Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Cost Falls 79% to Under $67, StarkWare Says

The estimated cost of preparing a quantum resistant Bitcoin transaction has dropped below $67, down from about $320 for the first mainnet transaction on Aug. 26. StarkWare says a week of optimization did the work, though the gains so far come only from benchmark tests. A public dashboard now shows $66.

How the Challenge Worked

StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs opened the Quantum Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge on Sept. 16 to developers, researchers and AI agents. It produced 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks, cutting GPU costs by roughly 79%. The first transaction needed about 3,100 GPU-hours on around 100 GPUs, excluding network fees.

Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Design Explained

Researcher Avihu Levy published the design in April. It adds hash-based protection without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules. Levy called it a “last resort measure” because of cost, complexity and limited use. Tomer Giladi handled engineering, and MARA’s Slipstream service submitted the transaction.

Experts worry a powerful quantum computer could break Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve signatures and let attackers steal coins with exposed public keys. StarkWare still prefers a soft fork as the long-term fix.