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Quantum attack benchmark for Bitcoin and Ethereum cut by 86%

A public circuit challenge reduced the benchmark score for a key operation from 10.8 billion to 1.5 billion over about two months.

Reported · Written up by our desk · Market Structure

Researchers associated with multiple crypto projects have substantially lowered the estimated resource cost of a key operation that could be used in a potential quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum, based on a technical paper authored by Theta Labs CTO Jieyi Long and other contributors.

The researchers describe a circuit that requires 1,151 logical qubits and 1.30 million Toffoli gates, and they compute a single benchmark score by combining those two elements, with a lower score indicating a more efficient circuit.

Through submissions to a public challenge over roughly two months, the benchmark score fell 86%, from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion, and the final figure was also less than half Google’s previously reported benchmark, while the authors noted the methods use different accounting approaches.

The paper stresses the work is not itself an attack, adding that the circuits do not include physical error correction and do not constitute a full implementation of Shor’s algorithm. According to The Block, Eigen Labs used software tied to a Google verifier published earlier to launch ECDSA.Fail on May 30, drawing more than 100 contributors including researchers affiliated with the Ethereum Foundation, Eigen Labs, StarkWare, Starknet Foundation, Theta Labs, Brevis, Sei Labs, and Trail of Bits.

Latest closeBitcoin $77,087.06 ▼1.5%|Ethereum $2,461.76 ▼0.2%

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