Bitcoin has survived market crashes, regulatory crackdowns, and more forks than a cutlery factory. The next threat on the horizon is quantum computing, and StarkWare just made the first serious move to address it on mainnet.
On August 26, 2026, StarkWare successfully mined the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction using the Quantum Safe Bitcoin construction developed by Avihu Levy, the company’s General Manager of Applications. The transaction ID, 305a24ffea912b9cf428f29ebf952321c96dab5bab284fc0d0801562f5abab07, is now a matter of public record on the Bitcoin blockchain.
What quantum-safe actually means here
Bitcoin’s current security relies on elliptic-curve cryptography, specifically the secp256k1 curve used to generate public-private key pairs. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could theoretically reverse-engineer a private key from a public key, which would be a catastrophic vulnerability for any exposed Bitcoin address.
The QSB method sidesteps this entirely by replacing elliptic-curve signatures with hash-based cryptography, specifically Lamport-style hash-based signatures that rely on RIPEMD-160 for pre-image resistance. Hash functions don’t have the same mathematical weakness to Shor’s algorithm that elliptic curves do, making them a more durable foundation when quantum hardware eventually matures.
