Crypto Researchers Cut Cost of Cracking Bitcoin's Cryptography by 86% in Two Months

Researchers from Eigen Labs and other top crypto organizations have made significant strides in cutting the cost of cracking Bitcoin's cryptography by 86% in just two months. The breakthrough, published this week, comes as part of a quantum scramble that has been building for weeks. A team of over 100 researchers worked alongside AI coding agents to decrease a benchmark for a key step in a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion.

The researchers used the method Open Autoresearch, which involves humans and AI agents iterating against a shared measurable target with a verifier in the loop. This approach has made the attack cheaper by an unprecedented amount, sparking concerns about the potential for quantum computers to reverse the math behind secp256k1, an elliptic curve used by Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The findings have significant implications for the crypto community, which is racing to prepare for a potential quantum threat. The Ethereum Foundation has set a hard deadline of December 2029 to make transactions, validators, and storage quantum-resistant. Other organizations, including StarkWare and Ripple, are also taking steps to harden their systems against potential attacks.