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ECDSA.fail

What would it take to break Bitcoin's signatures with a quantum computer?

No quantum computer can run this attack today. The best-scoring circuit on the point-addition leaderboard uses 1,234 logical qubits and 741,629 Toffoli gates.

logical qubits error-corrected qubits
1,234
Toffoli gates the main measure of quantum work
741.63K
lower resource score than the current challenge baseline
91.5%

Leaderboard data checked 27 Oct 2026. Figures refresh automatically on visits, about every 15 minutes.

How estimates have fallen

Resources for the attack's core step

Score = logical qubits × Toffoli gates, in billions.

Dashed line: Google published upper thresholds · about 2.99B
  1. ECDSA.fail starting circuit30 May 2026
    10.75B
  2. Google Quantum AIMar 2026
    2.99B
  3. Schrottenloher · open designJun 2026
    3.01B
  4. ECDSA.fail best at cutoff26 Jul 2026
    1.496B
  5. ECDSA.fail after cutoffReported Sep 2026
    1.259B
  6. Current ECDSA.fail record27 Oct 2026
    0.915B
View resource estimates and accounting
Historical paper operating points and current leaderboard record
DateCircuitLogical qubitsToffoli gatesQ × T score
30 May 2026ECDSA.fail starting circuit2,7153,960,75310.75B
Mar 2026Google Quantum AIup to 1,425up to 2.1M2.99B
Jun 2026Schrottenloher · open design1,4622.06M3.01B
26 Jul 2026ECDSA.fail best at cutoff1,1511,299,4531.496B
Reported Sep 2026ECDSA.fail after cutoff1,321about 953,0001.259B
27 Oct 2026Current ECDSA.fail record1,234741,6290.915B

What the estimate covers

Point addition inside Shor's algorithm

Public keyvisible on-chain

Shor's algorithm on secp256k1

  1. Repeated lookup, point addition and unlookupECDSA.fail benchmarks the point-addition part.
  2. Quantum Fourier transform
  3. Measurement and classical post-processing
Private keyrecovered
Schematic based on arXiv 2609.09582, Sections 2 and 6.

Paper and contributors

First page of the paper ECDSA.Fail: Open Autoresearch for Optimizing Elliptic-Curve Point Addition in Shor's Algorithm, with its authors and affiliations

ECDSA.Fail: Open Autoresearch for Optimizing Elliptic-Curve Point Addition in Shor's Algorithm

arXiv 2609.09582 · 9 Sep 2026

Eigen Labs launched ECDSA.fail as an open competition, and more than 100 people took part, alongside AI agents. Four StarkWare researchers and three Starknet Foundation researchers co-authored the resulting paper.

Read the paper on arXiv

Sources

Leaderboard checked 27 Oct 2026. The figures cover one benchmarked step of Shor's algorithm, point addition, not a complete attack. Outside this estimate: error correction, physical hardware, circuit depth and parallelism, and a complete working attack. Sources count resources a little differently, so compare the bars roughly; the paper's historical baseline differs slightly from the live challenge baseline.

Research