StarkWare says quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction costs drop 79%

StarkWare says the estimated compute cost of preparing a quantumresistant Bitcoin transaction has fallen to under $67, down from about $320 for the first mainnet example in August. The drop followed a weeklong optimization challenge that asked developers, researchers, and AI agents to improve the software used to build the transaction. StarkWare said the challenge produced 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks. The experimental approach, known as QuantumSafe Bitcoin, is designed as a lastresort defense against future quantum attacks and does not require changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules. Even so, the latest results were shown only in benchmark tests, and StarkWare said it still sees a protocollevel soft fork as the better longterm solution for broad protection.