No Fork Required: Bitcoin’s First Quantum-Safe Transaction Just Happened

Should fund managers dealing in Bitcoin be worried about the threat of quantum computing? 

The short answer is yes — but there’s time to prepare and solutions are already being found.

One of them? Post-quantum Bitcoin transactions on the mainnet. And the first one happened this week thanks to the Starknet Foundation. 

Speaking at Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong on Thursday, Damian Chen, VP of growth at the Starknet Foundation, demonstrated how funds vulnerable to future quantum attacks can be secured without requiring a network-wide fork, thanks to the company’s latest solution. 

“This is a monumental moment,” Chen said. “This is the first post-quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction on bitcoin mainnet today. It required no soft forks; it required no hard forks; it required no core protocol upgrades, and it’s live today.”

The transaction happened using a method created by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy. It works like this: Bitcoin transactions sit briefly in a public queue before confirmation. During that window, they expose cryptographic material that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could use to forge a signature and steal the funds before the transaction is confirmed.

But rather than accepting the first valid signature, his method generates millions of signature candidates until it finds one with a specific structural property that doesn’t expose that vulnerable material while waiting in the mempool.