StarkWare Seeks Optimized Quantum-Safe Bitcoin with $20,000 Challenge
The Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge has been launched by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs to improve the efficiency of off-chain computation for Quantum-Safe Bitcoin transactions. This effort aims to make a potential quantum attack fallback more feasible by reducing the computational burden required for QSB transaction construction.
The challenge follows the successful mining of the first QSB transaction on August 26th via MARA's Slipstream service, which demonstrated the viability of hash-based quantum protection within Bitcoin's existing consensus rules. The current process demands approximately 3,100 GPU-hours and $320 in compute costs, making it impractical for widespread implementation.
The challenge offers a $20,000 prize pool to incentivize developers and researchers to optimize the computationally intensive process behind QSB transactions. Participants can pursue several avenues for improvement, including refinements to search and hashing algorithms, efficient elliptic-curve arithmetic, and optimized GPU execution.