Crypto24 September, 20263 min read
StarkWare Cuts Quantum-Resistant Bitcoin Transaction Cost From $320 To $66 With AI Coding
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AI-assisted coding cut quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction cost from $320 to about $66-$67. First QSB transaction mined Aug 26; required ~3,100 compute hours on ~100 GPUs.
8 outlets told this the same way.
Cost drops to $66
StarkWare said a week of AI-assisted coding in the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge cut the estimated GPU cost of preparing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction from about $320 to $66. StarkWare tied the earlier $320 figure to a Bitcoin mined transaction in August that required about 3,100 hours of compute time across a fleet of roughly 100 GPUs, excluding the fee paid to put the transaction on the blockchain. StarkWare said the contest code reduced the estimated cost by making the underlying search process substantially faster, with a leading submission verifying about 881 million candidates per second versus around 146 million for the initial code on the same reference GPU.
StarkWare cautioned that the $66 figure remains an estimate derived from benchmark tests and that the enhanced code had not yet demonstrated preparing another mined Bitcoin transaction. StarkWare said the method adheres to Bitcoin’s existing rules, so testing it did not require the network to approve an update, and it framed the approach as an emergency option to move eligible coins if quantum threats arrive before broader fixes.
How the defense works
StarkWare said a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could use a wallet’s exposed public key to deduce its private key and steal the coins, which is why the company positioned its approach as protection against that future threat. StarkWare said its method adds a hash-based protection layer expected to resist that kind of attack, and it described the approach as fitting within Bitcoin’s existing rules without requiring a soft fork. StarkWare said the transactions must be sent directly to a miner because they do not circulate through the network in the usual way, and it said the method cannot protect coins whose public keys are already exposed.
StarkWare said the process shifts the security challenge from protecting a private key to performing a difficult reverse-hash search, with the sender searching for a transaction whose hash meets the format required for a valid Bitcoin signature. StarkWare said the additional computation takes place before the transaction is broadcast, creating the extra preparation cost that makes the approach an emergency tool rather than a routine mechanism.
What remains unproven
StarkWare said the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge opened on Sept. 16 and produced 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks required to build a QSB transaction.
“It makes one emergency option cheap enough to keep on the shelf.”
StarkWare said the $66 to $67 number is an estimated computational cost derived from performance tests, and it said the update does not, by itself, confirm that the most recent optimizations have been used to create and confirm additional QSB mainnet transactions.
StarkWare said the benchmark does not build real transactions, so the gains still have to be tested against production code, even as the dashboard showed the estimated cost dropping to $66.
StarkWare said it continues to favor a soft fork as the long-term fix, describing emergency add-ons as inherently narrower in scope than consensus-layer changes.
StarkWare said its latest messaging continued to frame the effort as making one emergency option cheap enough to keep on the shelf, while it still characterized the construction costing a few hundred dollars per transaction as a demo.