ECDSA.fail: A Public Leaderboard, With AI in the Race, Is Shrinking the Quantum Attack on Bitcoin's Curve

Eigen Labs launched ECDSA.fail, an open challenge asking one question: can you break ECDSA? Researchers, and increasingly AI research agents, compete to shrink the quantum circuit for attacking secp256k1, the exact curve securing Bitcoin and Ethereum, scored by the product of logical qubits and Toffoli gates against Google's benchmark circuit. Submissions are automatically verified, and the crowd pulled far ahead of Google's construction: by late June the leading circuit was down to roughly 1,152 logical qubits and about 1.32 million Toffoli gates, some 49% leaner than Google's benchmark on the combined qubit-Toffoli metric, with dozens of compounding micro-optimizations rolling in. Analysts tracking the challenge note the leading qubit constant has fallen from roughly 9n toward 4.355n.

This is a benchmark, not a live exploit: no hardware exists to run these circuits today. But it makes the trend measurable in public, in real time. The algorithmic cost of Q-Day is a falling number on a leaderboard, being pushed down by open competition and AI, while the hardware curve rises to meet it. Only the hardware side of the equation still protects unmigrated coins.