StarkWare Initiates Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Autoresearch Challenge with $20K Rewards

StarkWare, in collaboration with Yukon Research and Eigen Labs, officially launched the Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Autoresearch Challenge on September 16. The challenge invites developers to enhance code that can make quantum-resistant Bitcoin transactions cheaper and more efficient, with a total prize pool exceeding $20,000.

The initial $2,000 in rewards is available during the challenge's opening week, providing an immediate incentive for participants to engage. The focus of the challenge is on two critical computational bottlenecks: transaction pinning and subset selection, which currently inflate the costs of producing quantum-safe Bitcoin transactions.

The Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) methodology, developed by StarkWare’s Avihu Levy, employs a hash-based approach to secure Bitcoin transactions against quantum computing threats. Notably, it does not necessitate changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules, utilizing signature grinding and hash-based puzzles within Bitcoin’s existing Script constraints, which are limited to 201 opcodes and 10,000 bytes. The estimated cryptographic security of this approach is roughly equivalent to 118-bit preimage resistance, while 128-bit security is considered the standard for symmetric cryptography.

A proof of concept for QSB was successfully mined on the Bitcoin mainnet on August 26, with a transaction cost of approximately $320 in GPU resources, requiring around 3,100 GPU-hours of computation.

This initiative comes in the wake of StarkWare’s participation in the ECDSA.fail autoresearch challenge by Eigen Labs, which produced significant insights into the quantum vulnerabilities of elliptic-curve cryptography, particularly concerning Bitcoin's reliance on ECDSA.