THE QUANTUM INTELLIGENCER

The benchmark by which researchers measure the cost of a quantum attack upon the signatures of Bitcoin and Ethereum has fallen by 86 per cent in two months, from 10.75 billion operations to 1.496 billion, according to a paper published this week. More than one hundred researchers from Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs and the Ethereum Foundation took part, working alongside AI coding agents in a method the authors call Open Autoresearch. The reduction does not forecast when a practical attack may become feasible, and no funds are said to be at risk today; its significance lies in the asymmetry between attack-side and defence-side progress. The Ethereum Foundation continues to hold to December 2029 for quantum-resistant transactions, validators and storage, while StarkWare has already pushed the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction to mainnet. Regulators move to a fixed schedule: a NIST draft would deprecate classical public-key algorithms at the 112-bit security level after 2030 and disallow them after 2035. The authors defend publishing attack work on the ground that only a measured threat can be answered with a measured response. They stop short of forecasting when a practical attack might become feasible; whether institutional deadlines survive an attack-side cost curve that no longer moves at human speed is the question the result poses. —Elias Hartwell Dispatch from The Prepared E0