Last checked
RefreshEstimated news impact scores by coin. Scores are not price-change percentages.
Most chains have no quantum plan except "move your funds." On Starknet, you just upgrade. Same address, new cryptography. That’s what crypto agility actually looks like. We compared 10 networks. Here’s how they stack up:
The future of today's blockchains is becoming increasingly uncertain. That means we need to act as quickly as possible to address that uncertainty. Starknet becoming an independent L1 is our clearest path forward.
Stwo peak memory went from 13.9 GiB to 2.1 GiB in under two weeks. It all happened through open, collaborative research between humans and AI agents. Now a phone can prove a Starknet mainnet tx.
Stwo peak memory went from 13.9 GiB to 2.1 GiB in under two weeks. It all happened through open, collaborative research between humans and AI agents. Now a phone can prove a Starknet mainnet tx. Stwo peak memory went from 13.9 GiB to 2.1 GiB in under two weeks. It all happened through open, collaborative research between humans and AI agents. Now a phone can prove a Starknet mainnet tx. More challenges are coming. Prep your http://agents.It all happened through open, collaborative research between humans and AI agents. Now a phone can prove a Starknet mainnet tx.
Quantum-Safe Bitcoin, Today At Token2049 this week, StarkWare CEO @EliBenSasson argued that blockchains need to become future-proofed, and fast. The quantum threat may be closer than most people assume. The chains that come through it will be the ones with cryptographic agility: the ability to change their cryptography when they need to. Bitcoin is the hardest test of that idea. Its script language is effectively frozen. Adding a post-quantum signature opcode means a soft fork, and a soft fork means years of coordination before a single coin is protected. The quantum timeline may not wait that long. So StarkWare researchers asked a narrower question. Not what Bitcoin should add, but what Bitcoin can already express. Can you build a lock that Shor's algorithm can't pick today, inside the rules the network already runs on, without asking anyone's permission? The answer is yes. It's called Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB), and it has already been spent on Bitcoin mainnet. The problem Every Bitcoin public key is derived from a private key by multiplying a point on an elliptic curve. Going forward takes microseconds. Going backward should take longer than the universe has existed. Shor's algorithm, on a large enough quantum computer, does it in polynomial time. Roughly a third of all BTC (around 7 million coins, by Coinbase's estimate) already has its public key visible on chain. That includes old P2PK outputs, reused addresses and every Taproot output. These coins don't need to move to be exposed, so a quantum attacker would never have to race anyone for them. The agreed long-term fix is post-quantum signatures, and that work is underway in BIP-360 and BIP-361. Both need a soft fork, and Bitcoin soft forks are measured in years. But Bitcoin already has the tools for another approach. Shor breaks elliptic-curve cryptography by exploiting its mathematical structure. Hash-based cryptography doesnt rely on the mathmatical structure Shor exploits. That is the whole idea behind QSB. What QSB is QSB locks a Bitcoin output so that the only thing between an attacker and the coins is an enormous amount of hashing, not an elliptic-curve private key. Elliptic-curve cryptography is still in the script, and the network still checks signatures exactly as it always has. The signature check just isn't what keeps the coins locked anymore. StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy (@avihu28) designed the method and published it in April 2026. On 26 August 2026, with engineering work from StarkWare's Tomer Giladi, the first QSB output was spent on Bitcoin mainnet in block 964,199. It took a few hundred dollars of GPU time, with no soft fork, no new opcode and no consensus change. Since launch, that cost has dropped from about $320 to around $50, and work to bring it down further is ongoing. How it works To spend a Bitcoin output, you have to satisfy its script. Normally three pieces have to fit together: a signature, a message and a public key. The public key comes from the script, the message comes from your transaction, and the signature comes from you, made with your private key. QSB flips which piece is missing. The signature is fixed in the script and the message still comes from your transaction. The public key then follows from those two on its own. Then comes the catch: hash that public key, and the result must itself be a valid signature. Almost nothing is, about one in forty trillion. So you tweak harmless fields in your transaction and try again, tens of trillions of times, on rented GPUs. Eventually one attempt works, and the output becomes spendable. No private key was involved at any point, so there's nothing for Shor's algorithm to recover. Hashing and a hash-based one-time signature tie the spend to this exact transaction. The lock rests on RIPEMD-160, which gives roughly 118 bits of security even against a quantum attacker. What it is not QSB doesn't make Bitcoin quantum-resistant. Running Bitcoin's normal throughput this way would cost tens of millions of dollars a day in compute, and the difficulty can't be tuned down to make it cheaper. It protects new outputs one at a time and does nothing for coins that are already exposed. Moving coins into QSB in the first place also requires an ordinary, quantum-unsafe spend. It isn't a normal transaction either. Bitcoin Core's default relay rules treat QSB spends as nonstandard, so the mainnet transaction never passed through the public mempool. It was submitted directly to @MARA through its Slipstream service. The consensus rules accept it, but default node software won't relay it, so anyone using QSB today needs a miner willing to take the transaction directly. There's no wallet, no address format, no recovery flow and no Lightning support. QSB also relies on two behaviours that Bitcoin arguably treats as bugs, so a future consensus cleanup could break it with no upgrade path. Levy himself calls it a last-resort measure and a research curiosity, not a path to post-quantum Bitcoin. StarkWare's position hasn't changed: the real fix for Bitcoin is a soft fork. QSB shows what's possible in the meantime, and how much it costs when a chain can't change its own cryptography. Why this matters for Starknet Being quantum-safe isn't one upgrade; it's the ability to keep upgrading a chains cryptography as threats evolve. Eli Ben-Sasson calls this cryptographic agility. Starknet is built to adapt. STARK proofs have used hash-based security from day one, so the proving system does not need to be replaced for a quantum migration. Its native account abstraction lets accounts adopt post-quantum signatures without changing the protocol. In June, StarkWare published Starknet's quantum migration roadmap in three phases: Core cryptography: replace Pedersen hashing with BLAKE2 across state commitments, contract addresses and network configuration, and add post-quantum consensus signatures. Migration tooling: give existing contracts a path to the new setup. Ethereum-linked components: bridge syscalls and blob data availability. The third phase is the hard one. As an L2, Starknet inherits its security from Ethereum. However fast Starknet moves, it can only be fully quantum-safe once Ethereum is. At Token2049, Eli Ben-Sasson put that dependency to the community as an open question: should Starknet become an L1 for post-quantum agility, so it can move at the pace the threat may demand instead of waiting on Ethereum's timeline? It's a question, not a decision, and the conversation is happening in public. QSB shows what it looks like when a chain can't move. Starknet is asking how to make sure it always can. Read the quantum roadmap and join the discussion on X.
Would you put every employee’s salary on your company’s homepage? Paying your team onchain does exactly that. Introducing @DashXHQ, private stablecoin payroll on Starknet.
Showing 7 of 7 stories. Filters apply to the full news archive.