Key facts
- AI agents helped researchers cut the benchmark cost for a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum by 86% in two months.
- The cost dropped from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion between late May and July 26.
- Bitcoin and Ethereum use secp256k1 elliptic curve cryptography, which could be reversed by a powerful quantum computer.
- The Ethereum Foundation has a deadline of December 2029 for quantum-resistant transactions.
- The research was funded by entities including the Ethereum Foundation and published by researchers from Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, and StarkWare.
AI coding agents have significantly reduced the computational cost of a key step in a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to research published this week. The benchmark cost for this operation dropped by 86% in just two months, from late May to July 26, raising concerns about the pace of quantum computing advancements versus defense strategies.
The competition, ECDSA.Fail, run by Eigen Labs, measured circuit designs by multiplying logical qubits against Toffoli gates, an expensive quantum operation. The leading design used 1,151 logical qubits and approximately 1.3 million Toffoli gates, achieving a score of 1.496 billion, a substantial decrease from the previous benchmark of 10.75 billion. This new score is roughly half of Google Quantum AI's March benchmark, though direct comparisons are complicated by different counting methods.
The research was authored by a collaboration of entities including Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs, and the Ethereum Foundation. This work, termed Open Autoresearch, involves humans and AI agents iterating on designs with a verifier in the loop. The goal is to understand the true cost of quantum attacks to better plan defenses.
This development occurs amid a growing focus on quantum security. The Ethereum Foundation has set a hard deadline of December 2029 for making its transactions, validators, and storage quantum-resistant. StarkWare has already deployed the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction to the mainnet. Other industry players, including Galaxy, BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy, have committed significant funding to quantum security research.