StarkWare Said It Has Successfully Carried Out a Quantum-resistant Transaction on the Bitcoin Network

• On August 26, MARA mined the first quantum-resistant transaction on the Bitcoin network.
• It is based on a method by StarkWare developer Avihu Levy.
• The mechanism he proposed does not require protocol-level changes.

On the evening of August 26, 2026, the first quantum-resistant transaction was successfully processed on the Bitcoin network, and it did not require protocol-level changes. This was announced by StarkWare researcher and general manager of applications Avihu Levy. 

He is also the author of the method used to make this possible. StarkWare engineer Tomer Giladi also took part in the work and, according to Levy, “brought the approach over the finish line.”

The transaction was carried out by MARA via the Slipstream service. Details are available at this link. 

As StarkWare explained, the transaction was sent directly to the miner rather than placed in the public queue due to its non-standard nature. Otherwise, nodes would have ignored it. 

At the same time, the company still believes that the best path forward for the Bitcoin network in the post-quantum cryptography era is a soft fork. StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson emphasized this. According to him, Levy’s work “gives hope” that users’ assets will remain safe until then. 

The Essence of Levy’s Approach

The researcher presented his work in April 2026. Notably, it does not use STARK proofs, is implemented entirely on the Bitcoin network, and relies only on tools already available there. 

The key idea behind Levy’s approach is not to make the ECDSA signature quantum-resistant, but to add an extra layer of protection on top of the old scripting language, with security that relies primarily on hash functions. 

First, the scheme rigidly binds the transaction to its contents. The script pre-commits to a signature that covers the entire transaction. 

From it and the data of the specific transaction, a public key is reconstructed and then hashed. You need to find a version of the transaction such that the resulting hash has the format of a valid signature. 

On average, this requires about 2^46 attempts. If you change the amount, the recipient, or other data, the result changes as well, so the entire search has to be done again. 

Next, a transaction digest is formed. The sender selects a subset from a set of pre-prepared dummy signatures. Each of them changes the transaction’s signed representation and, consequently, the resulting hash. 

The subset for which the hash takes the format of a valid signature becomes part of the digest. The procedure is carried out in two rounds, and the selected parts of the digest are confirmed with a Lamport one-time signature. 

The key drawback of this approach is that creating a transaction requires a large amount of computation off-chain, Levy noted. Even the optimized version is estimated at roughly tens or hundreds of dollars in compute costs. 

The transaction itself ends up being large and almost fully consumes the available limits of Bitcoin’s legacy scripting language. In addition, the scheme works only via the legacy transaction format and does not yet cover all scenarios, such as Lightning. 

How Close Is Q-Day?

Q-Day is the notional moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to break existing public-key encryption algorithms. Ethereum developer Justin Drake believes this could happen before 2032. 

On the Brink of Q-Day: How Real Is the Quantum Threat to the Crypto Industry?

02.06.2026

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At the same time, some networks are already working on deploying post-quantum cryptography. These include, for example, NEAR Protocol. 

Meanwhile, major networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum, face certain challenges due to the large number of potential protocol-level changes.  

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