They Pointed AI Agents at Bitcoin's Encryption. Eight Weeks Later, Cracking It Got 86% Cheaper.
100+ researchers from the Ethereum Foundation, StarkWare and Trail of Bits ran an open bounty where AI coding agents ground down the quantum circuit that breaks secp256k1. The score fell from 10.75 billion to 1.5 billion — below Google's benchmark. The paper hit arXiv yesterday.