Researchers collaborating with AI coding agents lowered a resource benchmark for a crucial step in a potential quantum attack against Bitcoin and Ethereum by 86 percent. A paper published on Wednesday detailed the findings. The reduction targets the computing power needed to uncover a wallet private key and steal funds. The exact arrival date of quantum computers capable of a full attack, known as Q-Day, is still unknown.
The researchers noted that migration away from vulnerable cryptography is already underway. NIST standardized post-quantum replacements. The initial public draft of NIST IR 8547 proposes deprecating classical public-key algorithms at the 112-bit security level after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035.
These findings stem from ECDSA.Fail. Eigen Labs launched this open competition in late May. More than 100 participants built circuits for secp256k1. This elliptic curve secures transaction signatures on Bitcoin and Ethereum. The paper features authors from Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs, Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, and the Ethereum Foundation.
The team designed and tested a quantum circuit that performs a calculation needed to crack Bitcoin cryptography. They cut its resource score by 86 percent. These tests verified the circuit calculations. They did not crack an actual Bitcoin private key.
The challenge measured quantum memory and computational work. It multiplied logical qubits by Toffoli gates. Tommaso Toffoli invented this costly type of quantum operation in 1980. A lower score means the calculation needs fewer combined resources. This could make a future attack easier to execute.
Participants lowered the score from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion by July 26. The winning design used 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.3 million Toffoli gates. This score was roughly half of Google Quantum AI from a March benchmark. Differences in testing and counting methods prevent a direct comparison.
The researchers described ECDSA.Fail as a case study of Open Autoresearch. This involved a verifier-gated research process where humans and AI agents iteratively generated, implemented, tested, and shared improvements against a common objective.
This report forms part of wider efforts by crypto firms to fund research defending against quantum threats. Galaxy Digital pledged up to $5 million for this work in July. Nine other firms including BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy committed $15 million over three years for broader Bitcoin security research including quantum defenses.
