The Israeli blockchain company StarkWare announced that it has carried out what it describes as the first quantum-resistant transaction on the bitcoin network, demonstrating a new way to shield funds in a specially assembled transfer from potential attacks by quantum computers. The experiment did not require any immediate change to the protocol itself.
StarkWare frames the method as a stopgap, something to lean on until bitcoin can eventually move to a quantum-resistant protocol.
A regular transaction stays vulnerable while it sits in the mempool waiting for confirmation. That window is when data gets exposed that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could use to forge the signature. StarkWare developer Avihu Levy came up with a fix: instead of settling for the first available signature, the system runs through an enormous number of variants until it lands on a signature form that gives a quantum computer no way to exploit that exposed data during the wait.
The method is computationally heavy — putting together just one such transaction takes several hours. On top of that, regular nodes don't relay this non-standard format yet, so the transaction had to be sent straight to a miner through MARA's Slipstream service, skipping standard network propagation altogether.
StarkWare stresses that this is a temporary, “psychologically important” fix, not a replacement for a full upgrade to the bitcoin protocol.
“Eventually, the network will still need a fork for quantum protection,” said StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson.