StarkWare Challenge Slashes Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Costs by 79% to ~$67

StarkWare, in partnership with Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, launched the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) Optimization Challenge on September 16, 2026, offering over $20,000 in prizes to optimize the GPU-intensive computation required for hash-based, quantum-resistant Bitcoin transactions that operate under existing consensus rules without a soft fork. The first QSB transaction was mined on August 26, 2026 (block 964,199), costing approximately $320 in compute (3,100 GPU-hours across ~100 GPUs) excluding network fees. Within one week, 62 accepted improvements across transaction pinning and subset selection tasks boosted RTX 4090 benchmark throughput from 146 million to over 820 million verified candidates per second for pinning and from ~62 million to over 623 million for subset selection, reducing estimated costs to $66–$67 based on benchmarks. Multiple outlets, including StarkWare's official updates and independent reporting, confirm the 79% reduction, though optimizations remain benchmark-based and unproven in a second on-chain transaction. QSB uses Lamport-style hash-based signatures for ~118-bit preimage resistance on unexposed public keys, serving as an emergency fallback amid quantum computing risks to ECDSA, while StarkWare continues advocating protocol-level upgrades like soft forks for broader protection. The approach has gained traction in crypto circles as a practical near-term hedge for large, unexposed holdings.