal agencies and the banks they work with to migrate to post-quantum standards by 2030. But for decentralized financial systems, coordination is much harder. There’s no single vendor or update cycle. The upgrade path is messy.

Most of crypto is sleepwalking toward this risk, even though the stakes are existential. But one team is sounding the alarm and building the safety net.

That’s why we led an investment in Project Eleven.

Project Eleven is building the infrastructure crypto needs to survive and thrive in a post-quantum world. 

Their first product, yellowpages, is like a fire escape for your Bitcoin. It lets holders generate quantum-resistant keys, prove ownership of their existing addresses, and publicly register those proofs, without moving funds or waiting for a protocol upgrade. It’s simple, free, and available today. It’s a way to secure what you already own against a threat that hasn’t arrived, yet.

Project Eleven is led by Alex Pruden, someone I’ve known and respected for years. We first met at Andreessen Horowitz, where we were both investment partners on the crypto team. Even then, it was clear that, as a former Special Forces officer, he had a rare combination of vision, rigor, and operational grit. He later joined Aleo (a Variant portfolio company) as COO, where he led the team at the frontier of decentralized systems and bleeding-edge cryptography. This isn't  theory for him. It’s mission-critical work — and he’s built his career preparing for exactly this moment.

We’re proud to partner with Alex and the Project Eleven team as they help crypto meet its next great challenge. Quantum won’t arrive with a bang. But when it does come, it will be too late to scramble. The time to harden our systems is now, and Project Eleven is leading the way.

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