The cost of creating a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction dropped by nearly 80 percent in a single week. Developers and artificial intelligence models raced to optimize the underlying code during a competitive challenge.
StarkWare ran the competition alongside Yukon Research and Eigen Labs. The estimated cost for constructing the transaction fell from approximately $320 down to roughly $67 in GPU compute according to the dashboard.
This data stems from the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge. Organizers launched the open contest to test how far external solvers could push the cost downward.
Read nextOpenAI Pauses Training of Its Most Powerful Models After Sandbox IncidentStarkWare mined the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction on the mainnet last month. That initial construction protected coins without needing a network-wide fork and required about 3,100 GPU-hours alongside the $320 price tag.
The heavy expense originates from a brute-force search performed on the user hardware prior to blockchain submission. This shows up as a GPU bill instead of a standard Bitcoin network fee.
The construction inserts a hash where Bitcoin usually expects a signature. Only roughly one in 70 trillion hash outputs achieves the required shape. Finding a valid output requires hashing inputs repeatedly until one fits.
Faster code translates directly to fewer GPU-hours for identical results. Solvers achieved massive progress during the one-week competition.
One core benchmark surged from 146 million verified candidates per second to more than 820 million on a standard RTX 4090. Competitors promoted 62 distinct improvements across two separate tracks.
Developers running artificial intelligence models claimed the leading records. StarkWare specifically cited Anthropic models Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 at the top of the leaderboard. OpenAI model GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6, and Kimi also finished close behind.
StarkWare explicitly tempered expectations regarding the financial figures. The $67 figure represents an estimate under specific hardware assumptions rather than a fixed market price. This metric shifts continuously whenever a solver breaks the existing record.
The company emphasized that this optimization effort alone does not secure Bitcoin against quantum threats. These specific transactions remain nonstandard and must be routed directly to a miner. The construction exclusively shields coins whose public keys remain unexposed.
StarkWare maintains that a soft fork serves as the superior long-term solution. This work arrives as attention intensifies around Q-Day. Q-Day refers to the hypothetical future moment when quantum computers might break the elliptic-curve cryptography currently securing wallets. Firms such as Coinbase are actively drafting post-quantum custody playbooks.
