AI Agents Are Racing to Make Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Cheap—And Winning

Briefly

StarkWare stated the estimated price of constructing a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction fell from about $320 to roughly $67 in every week, as solvers in its Quantum-Protected Bitcoin Optimization Problem optimized the brute-force search that runs on a person’s personal GPU earlier than hitting the chain.
The main data had been held by builders operating AI fashions, together with Anthropic’s Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, with OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6 and Kimi shut behind.
StarkWare cautioned the $67 is an estimate, not a value, and that the work would not make Bitcoin quantum-safe by itself—it nonetheless favors a mushy fork long-term.

The worth of constructing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction has plunged practically 80% in a single week, after builders and AI fashions competed to optimize the code behind it.

In keeping with StarkWare, which ran the competitors alongside Yukon Analysis and Eigen Labs, the estimated cost of constructing such a transaction fell from about $320 to roughly $67 in GPU compute.

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The determine comes from the dashboard of the Quantum-Protected Bitcoin Optimization Problem, an open contest launched to see how far outdoors solvers might push the quantity down.

The first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction was mined on mainnet final month, a development StarkWare developed to guard cash with out requiring a network-wide fork. That preliminary transaction took roughly 3,100 GPU-hours and value round $320 to construct. One week of open competitors reduce most of that away.

The financial savings come from uncooked pace. The costly a part of the method is a brute-force search that occurs on a person’s personal {hardware} earlier than something reaches the blockchain, which is why it exhibits up as a GPU invoice somewhat than a Bitcoin payment. The development slots a hash the place Bitcoin expects a signature, and since solely about one in 70 trillion hash outputs takes the required form, discovering a legitimate one means hashing inputs time and again till one suits. Quicker code means fewer GPU-hours for a similar end result.

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Solvers made dramatic progress. One core benchmark jumped from 146 million verified candidates per second to over 820 million on a regular RTX 4090, with 62 enhancements promoted throughout two tracks.

Notably, the main data had been held by builders operating AI fashions, with StarkWare citing Anthropic’s Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 on the prime and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6, and Kimi shut behind.

StarkWare was cautious to mood expectations. The $67 is an estimate beneath acknowledged {hardware} assumptions, not a market value, and it shifts every time a solver beats the file.

The corporate careworn the hassle would not make Bitcoin quantum-safe on its own: the transactions are nonstandard and should be despatched on to a miner, and the development solely shields cash whose public key hasn’t already been uncovered. StarkWare maintains {that a} soft fork remains the better long-term fix.

The work lands amid intensifying give attention to Bitcoin’s publicity to “Q-Day,” the hypothetical level when quantum computer systems might break the elliptic-curve cryptography securing wallets. Corporations together with Coinbase are already drafting post-quantum custody playbooks.