StarkWare secures Bitcoin with quantum-safe method on mainnet

A StarkWare researcher just pulled off something the Bitcoin community has debated for years: locking coins in a vault that no quantum computer, present or future, can crack. And he did it on Bitcoin’s live network, using existing rules, without asking anyone’s permission. The first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction was confirmed in block 964,199 on August 26, 2026. It spent a modest 10,000 satoshis, cost 5,179 satoshis in fees, and weighed in at 1,403 bytes. How it works without changing Bitcoin The transaction was executed by Avihu Levy, StarkWare’s General Manager of Applications, who published an open-source implementation of the method back in April 2026. The core idea is deceptively simple: replace the elliptic-curve cryptography that Bitcoin normally uses for signatures with hash-based constructions instead. Bitcoin’s current security relies on elliptic-curve discrete-log hardness. Quantum computers could eventually solve it using Shor’s algorithm, potentially exposing funds secured by publicly revealed keys. The quantum-safe Bitcoin (QSB) approach swaps that foundation for hash preimage resistance, which remains robust even against quantum attackers. The result is approximat...