StarkWare says Bitcoin has reached a major milestone in its race against quantum computing. The company confirmed that a quantum-safe transaction was mined on the Bitcoin mainnet on August 26, marking the first live demonstration of its Quantum Safe Bitcoin construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transaction shows that Bitcoin can support a quantum-resistant spending method without changing its consensus rules. However, the development does not make the Bitcoin network fully quantum-safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bitcoin currently relies on elliptic-curve cryptography for transaction signatures. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could eventually derive private keys from exposed public keys. That could put some Bitcoin holdings at risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy developed Quantum Safe Bitcoin, or QSB, to address this vulnerability using Bitcoin’s existing scripting capabilities. The method adds a hash-based security layer that does not depend on elliptic-curve assumptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
QSB uses a technique called signature grinding. Instead of producing a conventional private-key signature, the sender performs substantial computation to find a transaction hash that satisfies the required conditions. The resulting security depends on hash preimage resistance rather than the secrecy of an elliptic-curve private key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The break through comes with significant limitations. Producing a QSB transaction requires expensive off-chain computation, with the original research estimating costs of several hundred dollars under its assumptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transaction also uses a nonstandard format. Ordinary Bitcoin nodes do not relay it through the normal mempool process, so StarkWare relied on MARA’s Slipstream service to deliver the transaction directly to a miner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
StarkWare continues to favor a Bitcoin protocol upgrade as the long-term solution. The company has also participated in BIP 360, a proposal aimed at enabling quantum-resistant Bitcoin script functionality through a soft fork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mainnet demonstration therefore represents a practical emergency option rather than a complete network upgrade. Still, it moves quantum-resistant Bitcoin protection from research into real-world execution and gives holders another potential path before quantum computers become capable of threatening existing cryptographic protections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
StarkWare says Bitcoin has reached a major milestone in its race against quantum computing. The company confirmed that a quantum-safe transaction was mined on the Bitcoin mainnet on August 26, marking the first live demonstration of its Quantum Safe Bitcoin construction. The transaction shows that Bitcoin can support a quantum-resistant spending method without changing its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3693,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[2,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-featured","category-general-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n