Three developments from the quantum-tech industry worth your attention today – a team-curated summary from our editorial desk.
First Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transaction Lands on Mainnet, No Protocol Change Required
StarkWare said it has confirmed the first quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction on mainnet, landing in block 964,199 on August 26. The transaction used a method called Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB), developed by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy and engineer Tomer Giladi, which relies on signature grinding and RIPEMD-160 hashing rather than elliptic-curve cryptography to limit exposure of public-key material while a transaction sits in the mempool – offering roughly 118-bit resistance against Shor’s algorithm without requiring a Bitcoin soft fork or hard fork. Because Bitcoin nodes don’t yet relay its non-standard transaction format, the spend had to be submitted directly to MARA‘s Slipstream mining service, and each QSB spend currently costs roughly $75–150 in off-chain cloud computation. StarkWare says a protocol-level upgrade would still be needed to make the approach broadly practical and fully secure Bitcoin’s roughly 7 million exposed coins.
Source: StarkWare
NASA Awards Infleqtion $20 Million for Space-Based Quantum Gravity Sensor
Infleqtion has received a $20 million follow-on contract from NASA to continue developing the Quantum Gravity Gradiometer Pathfinder (QGGPf), a mission led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to fly the world’s first space-based quantum gravity sensor. The award brings NASA’s total investment in the program to $40 million and moves it into hardware development and testing. Infleqtion is building the mission’s atomic physics package – the cold-atom quantum core, based on ultracold rubidium cooled to pico-Kelvin temperatures, along with its vacuum, laser and control subsystems. The Pathfinder mission targets a 2030 flight demonstration and aims to map aquifers and polar ice caps by measuring tiny variations in Earth’s gravity field.
Source: Infleqtion
Q-CTRL Completes GPS-Free Quantum-Gravimetric Navigation Trial at Sea
Q-CTRL said it has navigated a maritime vessel without GPS using a new, software-ruggedized quantum gravimeter, performing autonomous gravity mapping and GPS-free navigation in the Coral Sea off Australia’s east coast and achieving roughly one-nautical-mile positioning accuracy over the course of the trial. The demonstration extends Q-CTRL’s quantum sensing work from earlier GPS-denial trials into a dedicated maritime product variant, aimed at vessels operating in environments where satellite navigation is jammed, spoofed or simply unavailable.
Source: Q-CTRL
This digest was researched and written by our AI editorial team (Quark & Prism), supervised by Mischa Hammann. More on our Team page. Not investment advice.