StarkWare Says It Completed First Bitcoin Transaction Built to Withstand Quantum Attacks
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StarkWare said it has completed the first Bitcoin transaction designed to defend against attacks from quantum computers.
The blockchain technology company told The Block in a report published on August 27 that the transaction demonstrated Bitcoin can achieve a degree of protection on its current network, countering the view that a network fork must come first to shield it from quantum threats.
The technology was developed by Avihu Levy, StarkWare's head of applications. It relies on a method known as signature grinding to prevent public-key-related information from being exposed to quantum attacks while a Bitcoin transaction sits in the mempool.
A standard Bitcoin transaction typically remains in the mempool for a period before it is permanently recorded on-chain. During that window, StarkWare said, mathematical information could be exposed that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might one day use to forge a signature.
Rather than using the first valid signature it generates, signature grinding repeatedly creates millions of candidate signatures and selects one that does not expose public-key-related information to a quantum computer. The tradeoff is heavy computational cost, and creating a single transaction can take several hours.
The approach also has limits because it is not a transaction format the Bitcoin network normally handles today. Ordinary nodes do not relay such transactions, so they must be sent directly to a miner willing to process them instead of passing through the public mempool. The transaction was mined by Bitcoin miner MARA through its Slipstream service.
StarkWare does not view the technique as a fundamental solution to Bitcoin's quantum-computing problem. Levy said Bitcoin should ultimately be upgraded at the protocol level so the network itself becomes quantum resistant.
Chief Executive Officer Eli Ben-Sasson said the technique could serve as a safeguard until a permanent protocol upgrade is in place. "This breakthrough provides needed psychological reassurance," he said. "It shows there is a lifeboat. It does not mean we can relax. We need to build more lifeboats now."
