Researchers working with AI coding agents have sharply lowered the resource benchmark for a crucial step in a potential quantum attack against the cryptography used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to a paper posted Wednesday. The work came out of ECDSA.Fail, an open competition launched by Eigen Labs in late May, where more than 100 participants built circuits for secp256k1, the elliptic curve behind transaction signatures on both networks. By July 26, the benchmark score had fallen 86%, from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion. The top design used 1,151 logical qubits and about 1.3 million Toffoli gates. Researchers said the tests verified the circuit’s calculations but did not crack a Bitcoin private key. The paper also frames ECDSA.Fail as a case study in “Open Autoresearch,” where human researchers and AI agents iteratively generate, implement, test, and share improvements against a common measurable target. The report lands as crypto firms put more money into quantum defense research, with Galaxy Digital committing up to $5 million in July and nine firms, including BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy, pledging a combined $15 million over three years for broader Bitcoin security work that includes quantum defenses.

The US Department of Commerce on Sept. 8 finalized CHIPS research and development awards for Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantinuum, with each company eligible for as much as $100 million and the three together receiving up to $300 million. The same day, PsiQuantum was approved for up to $100 million, while GlobalFoundries was approved for up to $375 million, including support tied to domestic quantum foundry capacity. Earlier in May, the department had already announced $2.013 billion in intended quantum industry investments across nine companies. The latest funding has sharpened attention on a long-standing risk for Bitcoin: a future quantum computer powerful enough to break current cryptography. While there is no evidence such a machine is close to breaking Bitcoin today, developers are debating how long a migration away from quantum-vulnerable setups could take. BIP-360 focuses on reducing long-term public-key exposure through a new output type called Pay-to-Merkle-Root, or P2MR. BIP-361 goes further by outlining how the network might phase out vulnerable addresses and eventually restrict ECDSA and Schnorr-based spending. According to material cited in the draft, more than 34% of Bitcoin’s supply had exposed public keys on-chain as of March 2026.

Crypto markets saw an unusually dense flow of developments between Sept. 9 and Sept. 10, with LAPTOP drawing the most attention after its launch, airdrop claims, market-maker allocations, liquidity incentives and extreme price moves all unfolded in quick succession. Security concerns emerged at the same time, including phishing warnings tied to LAPTOP and a separate email phishing alert from hardware wallet maker Trezor. Beyond LAPTOP, on-chain activity showed large ZEC buying through three wallets, a profitable six-month run in VVV and LIT by whale address 0x7378, and fresh positioning by trader Based16z. Binance listed Niulai and expanded related services, while Binance Alpha added 4Stock and A Meme Coin. Institutional and infrastructure news also arrived in size. Aave launched an official MCP server for AI agents, Consensys spun out MetaMask into an independent entity, U.S. Bank tested cross-border payments using USBDC on Stellar, PayPal formally rolled out its PYUSDx platform, and Tether teamed up with Fasanara Capital on a $400 million private credit fund. Regulators and policymakers were active as well, with U.S. enforcement action against Xinbi Guarantee, fresh pressure in Washington around the CLARITY Act, and an EU move to extend local contact-point rules to crypto service providers.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined EIP-8288, a proposal for a recursive STARK mempool, and said he hopes it will be included in the I-star upgrade that follows Hegota. The proposal moves signatures and proofs out of Ethereum’s core execution path and recursively aggregates STARKs in the mempool, with the aim of reducing on-chain computation and data costs. According to Buterin, the design could enable low-cost quantum-safe signatures and privacy protocols. He said the cost of quantum-safe private transactions could fall from roughly 10 million gas to tens of thousands of gas. The proposal is also designed to work without changes to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, allowing compatibility with newer signature or proof systems such as Falcon and ML-DSA while also supporting private account abstraction. Under the proposed workflow, nodes would periodically aggregate transaction dependencies and generate recursive STARKs, while block builders would create proofs for transactions selected for inclusion. The added on-chain overhead per block would be about one 100 KB to 300 KB STARK plus 96 bytes of data for each claim being proven.

Quantus founder and CEO Yuvi Lightman said on X that the quantum-resistant blockchain’s mainnet is scheduled to go live on Sept. 9, a Wednesday. At launch, mining will be the only way to obtain tokens, while liquidity and trading functionality are expected to come several weeks later. Lightman said the team has merged its Immunefi security work into the public codebase and completed all fixes from its audit contest. He also outlined several protocol and infrastructure measures ahead of launch, including support for ML-DSA-65 and ML-DSA-87, contextual binding for every signature under the FIPS 204 standard, fail-closed handling for undecodable multisig transactions, and a hardened network stack designed to resist denial-of-service attacks. The team said it completed a full end-to-end rehearsal on a global pre-production mainnet spanning the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Quantus also said it deployed multi-region bootnodes and dedicated RPC nodes through infrastructure-as-code, reduced indexer memory usage from above 90% to about 26%, launched its registration page, revamped its website, added multi-account support for Keystone hardware wallets, and released CLI v2.1.3 and miner v4.0.2. A Quantum & Privacy Day event with NEAR is set for Oct. 8 in Singapore during Token2049.

Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Hegotá, now has two clear top-priority items after the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol team reviewed 62 candidate Ethereum Improvement Proposals with roughly 60 researchers and engineers. The winners were FOCIL (EIP-7805), aimed at strengthening censorship resistance at the consensus layer, and Frame Transactions (EIP-8141), which would bring native account abstraction to the execution layer. FOCIL is designed to reduce the power of any single block builder by letting a selected group of validators create inclusion lists of valid mempool transactions that builders or proposers are expected to include. Frame Transactions would split validation, gas payment and execution into programmable components, opening the door for third-party paymasters to cover gas and for users to transact without holding ETH in advance. The Ethereum Foundation also attached a concrete post-quantum target to its roadmap for the first time, setting December 2029 as the point by which Ethereum L1 should become quantum-resistant across the execution, consensus and data layers. Hegotá is not being framed as the post-quantum hard fork itself, but as the first crucial milestone that determines whether the wider roadmap can arrive on schedule.

The G7’s cybersecurity working group is calling on governments and businesses to start preparing now for quantum-enabled cyberattacks, warning that the shift to post-quantum cryptography could take years and that sensitive data may already be exposed to future decryption risks. In a new report, the group said quantum computing poses both security and economic risks to public and private organizations, extending well beyond operators of critical infrastructure. The report does not mention cryptocurrency directly, but the same public-key cryptography underpins blockchain wallets and transaction authorization. That link has kept the issue on the radar for major crypto ecosystems. Bitcoin developers are weighing proposals such as BIP-360, though any major change would require broad agreement across developers, miners, businesses, and users. Ethereum researchers are studying replacements for several cryptographic components, including a proposal to rebuild the deposit contract to handle larger post-quantum keys. Researchers have also said Solana may face a simpler migration path because it uses EdDSA signatures, and the Solana Foundation has already tested post-quantum signatures on a test network while introducing an optional hash-based vault.

Circle has warned that the quantum resources needed to break mainstream blockchain signature schemes are falling, citing a low-resource record of 813 logical qubits. But the core issue for USDC is not Circle’s own systems alone. According to the company’s current contract documentation, USDC is deployed across 37 mainnets, which means any credible post-quantum migration would also depend on host chains, wallets, custodians, bridges, and end users adopting safer authorization methods. The report argues that the 813-qubit figure is a reference point, not a countdown clock. It reflects improving circuit efficiency, yet does not by itself describe attack depth, error-correction costs, runtime on physical hardware, or when such hardware might exist. It also challenges Circle’s comparison between attack-oriented logical qubits and Google’s Willow, which was described by Google as a 105-qubit processor rather than 105 logical qubits usable for cryptographic attacks. Circle’s Arc stack may help test post-quantum verification, including an SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s precompile, but it does not automatically replace transaction signing across public networks. The article’s conclusion is that USDC’s quantum security will require coordinated changes across 37 independent network paths, not a unilateral switch by the issuer.