AI-Assisted Developers Slash Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Costs
What happened: An open competition organized by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs drove the estimated cost of a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction down from about $320 to $67—a 79% reduction—wit
What happened: An open competition organized by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs drove the estimated cost of a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction down from about $320 to $67—a 79% reduction—within a week. Sixty-two accepted improvements boosted GPU throughput from 146 million to 881 million candidates per second on an RTX 4090. The top solutions used AI models such as Anthropic’s Opus 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, but the contest involved AI-assisted human developers, not fully autonomous agents.
Why it matters: While the technical breakthrough dramatically reduces the computational cost of quantum-safe transactions, these remain nonstandard and are not relayed by the Bitcoin network—users must submit them directly to willing miners. A network-wide upgrade via soft fork is still required for true quantum resistance. The contest highlights the growing role of AI in cryptographic research, but also the limits of current Bitcoin protocol flexibility. Source: Decrypt