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 dropped 79% to $66, down from roughly $320. The reduction followed a weeklong optimization challenge hosted by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs that yielded 62 accepted AI-assisted code improvements. The initial live transaction on August 26 required 3,100 GPU-hours across roughly 100 graphics processors. The optimizations boosted benchmark candidate verification speeds on Nvidia RTX 4090 hardware from 146 million to as high as 881 million per second. The hash-based scheme functions within existing consensus rules without requiring a network soft fork.