StarkWare launches Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Autoresearch Challenge with over $20K in rewards

StarkWare, partnering with Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, kicked off the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Autoresearch Challenge on September 16. The goal: get developers to optimize code that makes quantum-resistant Bitcoin transactions cheaper and more practical, with a prize pool exceeding $20,000.

The first $2,000 in rewards is available during the opening week, giving early participants an immediate incentive to start tinkering. The challenge focuses specifically on transaction pinning and subset selection bottlenecks, two computational chokepoints that currently make quantum-safe Bitcoin transactions expensive to produce.

What quantum-safe Bitcoin actually means

The QSB methodology was developed by StarkWare’s Avihu Levy. It’s a hash-based approach to making Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computers, and it comes with one particularly appealing feature: it doesn’t require changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules.

QSB uses signature grinding and hash-based puzzles to achieve this within Bitcoin’s existing legacy Script constraints, which cap out at 201 opcodes and 10,000 bytes.

The estimated cryptographic security equivalent sits at roughly 118-bit preimage resistance. For context, 128-bit security is generally considered the gold standard for symmetric cryptography.

A $320 proof of concept already exists

On August 26, a live QSB transaction was successfully mined on the Bitcoin mainnet at block 964,199. The transaction moved funds into hash-based storage, proving the concept works on actual Bitcoin infrastructure.

The cost: approximately $320 in GPU resources, requiring around 3,100 GPU-hours of computation.

Why this matters now

StarkWare participated in the ECDSA.fail autoresearch challenge launched by Eigen Labs, which produced a paper in September 2026 that advanced estimates of quantum vulnerability in elliptic-curve cryptography. The research reduced previous assumptions about how much quantum computing power would be needed to crack ECDSA, the signature scheme Bitcoin relies on.

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