Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Build Cost Cuts by 79% in One Week
A challenge to optimize Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) transactions has resulted in a significant reduction in their construction cost. The modeled GPU-compute cost of building a QSB transaction fell by 79% in just one week, from approximately $320 to around $67 on September 23rd.
The Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge was launched by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs on September 16th. The challenge offered $20,000 in prizes, with an additional prize from Yukon Research, to developers, researchers, and artificial intelligence agents to improve two workloads: transaction pinning and subset selection.
The benchmark measures SHA-256 hashing, secp256k1 public-key recovery, and searches involving nine omissions from 150 signature pushes. Transaction-pinning throughput increased significantly, from 146.09 million to over 820 million verified candidates per second on an RTX 4090 benchmark.