TLDR The estimated GPU cost of a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction fell from about $320 to under $67 in one week. StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs launched the optimization challenge o
The estimated cost to prepare a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction has dropped to under $67, according to StarkWare. That is down about 79% from the roughly $320 spent on the first such transaction in August.
The drop came after one week of the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge. StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs launched the contest on Sept. 16.
The challenge invited developers, researchers and AI agents to make the transaction-building software faster. It produced 62 accepted improvements across two computing tasks.
The first task, called transaction pinning, now checks just over 820 million candidates per second on a benchmark RTX 4090 graphics card. The starting speed was 146.09 million.
The second task, subset selection, went from about 62 million to more than 623 million per second. That is a little over ten times faster.
There were 23 solvers on the pinning track and 17 on subset selection. As of Sept. 23, the two records were held by developers using the AI models Opus 5 and Fable 5.1.
Every submission is checked again on a separate reference system. Code that gains speed by skipping work is rejected.
The costly part of a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction is a brute-force search. It runs on the user’s own hardware before anything reaches the network.
The design places a hash where Bitcoin expects a signature. Only about one in 70 trillion hash results has the right format, so computers must try over and over until they find one.
This cost shows up as a GPU bill, not a Bitcoin network fee. If the search runs twice as fast, it takes half the GPU time.
StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy published the design in April. He called it a “last resort measure” due to its cost, complexity and limited use.
The first such transaction was mined on Aug. 26 through MARA’s Slipstream service. It took about 3,100 GPU-hours across roughly 100 GPUs.
“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 wrote.
Limits remain. These transactions must be sent directly to a miner, and they only protect coins whose public key has not been exposed.
The new speed gains have also only been shown in benchmark tests. The $67 figure is an estimate, not a set price.
StarkWare said it still favors a soft fork, a change to Bitcoin’s rules, as the better long-term answer. The challenge’s remaining prize pools are still open.
The Yukon dashboard now shows the estimated cost has fallen further, to $66.
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