StarkWare’s Ben-Sasson Says ZK STARKs Could Help Bitcoin Scale With Post-Quantum Signatures

StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson said ZK STARK proof aggregation is the most effective way to address scaling problems that could arise if Bitcoin adopts post-quantum signature schemes, arguing it could support mass adoption while preserving decentralization. According to Cointelegraph, Ben-Sasson also claimed Blockstream founder Adam Back agrees with the approach, though Back did not respond to a request for comment. Ben-Sasson, who co-invented STARKs, has drawn attention this week for a separate and controversial suggestion on X to raise Bitcoin inflation to 4% annually, which Grok’s analysis of replies found had “zero clear support.” He said his Starknet project announced a three-phase plan last week to become quantum secure.

The core issue, as described in the report, is that adding zero-knowledge proofs does not itself make Bitcoin quantum safe; rather, ZK proofs could mitigate the blockchain impact of much larger post-quantum signatures. NIST-approved post-quantum signatures are described as 10 to 100 times larger than Bitcoin’s current ECDSA and Schnorr signatures, with some arguing this could reduce throughput to fewer than 1 transaction per second. Ben-Sasson said aggregating a block’s large signatures into a small ZK STARK proof could compress data enough that Bitcoin might even run faster than if it included current signatures directly, adding that simply increasing block size would not be sufficient. Marin Ivezic of Applied Quantum said SegWit can reduce the impact of large signatures by up to 75%, but modeling of NIST’s ML-DSA-44 at 2,420 bytes per signature could cut block capacity to roughly 500 to 700 transactions from 2,500 to 3,000, reviving block-size debates that previously split the community in 2017.

The article also cited Blockstream Research experiments to compress hash-based post-quantum signatures, including SHRINCS and SHRIMPS, with “everyday” signatures around five times larger than current ones but up to 40 times larger in wallet recovery scenarios. SHRINCS has signed real transactions on the Liquid sidechain, though development is early and complexity and usability remain concerns; larger signatures could still slow Bitcoin unless block size increases. Ben-Sasson said early Bitcoin developers such as Greg Maxwell and Mike Hearn were positive on ZK STARKs, and he believes Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr and Back are warming to the idea. The report outlined Bitcoin-focused paths such as re-enabling OP_CAT, as well as more speculative proposals like OP_STARK_VERIFY and Ethan Heilman’s BitZip concept for aggregating signatures and public keys into a single STARK proof.

Ivezic said governance, not cryptography, is the main obstacle, noting Bitcoin Script cannot verify a STARK today and that a production verifier would expand the consensus attack surface compared with narrower changes. He said that given OP_CAT’s long debate, a base-layer STARK verifier is more realistically a “2030s conversation.” The report added that Ethereum targets 2029 for a post-quantum transition and that Solana has been experimenting with post-quantum signatures, while Ben-Sasson argued Starknet’s account abstraction could make its own transition easier than those networks’ roadmaps.