AI Agents Are Racing to Make Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Cheap—And Winning

In brief

• StarkWare said the estimated cost of building a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction fell from about $320 to roughly $67 in a week, as solvers in its Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge optimized the brute-force search that runs on a user's own GPU before hitting the chain.
• The leading records were held by developers running AI models, including Anthropic's Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6 and Kimi close behind.
• StarkWare cautioned the $67 is an estimate, not a price, and that the work doesn't make Bitcoin quantum-safe on its own—it still favors a soft fork long-term.

The price of building a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction has plunged nearly 80% in a single week, after developers and AI models competed to optimize the code behind it.

According to StarkWare, which ran the competition alongside Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, the estimated cost of constructing such a transaction fell from about $320 to roughly $67 in GPU compute.

The figure comes from the dashboard of the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Optimization Challenge, an open contest launched to see how far outside solvers could push the number down.

The first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction was mined on mainnet last month, a construction StarkWare developed to protect coins without requiring a network-wide fork. That initial transaction took roughly 3,100 GPU-hours and cost around $320 to build. One week of open competition cut most of that away.