Protecting Bitcoin from the quantum threat starts with understanding it. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from an exposed public key. Preparing for that possibility means understanding the resources an attacker would need, while building practical ways to protect BTC. That’s the connection between http://ECDSA.fail and Quantum-Safe Bitcoin, and why StarkWare is contributing to both. 1⃣ ECDSA fail http://ECDSA.fail brings researchers and AI agents together to optimize a key building block of a quantum attack on the cryptography used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The published results report an 86.1% reduction from the initial benchmark score, which combines qubit requirements and computational work. That improvement concerns elliptic-curve point addition, one component of a larger quantum algorithm. It helps researchers refine resource estimates and gives the ecosystem better evidence to inform its preparation. The research is open for anyone to inspect and build on: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09582 2⃣Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB) Challenge On the protection side, QSB, designed by Avihu Levy, offers Bitcoin a quantum-safe fallback under its existing consensus rules. It uses hash-based protection designed to remain secure even if an attacker can forge Bitcoin’s usual signatures. On August 26, a QSB transaction was mined on Bitcoin mainnet, demonstrating that this construction could work without a protocol change. While a soft fork remains the better long-term path, QSB gives Bitcoin another option to develop and prepare in the meantime: https://starkware.co/blog/the-first-quantum-safe-bitcoin-transaction-has-been-mined/ The next challenge is making that option more practical. Our first mainnet transaction cost approximately $320 in offchain GPU computation. The QSB Autoresearch Challenge invites developers, researchers and AI agents to help reduce that computational burden, with over $20,000 in prizes available: https://x.com/StarkWareLtd/status/2100239431764705353 The cost is already down 4x, from $320 to $76, just one day after launching the challenge. And you can all contribute to bring it even lower. Simply put, understanding the threat helps us prepare, and making a fallback cheaper gives Bitcoiners a more practical option. Explore http://ECDSA.fail or bring your performance engineering skills and coding agents to the QSB Challenge 🤝