StarkWare Cuts Estimated Cost of Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions by 79% to $66

The estimated computing expense to prepare an experimental Quantum-Safe Bitcoin transaction has dropped 79% from roughly $320 to $66. The cost reduction follows a weeklong optimization challenge hosted by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs, where AI-assisted developers generated 62 accepted algorithmic improvements. Benchmark speeds on an Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU surged from 146 million to over 880 million candidate verifications per second. The hash-based framework operates within Bitcoin's current consensus rules without requiring a soft fork, though transactions currently require direct routing to miners and cannot protect previously exposed public keys.