{"slug": "ai-agents-are-racing-to-make-quantum-safe-bitcoin-cheap-and-winning", "title": "AI Agents Are Racing to Make Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Cheap—And Winning", "summary": "StarkWare said the estimated cost of constructing a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction fell nearly 80%, from about $320 to roughly $67 in GPU compute, during the one-week Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge it ran with Yukon Research and Eigen Labs. Developers running AI models held the leading records, with Anthropic's Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 at the top and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6 and Kimi close behind, after a core benchmark rose from 146 million to over 820 million verified candidates per second on an RTX 4090. StarkWare cautioned that $67 is an estimate under stated hardware assumptions rather than a market price, that the nonstandard transactions must be sent directly to a miner and only shield coins whose public key is unexposed, and that a soft fork remains the better long-term fix.", "body_md": "#### In brief\n\n- StarkWare said the estimated cost of building a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction fell from about $320 to roughly $67 in a week, as solvers in its Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge optimized the brute-force search that runs on a user's own GPU before hitting the chain.\n- The leading records were held by developers running AI models, including Anthropic's Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6 and Kimi close behind.\n- StarkWare cautioned the $67 is an estimate, not a price, and that the work doesn't make Bitcoin quantum-safe on its own—it still favors a soft fork long-term.\n\nThe price of building a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction has plunged nearly 80% in a single week, after developers and AI models competed to optimize the code behind it.\n\nAccording to StarkWare, which ran the competition alongside Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, the [estimated cost of constructing such a transaction](https://starkware.co/blog/ai-research-competition-cut-quantum-safe-bitcoin-costs-by-79-in-a-week/) fell from about $320 to roughly $67 in GPU compute.\n\nThe figure comes from the dashboard of the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, an open contest launched to see how far outside solvers could push the number down.\n\nThe [first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction was mined](https://decrypt.co/376767/bitcoin-quantum-safe-transaction-starkware) on mainnet last month, a construction StarkWare developed to protect coins without requiring a network-wide fork. That initial transaction took roughly 3,100 GPU-hours and cost around $320 to build. One week of open competition cut most of that away.\n\nThe savings come from raw speed. The expensive part of the process is a brute-force search that happens on a user's own hardware before anything reaches the blockchain, which is why it shows up as a GPU bill rather than a Bitcoin fee. The construction slots a hash where Bitcoin expects a signature, and because only about one in 70 trillion hash outputs takes the required shape, finding a valid one means hashing inputs over and over until one fits. Faster code means fewer GPU-hours for the same result.\n\nSolvers made dramatic progress. One core benchmark jumped from 146 million verified candidates per second to over 820 million on a standard RTX 4090, with 62 improvements promoted across two tracks.\n\nNotably, the leading records were held by developers running AI models, with StarkWare citing Anthropic's Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 at the top and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6, and Kimi close behind.\n\nStarkWare was careful to temper expectations. The $67 is an estimate under stated hardware assumptions, not a market price, and it shifts each time a solver beats the record.\n\nThe company stressed the effort doesn't make [Bitcoin quantum-safe on its own](https://decrypt.co/374753/bitcoin-quantum-threat-ibm-claims-trusted-quantum-advantage): the transactions are nonstandard and must be sent directly to a miner, and the construction only shields coins whose public key hasn't already been exposed. StarkWare maintains that a [soft fork remains the better long-term fix](https://decrypt.co/364092/quantum-safe-bitcoin-transactions-without-fork).\n\nThe work lands amid intensifying focus on Bitcoin's exposure to \"[Q-Day](https://decrypt.co/resources/what-q-day-quantum-threat-bitcoin-explained),\" the hypothetical point when quantum computers could break the elliptic-curve cryptography securing wallets. Firms including [Coinbase are already drafting post-quantum custody playbooks](https://decrypt.co/379000/coinbase-playbook-post-quantum-bitcoin-custody).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-racing-to-make-quantum-safe-bitcoin-cheap-and-winning", "canonical_source": "https://decrypt.co/379378/ai-agents-racing-make-quantum-safe-bitcoin-cheap", "published_at": "2026-09-26 15:01:05+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-26 15:29:02.661789+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-agents", "ai-research"], "entities": ["StarkWare", "Yukon Research", "Eigen Labs", "Anthropic", "Opus 5", "Fable 5.1", "OpenAI", "GPT-6 Astra"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-racing-to-make-quantum-safe-bitcoin-cheap-and-winning", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-racing-to-make-quantum-safe-bitcoin-cheap-and-winning.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-racing-to-make-quantum-safe-bitcoin-cheap-and-winning.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-agents-are-racing-to-make-quantum-safe-bitcoin-cheap-and-winning.jsonld"}}