StarkWare CEO Urges Bitcoin Soft Fork for Broad Quantum Protection

Bitcoin (BTC) needs a protocol change to gain broad protection against quantum attacks, while StarkWare’s Quantum-Safe Bitcoin design currently offers protection only for specific transactions.

StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson described the company’s QSB transaction as an interim safeguard and backed a Bitcoin soft fork as the longer-term solution. “I still want Bitcoin to choose to do a soft fork and I expect we will get one,” Ben-Sasson said.

The first QSB transaction reached Bitcoin mainnet Aug. 26, 2026, without changing the network’s consensus rules. It combined hash-based protection with Bitcoin’s existing elliptic-curve signature system.

QSB does not make Bitcoin quantum-safe as a whole. It protects specific newly created outputs but cannot secure an address whose public key was exposed before the transaction was broadcast. QSB transactions are also nonstandard and do not pass through Bitcoin’s ordinary mempool, so the first transaction used MARA Slipstream for direct submission to a miner.

Bitcoin’s current signature schemes rely on elliptic-curve cryptography. A sufficiently capable quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could derive private keys from exposed public keys and forge signatures.

Building the first QSB transaction required about 3,100 GPU-hours across roughly 100 GPUs, with estimated computing costs of about $320. Optimization work later lowered the estimated computing cost to about $67. That figure is an estimate based on hardware and challenge-performance assumptions, not a fixed transaction fee or market price.

The company continues to regard a soft fork as the preferable long-term approach because it could provide efficient, broadly usable quantum protection across Bitcoin. A separate StarkWare-backed proposal, BIP 360, would introduce a Pay-to-Merkle-Root output type intended to support quantum-resistant script functionality through a soft fork.

No quantum-resistance soft fork has been adopted or scheduled. The current QSB design therefore remains a targeted protection mechanism while broader protocol changes remain under consideration.

TokenPost previously covered how optimization work reduced the estimated cost of building a Quantum-Safe Bitcoin transaction.