StarkWare’s coding contest cuts quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction cost to $66

Getting a Bitcoin transaction quantum-proofed used to cost around $320 in GPU compute time. After a week-long coding contest, that number is now roughly $66. That is an 80% cost reduction achieved largely by developers and AI tools competing for prize money. StarkWare, working alongside Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, launched the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge on September 16, 2026. By September 23, the contest dashboard showed 62 accepted improvements had pushed estimated preparation costs down to between $66 and $67. What quantum-safe Bitcoin actually does Bitcoin’s current security model exposes public keys during transactions. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in theory, reverse-engineer a private key from a public one, draining a wallet before the owner could respond. QSB is an emergency workaround built entirely inside Bitcoin’s existing rules. It uses hash-based cryptographic locks that provide roughly 118-bit preimage resistance. It requires no soft fork, no consensus changes, and no protocol upgrades. The design was published in April 2026 by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy. The first actual QSB transaction on the Bitcoin mainnet landed on August...