StarkWare Cuts Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Estimate From $320 to $66—But It Is Still an Emergency Tool

By Isaac • September 24, 2026 9:19 am •

Bitcoin’s emergency plan for a future quantum-computing threat just became much cheaper on paper. StarkWare says an open optimization challenge cut the estimated GPU cost of preparing one experimental quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction from roughly $320 to about $66 in a week.

That is a dramatic improvement, but it is not the same thing as making Bitcoin quantum-safe. The new figure is a benchmark estimate, the optimized code has not yet produced another mined transaction, and the method only covers a narrow class of coins.

The progress is real. So are the limits.

CoinDesk reports that the challenge pushed the leading search speed to about 881 million candidates per second, compared with roughly 146 million for the