AI Agents Cut BTC Quantum Attack Benchmark by 86%

Morning Minute: AI Agents Cut BTC Quantum Attack Benchmark by 86%

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🤖 AI Agents Cut the Cost of Cracking Bitcoin‘s Cryptography by 86% in Two Months

More than 100 researchers working alongside AI coding agents significantly decreased a benchmark for a key step in a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum from 10.75 billion down to 1.496 billion. That happened between late May and July 26, but the paper landed just this week.

For background, Bitcoin and Ethereum both secure signatures with secp256k1, an elliptic curve. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could reverse that math and derive a private key from a public one. That’s the problem. The competition, called ECDSA.Fail and run by Eigen Labs, scored circuit designs by multiplying logical qubits against Toffoli gates, an expensive quantum operation. A lower score means fewer resources needed. The leading design used 1,151 logical qubits and roughly 1.3 million Toffoli gates, and a later submission pushed 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 and don’t compare cleanly.

The paper was authored by researchers from Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs, and the Ethereum Foundation. That’s crypto’s own security establishment funding and publishing work that makes the attack cheaper, on the theory that knowing the real cost is the only way to plan the defense. They call the method Open Autoresearch, humans and AI agents iterating against a shared measurable target with a verifier in the loop.

This lands in the middle of a quantum scramble that’s been building for weeks. The Ethereum Foundation set a hard December 2029 deadline to make transactions, validators, and storage quantum-resistant. StarkWare pushed the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction to mainnet. Ethereum developers proposed rebuilding the validator deposit contract. Ripple is hardening the XRP Ledger. Galaxy committed up to $5 million in July, and nine firms including BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy pledged $15 million over three years. The researchers point to NIST’s draft proposing deprecation of classical public-key algorithms at the 112-bit level after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035.

Source: finance.yahoo.com