A one-week open challenge by StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs cut the estimated GPU-compute cost of building a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction from about $320 to roughly $67, with developers using AI models holding the top records.
The $67 is an estimate under stated hardware assumptions, not a market price or Bitcoin fee, and it can change when a solver beats the record. The expensive step is a brute-force search on users' hardware before a transaction reaches the blockchain. Only about one in 70 trillion hash outputs has the required shape. One core benchmark rose from 146 million to more than 820 million verified candidates per second on a standard RTX 4090.
The construction puts a hash where Bitcoin expects a signature, but it does not make Bitcoin quantum-safe on its own. Transactions are nonstandard and must be sent directly to a miner; the construction only shields coins whose public key has not already been exposed. StarkWare says a soft fork remains the better long-term fix. The company cited Anthropic's Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 among the top records, with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6 and Kimi close behind.
