StarkWare Slashes Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Costs by 79% in Optimization Challenge

StarkWare has made significant progress in optimizing quantum-safe Bitcoin transactions. The estimated computational cost to prepare such a transaction has fallen below $67, down from the initial $320 spent on the first mainnet transaction in August. This reduction comes after participants in the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge found ways to push down the GPU computation needed for building a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction.

The challenge was launched by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs to make the transaction-building software faster and more efficient. The effort resulted in 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks needed to prepare a QSB transaction, cutting the estimated computing cost by about 79% based on benchmark tests.

A quantum-safe Bitcoin solution is considered an 'emergency' measure due to its high costs and limited applicability. StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy described it as a 'last resort' in April when he published the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) design, which adds hash-based protection against quantum attacks without changing Bitcoin's consensus rules.

The development comes amid increasing concern that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the elliptic-curve digital signatures used by Bitcoin, potentially allowing attackers to steal coins whose public keys are exposed. Researchers are developing quantum-resistant protections, including QSB, but StarkWare still favors a soft fork as a better 'long-term answer' for broad quantum protection on Bitcoin.