AI Agents Cut Bitcoin Quantum Attack Cost 86% in Two Months
In brief
- AI agents and 100+ researchers reduced quantum attack benchmark from 10.75B to 1.496B in two months.
- ECDSA.Fail competition, run by Eigen Labs, scored circuit designs using logical qubits and Toffoli gates.
- Ethereum Foundation set December 2029 deadline for quantum-resistant transactions; BlackRock and Coinbase pledged $15M.
The Benchmark and the Attack
Bitcoin and Ethereum both secure signatures with secp256k1, an elliptic curve that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could reverse to derive a private key from a public one. The competition, called ECDSA.Fail and run by Eigen Labs, scored circuit designs by multiplying logical qubits against Toffoli gates—a standard measure of quantum circuit complexity.
The leading design used 1,151 logical qubits and roughly 1.3 million Toffoli gates, with a later submission pushing gates below a million. That leading score came in at about half of Google Quantum AI's March benchmark, though the two used different counting methods.
The researchers employed a method called Open Autoresearch, with humans and AI agents iterating against a shared measurable target with a verifier in the loop. This approach compressed months of traditional research into weeks.
Industry Response and Deadlines
The paper was authored by researchers from Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs, and the Ethereum Foundation. StarkWare pushed the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction to mainnet, signaling that defense mechanisms exist today.
The Ethereum Foundation set a hard December 2029 deadline to make transactions, validators, and storage quantum-resistant. Meanwhile, funding for quantum-resistance efforts is accelerating: Galaxy committed up to $5 million in July, and nine firms including BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy pledged $15 million over three years.
NIST's draft proposes deprecation of classical public-key algorithms at the 112-bit level after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035. The researchers point to these regulatory timelines as evidence that the quantum threat is real—and now, measurably closer than it was two months ago.
"The defense side has a fixed schedule measured in years. The attack side just got 86% cheaper in two months because a hundred people pointed AI agents at it." — Tyler Warner, Morning Minute newsletter
