Developers Push Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Cost Below $70

Insider Brief

• An open optimization challenge has reduced the estimated GPU cost of constructing a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction from about $320 to roughly $67 in one week, based on its current benchmark records.
• The leading submissions have increased transaction-pinning throughput on an RTX 4090 from about 146 million to more than 820 million verified candidates per second, while subset-selection performance has improved by roughly tenfold.
• The approach can help protect Bitcoin holdings with unexposed public keys under current rules, but transactions remain nonstandard, require direct miner submission and do not replace a broader protocol upgrade for quantum security.

PRESS RELEASE — A quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction now costs about $67 in GPU compute, by the current estimate on the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge dashboard.

A month ago, the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction was mined on Bitcoin mainnet. Building it took roughly 3,100 GPU-hours and cost about $320. StarkWare, Yukon Research and Eigen Labs then opened the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge to see how far outside developers and AI agents could push the number down. One week in, it has fallen by close to 80 percent.