StarkWare Cuts Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Cost 79% to Under $67

StarkWare has reduced the estimated cost of preparing a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction to under $67, a 79% drop from the roughly $320 spent on the first such mainnet transaction in August. The improvement came through a weeklong Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, where developers, researchers, and AI agents submitted 62 accepted improvements across two computational tasks required to build the transaction.

The original Quantum-Safe Bitcoin transaction was mined and confirmed on Aug. 26, requiring approximately 3,100 GPU-hours across roughly 100 GPUs. It was prepared through engineering work by Tomer Giladi and submitted directly via MARA's Slipstream service. The design was published in April by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy as a "last resort measure" that adds hash-based protection against quantum attacks without requiring changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules.

StarkWare, along with Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, launched the optimization challenge on Sept. 16 to make this emergency defense more practical for Bitcoin holders holding large unexposed balances. "A construction that costs a few hundred dollars per transaction is a demo. One that costs $67 is closer to something a holder with a large unexposed balance might reach for in an emergency," StarkWare noted in its Sept. 23 update. The results have only been demonstrated in benchmark tests so far.

The development arrives amid growing concern over quantum computing threats to existing cryptographic systems. While Quantum-Safe Bitcoin offers an experimental short-term defense, StarkWare and Levy continue to advocate for protocol-level changes to better protect the network from future quantum attacks.