Side-Eye Signals

AI x Crypto

AI Agents Cut Bitcoin's Quantum Bill 86%

5 min read

AI agents slashed Bitcoin's quantum attack benchmark 86%, while TRM says agent commerce on x402 is mostly scripts. Plus: Amodei's slowdown call sinks chips.

  • AI x Crypto
  • AI Agents
  • Markets
  • Infrastructure
AI Agents Cut Bitcoin's Quantum Bill 86%

The Quantum Bill Just Got 86% Cheaper

More than 100 researchers working alongside AI coding agents cut a key resource benchmark for a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum by 86%, from 10.75 billion down to about 1.496 billion, per a paper reported by Decrypt, Unchained, and The Block. The leading circuit needs 1,151 logical qubits and roughly 1.30 million Toffoli gates.

The competition, ECDSA.Fail, was launched by Eigen Labs in late May, and the paper's authors span Eigen Labs, Trail of Bits, StarkWare, Theta Labs, MultiVM Labs, and the Ethereum Foundation. The target is secp256k1, the elliptic curve both networks use for signatures.

  • The score is qubits multiplied by Toffoli gates, so lower is better.
  • The result is more than 50% below Google Quantum AI's March figure, though Theta CTO Jieyi Long cautioned the two used different interfaces and accounting conventions and don't compare cleanly.
  • A later submission pushed the gate count below one million after the paper's July 26 cutoff.
  • The tests verified the circuit's calculations. They did not crack a private key, and the authors stress this is not an attack.

"The quantum threat no longer depends only on hardware challenges alone," StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said on X, per Unchained. "AI agents are narrowing the gap to a quantum attack." That's the sentence to sit with: crypto's own security establishment funded and published work that makes the attack cheaper, on the theory that knowing the real cost is the only way to plan the defense. Charming.

Agent Commerce: Mostly Scripts in a Trench Coat

TRM Labs examined $52.7 million across 198.9 million x402 settlements on Base, Solana, and Polygon since May 2025. After stripping self-payments and anomalous flows, it was left with $25.62 million in likely commerce. Under its models, AI agents accounted for just 0.6%–7.5% of that by value — and TRM admits it can't conclusively distinguish agents from scripts.

  • A true agent, the report reasons, explores multiple services; an address repeating the same price looks more like a script hitting one endpoint.
  • That's a deliberate modeling choice, and TRM concedes it may understate the space, since many agents today could be single-purpose.
  • x402, launched by Coinbase in 2025, works fine for ordinary scripts, scheduled jobs, and load tests, all of which leave the same blockchain records.

So the agentic-payments narrative is running well ahead of the receipts. Not zero, but not the autonomous economy either.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure keeps landing. Bankless reported that Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter for more than $8 billion, AWS made AgentCore Payments generally available, and Ramp launched an alpha for agents to make x402 payments with corporate spend controls and audit trails. Coinbase's term for all of it: AiFi.

Arthur Hayes: Agent Commerce or Bust

Arthur Hayes, whose Flop network would charge AI agents for inference under a model it calls proof of useful inference, said the token will be worth little more than a compute spot market until agents actually trade with each other, per Unchained.

  • "We're not gonna achieve any sort of meaningful valuation for the token itself above just operating a really cool spot market for compute unless we have agentic commerce that's native to the Flop network," Hayes said.
  • Asked how Flop handles disagreeing agents, he said the team "haven't thought about that too deeply" and that an adjudication layer is "absolutely going to be needed."
  • Flop's spec sets a genesis airdrop of 3.5 billion FLOP, or 20.4% of supply at year 10, with a testnet planned for Q4 2026 and mainnet in Q1 2027. The document is version 0.1 and its figures are provisional.

Also in agent tooling: Olas co-founder David Minarsch told Unchained the project has facilitated over 14 million transactions between AI agents and is launching self-custodial prediction-market trading agents, with plans to land on Robinhood in the coming weeks.

AI Asks Everyone to Slow Down

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for frontier AI development to be "paced," warning that AI capabilities are advancing faster than the industry's ability to understand and control them. OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk both publicly agreed.

The market read it as bad news for chips. Nvidia fell as much as 3%, Intel dropped more than 5%, AMD sank about 6%, Marvell lost as much as 7.5%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index sank almost 6% on Monday, per Decrypt.

Bitcoin moved the other way, climbing as high as $78,280, up nearly 2% since midnight UTC. Whether that's a rotation, or just the CLARITY Act getting a second life, is anyone's guess.

Also Worth Side-Eye

  • CLARITY Act: Senate Republicans released a 635-page revised text with new ethics provisions President Trump reportedly agreed to, ahead of a Tuesday cloture vote. Polymarket odds of the bill becoming law this year sat at 24%, per CoinTelegraph, while Decrypt reported odds of passage jumping to 31% overnight.
  • CoinEx is shutting down after nine years, citing a prolonged downturn and compliance costs, with users given until December 22, 2026 to withdraw and CET repurchased at 0.005 USDT, per Unchained.
  • VVV jumped 34% to $24.77 on a spike in volume after a public dispute between an NYU mathematician and OpenAI over credit for fluid dynamics proofs — a fight nobody has shown involved actual data misuse, but plenty found plausible. Decrypt notes Venice's pitch is private inference, with VVV staked for a share of daily API capacity.
  • Hunter Biden's LAPTOP peaked at $190.81 two minutes after launch and fell roughly 99% within hours, per Decrypt. The airdrop designed to compensate wallets underwater on TRUMP spent its first day manufacturing a fresh set of them.

Closing Take

AI agents are genuinely getting better at the scary math — kernel design, vulnerability discovery, and now shaving 86% off a quantum attack's resource bill. They are also, apparently, not yet doing much shopping. The gap between what agents can do to cryptography and what they can do with a wallet is the whole story here, and right now the second number is somewhere between 0.6% and 7.5%.

Not financial advice. Do your own research.

Social Pulse

Mood soured fast as CLARITY Act optimism faded and Bitcoin slipped below $76,000, per @coingecko. ETF flows painted a mixed picture, with @lookonchain flagging a positive one-day Bitcoin ETF print against a still-negative seven-day trend.

  • @coingecko — @coingecko attributes Bitcoin's drop below $76,000 to fading optimism around the CLARITY Act ahead of the Senate vote. (source)
  • @lookonchain — @lookonchain reports Bitcoin ETFs at +1,917 BTC (+$147.42M) on the day but -4,372 BTC (-$336.16M) over seven days, while Ethereum ETFs sit positive on both windows. (source)