StarkWare's Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Costs Plummet 79%

StarkWare has announced that its Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) project has made significant progress in reducing the computational cost of constructing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction. According to an update on September 23, the estimated computational cost of building a QSB transaction has dropped to under $67, down from around $320 for the first QSB transaction demonstrated on mainnet in August.

The reduction is attributed to optimization efforts connected to StarkWare's QSB work, which have driven down the estimated computing cost by about 79%. This achievement follows the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, a collaborative effort involving Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, which focused on reducing the GPU computation needed to prepare a QSB transaction.

StarkWare emphasizes that while these results are promising, they represent benchmark performance rather than real-world transaction preparation at full scale. The company cautions that QSB is positioned as an 'emergency' measure and that broader, long-term protection likely still requires a consensus-layer soft fork.