AI Agents Are Racing to Make Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Cheap—And Winning

What happened

The price of building a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction has plunged nearly 80% in a single week, after developers and AI models competed to optimize the code behind it. An open competition run by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs drove the estimated cost of building a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction from about $320 to roughly $67, with AI models topping the leaderboards.

The leading records were held by developers running AI models, including Anthropic's Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, with OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Grok 4.6 and Kimi close behind. StarkWare cautioned the $67 is an estimate, not a price, and that the work doesn't make Bitcoin quantum-safe on its own—it still favors a soft fork long-term.

The first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction was mined on mainnet last month, a construction StarkWare developed to protect coins without requiring a network-wide fork. That initial transaction took roughly 3,100 GPU-hours and cost around $320 to build.

One week of open competition cut most of that away. The expensive part of the process is a brute-force search that happens on a user's own hardware before anything reaches the blockchain, which is why it shows up as a GPU bill rather than a Bitcoin fee.