Bitcoin Completes First Experimental Quantum-Safe Transaction, Starkware Says
Starkware says it mined the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction on Bitcoin mainnet using Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB), a method designed to protect funds from future quantum attacks without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules. The approach was developed by researcher Avihu Levy and later implemented on mainnet by engineer Tomer Giladi. Bitcoin’s current elliptic-curve signatures could be broken by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Starkware argues the long-term fix should still be a Bitcoin soft fork, but QSB offers an interim way for holders to move coins into storage that a quantum computer cannot open. QSB adds a second, hash-based security layer and uses off-chain “signature grinding” to create a transaction Bitcoin will accept. Starkware says this does not make Bitcoin fully quantum-safe and cannot protect addresses with already exposed public keys, but it shows funds can be protected before a protocol upgrade.
