AI Agents Are Racing to Make Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Cheap—And Winning
The cost of building a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction fell about 80% in one week, from roughly $320 to $67 in GPU compute, after an open optimization contest drew developers and AI models. StarkWare, with Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, launched the challenge to improve a construction used for the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction mined on mainnet last month. The main expense is a brute-force prechain search on local hardware, so faster code directly reduces GPU-hours. Benchmark performance jumped from 146 million to over 820 million verified candidates per second on an RTX 4090, with 62 improvements across two tracks. Top results came from AI-assisted solvers. The $67 figure is only an estimate and changes with new records. StarkWare said the method is not a full Bitcoin fix: it works only for certain coins, requires direct miner submission, and a soft fork is still the better long-term solution.
