StarkWare Breaks Ground with Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction

A quantum-safe transaction has been successfully executed on the mainnet using StarkWare's Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB) method. The transaction was confirmed in block 964,199 and was mined by MARA Pool at 8:48 p.m. UTC on August 26. This achievement marks a significant milestone for the QSB technology, which uses 'signature grinding' to rest security on hash functions instead of elliptic-curve cryptography that can be broken by quantum computers.

StarkWare's researcher Avihu Levy designed the QSB method, which relies on searching off-chain for a spending transaction whose hash is itself a validly formatted signature. This approach adds 'a second lock that a quantum computer has no shortcut for,' according to Levy. The mainnet transaction took hours of computation and cost several hundred dollars.

It's essential to note that QSB does not make Bitcoin itself quantum-safe, as stated by StarkWare. The company still wants and expects a protocol-level soft fork to address this issue. Quantum risk has been a concern for the market, with Google security researchers calling for a post-quantum transition before 2029.