StarkWare Researchers Push Quantum-Resistant Bitcoin Transaction on Mainnet
A team of researchers from StarkWare has successfully completed the first quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction on mainnet. The transaction was tested by Avihu Levy, a researcher at StarkWare, and spent a 10,000-satoshi output in block 964,199 without altering Bitcoin's consensus rules.
The transaction cost around $150 to $200 in computation, according to Nathan Jeffay, a StarkWare spokesperson. The process took hours, showing a way to protect a single output under Bitcoin's current rules, but at a material computational and operational cost.
Levy's Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) scheme combines hash-based one-time signatures with computational searches that bind authorization to a specific transaction. This construction is intended to prevent forgery even if a sufficiently capable quantum computer breaks the elliptic-curve cryptography used by Bitcoin.