StarkWare Completes First Quantum-Resistant Bitcoin Transaction, Says Protocol-Level Upgrades Still Needed
According to The Block, StarkWare announced it has successfully executed the first post-quantum Bitcoin transaction. Avihu Levy, Head of Applications, used a "signature grinding" approach to repeatedly generate millions of candidate signatures before the transaction entered the Bitcoin mempool, thereby avoiding the exposure of mathematical data related to public keys that could be exploited by future quantum computers to forge signatures.
This method incurs significant computational costs, with a single transaction potentially taking several hours. Because the transaction format is unrecognized by standard Bitcoin nodes, it bypassed the public mempool and was submitted directly to miners for inclusion via MARA’s Slipstream service. StarkWare noted that while this technique can serve as a transitional safeguard, Bitcoin will still require protocol-level upgrades or a hard fork to systematically mitigate quantum computing threats.
