Open ECDSA.fail challenge uses AI agents to shrink Shor's-algorithm quantum circuits for Bitcoin keys
StefanoGogioso · x · 2026-09-11
- jieyilong spent three months on ECDSA.fail, an open challenge to optimize the quantum circuit for point-addition on secp256k1 (the elliptic curve behind Bitcoin and Ethereum) using AI agents, now documented in an arXiv paper.
- Point-addition is a key bottleneck in Shor's algorithm for elliptic curves: a sufficiently capable fault-tolerant quantum computer could recover private keys from exposed ECDSA public keys.
- The effort drew collaborators across quantum computing, cryptography, Web3, and systems research; best estimates now beat Litinski, the previous best published circuit construction, advancing the Pareto frontier on the qubit-Toffoli product metric.
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