The Record for the Cheapest Quantum Attack on Bitcoin's Curve Goes Private, Proved Without Showing the Circuit

doubleAI announced that WarpSpeed, its AI research system, designed a quantum circuit for breaking secp256k1 - the exact curve securing Bitcoin and Ethereum - using 993,181 Toffoli gates on 1,205 logical qubits, a combined spacetime score of 1.20 billion. That is roughly 2.5x more efficient than Google's published benchmark and about 19% ahead of the best entry on the public ECDSA.fail leaderboard, whose own frontier has meanwhile pushed past 50% ahead of Google at 1,154 logical qubits x 1.29 million Toffolis. Citing security concerns, doubleAI did not open-source the circuit: it published a zero-knowledge proof certifying that the design passes the challenge's full validation suite instead.

What was new here was not that software designed the circuit, which is true of the leaderboard entries as well, but that the result was sealed: for the first time the leading design was not public, only attested by cryptography. The algorithmic cost of Q-Day keeps falling on and off the leaderboard, while the coins the attack targets remain unmigrated.

Update, August 22, 2026: the open ECDSA.fail leaderboard overtook this circuit, retaking the frontier at a score of 1.17 billion.