Morning Minute: AI Agents Cut BTC Quantum Attack Benchmark by 86%

By Tyler Warner

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors fall another 1-3% ahead of CPI; BTC at $77k
• BTC ETFs see $280M in outflows and $440M on the week
• Binance’s Bitcoin reserves hit 2-year highs
• Stonkfun ecosystem soars as Stonk hits $0.30 and multiple pairs run 2-4x+
• Robinhood Chain leaders rebound as volumes level off; Flycoin soars to $50M in its debut

🤖 AI Agents Cut the Cost of Cracking Bitcoin’s Cryptography by 86% in Two Months

More than 100 researchers working alongside AI coding agents significantly decreased a benchmark for a key step in a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum from 10.75 billion down to 1.496 billion. That happened between late May and July 26, but the paper landed just this week.

For background, Bitcoin and Ethereum both secure signatures with secp256k1, an elliptic curve. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could reverse that math and derive a private key from a public one. That’s the problem. The competition, called ECDSA.Fail and run by Eigen Labs, scored circuit designs by multiplying logical qubits against Toffoli gates, an expensive quantum operation. A lower score means fewer resources needed. The leading design used 1,151 logical qubits and roughly 1.3 million Toffoli gates, and a later submission pushed gates below a million. That leading score came in at about half of Google Quantum AI’s March benchmark, though the two used different counting methods and don’t compare cleanly.

The paper was authored by researchers from Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs, and the Ethereum Foundation. That’s crypto’s own security establishment funding and publishing work that makes the attack cheaper, on the theory that knowing the real cost is the only way to plan the defense. They call the method Open Autoresearch, humans and AI agents iterating against a shared measurable target with a verifier in the loop.

This lands in the middle of a quantum scramble that’s been building for weeks. The Ethereum Foundation set a hard December 2029 deadline to make transactions, validators, and storage quantum-resistant. StarkWare pushed the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction to mainnet. Ethereum developers proposed rebuilding the validator deposit contract. Ripple is hardening the XRP Ledger. Galaxy committed up to $5 million in July, and nine firms including BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy pledged $15 million over three years. The researchers point to NIST’s draft proposing deprecation of classical public-key algorithms at the 112-bit level after 2030 and disallowing them after 2035.

So where does this leave us? The defense side has a fixed schedule measured in years. The attack side just got 86% cheaper in two months because a hundred people pointed AI agents at it. That’s not a prediction about Q-Day, and no funds are at risk today. But every timeline in this space was built assuming attack research moves at human speed, and this is the first hard evidence it might not.

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are red down 1-4%; BTC -1% at $77k; ETH even at $2,455; SOL -2% at $100; HYPE -4% at $79; ZEC -10% at $1,095
• Top alt movers include RAY (+13%), PONS (+11%) and FF (+5%).
• Oil +2% at $99; Gold -1% at $4,385
• Stock futures are green after oil sold off from highs; DOW +0.6%, Nasdaq +0.6%
• Senate Republicans released a revised 630-page Clarity Act ahead of a September 15 procedural vote, adding CFTC registration for “decentralized-in-name-only” protocols while leaving ethics provisions largely unchanged
• Sam Bankman-Fried petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn his fraud conviction, arguing he was barred from showing customers lost nothing and calling the $11 billion forfeiture an excessive fine
• Brian Armstrong told CNBC that $400,000 Bitcoin by 2030 remains a reasonable target, saying the year-long down cycle has bottomed and expecting SEC and CFTC guidance within weeks
• Binance's Bitcoin reserves topped 693,000 BTC, a two-year high and roughly 30% of major exchange reserves, after about 77,000 BTC moved onto the platform since late April
• Singapore's Alpha Ladder began distributing Payward's xStocks to institutional and accredited investors across selected APAC markets through its WealthX platform, following an MOU with Payward and MetaComp
• Ethereum developers tentatively set the launch date for Glamsterdam for Sepolia on October 6, though the upgrade hasn't run stably on any private devnet and no Hoodi or mainnet dates are fixed

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETFs saw $283M in net outflows on Thursday; the ETH ETFs saw $30M in outflows

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were red; DOGE -2%, SHIB -2%, PEPE -4%, PENGU -3%, TRUMP -2%, SPX -2%
• Robinhood chain leaders rebounded on the day; Pons +10% to $420M; AI +25% at $250M; Cashcat even at $160M; Flybrain +830%, Zforge 100x, Juggernaut +600% and Frong +100% led top movers
• On BSC, Niu Lau jumped 70% to $130M after its Binance spot listing; BREW +100% and Marscoin +20% were other top movers
• Solana top movers were led by Ember +165% and Fone +40%; Ansem -7% at $150M
• The Stonkfun ecosystem soared last night as STONK broke $0.30; Stonk +55% at $270M, ZCAT -7% at $83M, KNOTS +100% at $44M, BTC +94% at $18M and PURR +43% at $13M; LOOP +100x, METH +7x, LMEOW +180% , Stonkcat +7x and JUPCAT +6x led top movers

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Hyperliquid led the onchain protocols with $2.08M in revenue on the day; PUMP was 7th with $1.4M, PONS next with $1.14M and Stonk was 13th with $760k
• Onchain RWA perpetual volume passed $120 billion in August, up from under $1 billion in October 2025, with open interest near $4.9 billion
• Raydium’s RAY token is up 86% this week on the back of its connection with the growing Stonkfun ecosystem

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly flat; Punks even at 30 ETH, BAYC -1% at 6.7 ETH, Pudgy -3% at 3.6 ETH
• Argonauts (+40%) and The 404 Machines (+20%) led top movers

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