Quantum Day — when a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to crack Bitcoin's cryptography — hasn't arrived. The price of getting there just dropped sharply, though.
Eigen Labs ran an open competition called ECDSA.Fail: 100+ participants working with AI agents optimized a quantum circuit targeting
secp256k1, the elliptic curve securing transactions on Bitcoin and Ethereum. The resource score fell from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion — 86% in two months.Caveat: no real private key was cracked, and full hardware costs weren't counted. Still, NIST has already proposed banning classical encryption algorithms after 2035.
The deadline is set. The clock is running.
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