Jieyi Long and over 100 participants collaborated on an open challenge to optimize quantum circuits for point-addition on secp256k1, the elliptic curve used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The effort produced a circuit with a Q x T score 50% lower than Google Quantum AI's March 2026 result, addressing the potential threat of Shor's algorithm being used to compromise ECDSA private keys. The initiative demonstrated the effectiveness of the Open Autoresearch paradigm, combining human researchers and AI agents in a public leaderboard-based optimization framework.
IonQ published a resource estimate showing that a trapped-ion quantum computer with approximately 20,000 physical qubits could break the secp256k1 elliptic curve used by Bitcoin and Ethereum in about 26 days per attempt using Shor's algorithm. The paper details optimizations to the logical circuit design and physical device architecture, achieving significantly lower qubit requirements than previous estimates for the same cryptographic attack.