If you own a crypto asset, you're implicitly betting on one invisible thing, specifically that nobody can compute your private key from your public key fast enough to steal your funds. The extremely high odds of that bet being true are the only reason that digital ownership actually works.
Alas, quantum computing is the most credible reason that this assumption might eventually fail. If it does fail, it likely won't be soon, though a clear timetable is impossible to determine with certainty. But the damage would be a lot bigger than a few hacked wallets, as it'd fully undermine the credibility of blockchains as long-lived ledgers of financial activity.
Enter Project 11, a startup that promises to turn post-quantum migration into an executable plan instead of a vague future concern.
So what is Project 11 building today, and where does it connect to existing networks? In a nutshell, it's positioning itself to be an infrastructure provider and perhaps also a consultancy for quantum computing security for the blockchain. Here's everything that you need to know.
Project 11 is trying to solve a collective-action problem
Project 11 presents itself as building the tools for post-quantum security and migration rather than launching a new chain. That distinction is not marketing fluff. Tooling only matters if ecosystems use it, and the hardest thing to ship here is coordinated behavior.
Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures, has become one of the loudest advocates for treating quantum risk as a real budgeting item rather than an academic forum debate.
So, this is when I make the case of the Bitcoin developers. I'm like, okay, so we're in a flood zone right here, right?...Even if it's just a 1% chance of a flood, you still buy the insurance.. Why are the Bitcoin developers not spending 1% of their time or 5% of their time, whatever it is, buying the insurance as in working on the new cryptography developing social consensus… Right now, we're uninsured. That's not good.
Nic Carter
Delphi Podcast (Jan 9, 2026)
On that note, Project 11’s Series A funding announcement makes the same point in institutional language; the company raised $20M in a round led by Castle Island Ventures.
One reason Project 11 can command such a large fundraising round so early is that the quantum problem is dual-sided. On the technical side, the threat model is that under certain conditions, Shor’s algorithm can break the elliptic-curve cryptography assumptions that protect most blockchain signature schemes.
On the social side, the fix can't be a patch. It'll need to be a multi-year migration that needs wallets, custody providers, validators, and tooling to move together. Even if post-quantum primitives are ready, networks still have to agree on a path and actually execute it. And, as we all know, forming a consensus is quite a tall order in crypto, even for something that's do-or-die.
Project 11 is also credible as an authority on this topic because it's actively working in a consulting capacity with the Solana Foundation, and it has already shipped a prototype post-quantum signature testnet. Solana's own documentation is blunt about the baseline identity model, wherein most accounts use an Ed25519 public key as their address. If a future quantum capability makes Ed25519-style assumptions unsafe, Solana has real migration work ahead.
One of Project 11's free offerings just might be a bit helpful to users in mitigating such issues if Solana lags, however.
Meet the "yellowpages"
Project 11 describes yellowpages as a bridge that lets users link legacy ownership proofs to post-quantum addresses without waiting for slow protocol upgrades. The design premise is that smaller coordination surfaces can move faster than full-chain consensus.
The service is live at yellowpages.xyz, and the name is literal on purpose. It's supposed to be a lookup layer rather than a new ideology or a new technical platform in and of itself.
If the idea of a registry makes you uneasy for privacy reasons, that reaction is quite healthy. It's also something they've accounted for. Project 11 features a trust model that relies on trusted execution environments as an engineering compromise rather than a philosophical endpoint.
To keep this discussion concrete, here's a simplified yellowpages flow:
The promise is a fallback path to give users some kind of recourse if on-chain upgrades lag (which they are almost guaranteed to do) given the lack of urgency that Bitcoin and some other chains are approaching the quantum computing security issue with.
The risk is, of course, that the fallback will itself become a new trust surface run by an unaccountable third party, complete with its own failure modes. There's also a timestamping issue in play here; if a quantum attacker uses the tool to generate a proof, it's unclear whether the attacker's proof or the original proof came first. So in some sense the yellow pages could exacerbate some of the security issues facing users while introducing new ones related to centralization.
This is a reaction to a deadline-shaped world
It's tempting to treat quantum timelines as vibe-based speculation, but institutional posture is already changing, which suggests that there's meat on the bone here with regard to the risk.
DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative is explicit that it is testing whether a utility-scale quantum computer is achievable by the year 2033. That's a real U.S. government program setting a concrete waypoint for investors and engineers to plan around, and they should.
Similarly, NIST is also publishing transition guidance that treats post-quantum migration as a decade-plus program rather than a weekend upgrade. Its materials describe an expected approach to migration, and also provide the proper framing for moving away from quantum-vulnerable algorithms in NIST IR 8547.
Project 11 is positioning itself as the glue layer between those institutional signals and messy crypto reality. This is also where Nic Carter is a relevant figure, as his writing has emphasized that even if timelines are uncertain, the expected cost of being wrong can still justify action.
The Main Takeaway
The most compelling part of Project 11’s strategy is that it aspires to treat migration like a product, complete with a suite of diagnostics, staging, rehearsal, and finally deployment. The most concerning part is the same thing. If the industry decides to treat quantum risk as someone else’s problem until it's a headline, even great tooling and helpful white glove services will sit unused.
In conclusion, judge Project 11 less like a token project and more like a security infrastructure vendor. The closer it gets to repeatable tooling and enterprise-grade assessments, the more durable the business becomes, even if quantum capability stays over the horizon. Is its next act going to be a big scaling up of its last one, or something else altogether?
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Sources
NIST IR 8547, Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards
Project Eleven Raises $20M to Prepare Digital Asset Infrastructure for the Quantum Era
Post-quantum crypto startup Project Eleven raises $20 million in funding round
Project Eleven to Advance Post-Quantum Security for the Solana Network
Announcing Our $6M Seed Round to Build a Quantum-Ready Future
