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Quantum-Safe Bitcoin? StarkWare Has a Plan

Quantum-Safe Bitcoin? StarkWare Has a Plan

Plus: 💸 Trump's WLFI borrows $75M against its own token, trapping Dolomite depositors • ⚖️ Bessent scolds crypto "nihilists" as clarity legislation stalls • 🤖 Covenant AI quits Bittensor, calls it decentralization theatre — TAO drops 15%

Laura Shin
April 10, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

⚛️ A StarkWare researcher published a STARK-proof-based scheme to make Bitcoin quantum-resistant without a soft fork
💸 Trump's WLFI borrowed $75M against its own token on a platform its advisor runs. Dolomite depositors can't easily get out
⚖️ Treasury Secretary Bessent called crypto resisters "nihilists" in a WSJ op-ed as the GENIUS Act stalls in Congress
🤖 One of Bittensor's biggest operators quit and said the whole network is fake decentralization. TAO dropped 15%

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Bitcoin Can Be Quantum-Safe Right Now — For $150 a Transaction

Quantum-proofing your bitcoin used to mean waiting for the community to agree on a protocol upgrade. StarkWare CPO Avihu Levy may have proved it doesn't. His new open-source scheme, called Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB) claims to achieve quantum resistance using only Bitcoin's existing consensus rules — no soft fork, no community coordination required.

The catch: it costs up to $150 per transaction in cloud GPU compute and is framed as an emergency fallback, not everyday infrastructure. The timing is pointed. A Google Quantum AI paper published March 30 found that cracking Bitcoin's elliptic-curve cryptography could require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits — roughly a 20-fold reduction from prior estimates — and that a capable machine could derive a private key in about nine minutes.

QSB is not yet complete — the on-chain broadcast phase remains untested end-to-end — but it demonstrates the protection is achievable today, without waiting years for consensus.

Trump's Crypto Project Used Its Own Token to Borrow $75 Million From an Insider's Protocol

CoinDesk reports that World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-backed crypto venture, has pledged 5 billion WLFI tokens on the Dolomite lending platform to borrow $75 million in stablecoins — draining the protocol's USD1 pool and sending more than $40 million to Coinbase Prime.

The move pushed the utilization rate of Dolomite's USD1 pool to approximately 93%, making it difficult for ordinary depositors to withdraw their funds. The conflict-of-interest dimension makes it worse: Dolomite co-founder Corey Caplan also serves as an advisor to WLFI — a related-party arrangement that in traditional finance would typically require independent approval.

The WLFI token dropped nearly 10% to a record low after the news. Because WLFI trades thinly, any forced liquidation could crash the collateral's value faster than Dolomite can absorb it, potentially leaving depositors holding the bad debt.

Bessent Calls Out Crypto 'Nihilists' as Clarity Act Stalls Again

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is losing patience. Bessent in a Wall Street Journal op-ed called out crypto leaders still resisting the Clarity Act as "nihilists" — industry actors who would rather have no rules than compromise on this one.

The bill remains stuck over two main disputes: stablecoin yield — whether holders can earn interest on their tokens — and President Trump's personal crypto ventures, which several pro-crypto Senate Democrats say must be addressed before they'll vote yes.

With midterms approaching, the window is narrowing and the Senate needs to move the bill to markup now, according to Bessent. The global crypto market has reached $3 trillion and nearly one in six Americans holds digital assets — the stakes for U.S. leadership, he argued, are too high to stall further.

Bittensor's Biggest Builder Quits, Calls the Network 'Decentralization Theatre'

Covenant AI founder Sam Dare has announced his team's exit from Bittensor, accusing network founder Jacob Steeves of maintaining effective unilateral control over what is marketed as a decentralized AI network. "It is decentralization theatre," Dare said.

TAO dropped over 15% — from roughly $337 to $284 — following the announcement. Covenant AI was the team behind the Covenant-72B model, the largest decentralized LLM pre-training effort ever attempted, which had driven TAO's 90% rally in March.

Dare cited two specific grievances: the direct suspension of emissions from Covenant's subnet, and alleged large-scale TAO token sales he characterized as market pressure to force compliance.

⚖️ Binance founder Changpeng Zhao claimed that U.S. crypto competitors paid millions of dollars to block his presidential pardon, though he did not name the firms involved.
🤫 Potential buyers are circling Gemini, the Winklevoss-backed crypto exchange, though no deal has been announced.
⚖️ The fate of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm remains uncertain after Judge Failla said "this is a lot" when describing the complexity of the case, without indicating a clear path forward.
🏛️ The U.S. Treasury will extend to the crypto sector the same hacker threat warnings it currently shares with traditional financial firms, a move to close an intelligence gap in digital asset markets.
🔒 The U.S. Secret Service froze $12 million in cryptocurrency tied to global fraud as part of Operation Atlantic, which disrupted more than $45 million in total crypto fraud schemes.
📈 Strategy's Michael Saylor said bitcoin likely bottomed near $60,000 and dismissed quantum computing as an overblown threat to the network.
📈 Galaxy stock rallied 11% after its annual report showed the core business is profitable, despite a $241 million net loss at the company level.
💸 Binance Wallet rolled out gas-free prediction markets through an integration with Predict.fun, letting users trade on outcomes without paying transaction fees.
🏦 Former SEC director and JPMorgan exec Brett Redfearn joined Securitize as president and a member of its board of directors.
🤖 Polygon, Frax, and Curve launched onchain forex liquidity pools, bringing foreign exchange trading infrastructure to DeFi.

🇯🇵 Japan's parliament approved legislation classifying crypto assets as financial instruments, a significant regulatory shift that brings digital assets under the country's existing financial product framework.
🌐 OKX and HashKey invested in a new Vietnamese crypto exchange as Vietnam prepares to roll out its crypto licensing regime, with the broader push valued at $380 million.
📈 BitMine, the Ethereum treasury firm backed by Tom Lee, uplisted to the NYSE and expanded its share buyback program to $4 billion as it deepens its ETH strategy.

💰 AlphaTON Capital is looking to raise $43 million to bolster the Cocoon AI infrastructure built on Telegram's TON blockchain, in partnership with Vertical Data.
💸 Web3 AI project Oh raised $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Maven11 Capital.

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