AI agents slash quantum‑attack cost on Bitcoin and Ethereum by 86 percent

AI agents cut quantum‑attack benchmark

More than 100 researchers used AI coding agents to lower a benchmark for a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum. The benchmark fell from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion between late May and July 26, a reduction of about 86 percent.

Key points

• The attack targets the secp256k1 elliptic‑curve signatures used by Bitcoin and Ethereum.
• Researchers from Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs and the Ethereum Foundation contributed.
• The best circuit design now uses 1,151 logical qubits and just under one million Toffoli gates, a type of quantum operation.
• The new score is roughly half of Google Quantum AI’s March benchmark, though counting methods differ.

What the Decrypt report says

The Decrypt article explains that the competition, called ECDSA.Fail, scores circuit designs by multiplying logical qubits against Toffoli gates. A lower score means fewer quantum resources are needed. The leading design achieved a score of about 1.3 million Toffoli gates, later pushed below one million.

What is confirmed

• The benchmark reduction was achieved between late May and July 26.
• The paper was authored by researchers from the listed institutions.
• The method used is called Open Autoresearch, where humans and AI agents iterate against a shared target with a verifier.

Uncertainties and open questions

• The timeline for a practical quantum computer that can exploit this reduced cost is not known.
• Different counting methods make direct comparison with other benchmarks difficult.

Why this matters for crypto security

Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on the difficulty of reversing secp256k1 signatures. If a quantum computer can perform the required operations with fewer resources, the private keys could be derived from public keys, threatening funds. Knowing the true cost helps developers plan defenses.

Next steps

• Ethereum aims to make its network quantum‑resistant by December 2029.
• StarkWare has already deployed a quantum‑safe Bitcoin transaction on mainnet.
• Researchers and industry groups continue to monitor quantum progress and improve defensive measures.

Sources

• Decrypt

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