Aankondiging • Mar 19
BTQ Technologies Corp. Announces First Deployment of BIP 360 On Bitcoin Quantum Testnet
BTQ Technologies Corp. announced that Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 includes the first working implementation of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 360, the quantum-resistant Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) output type that was merged into Bitcoin's official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository earlier this year. The Bitcoin Quantum testnet provides developers, miners, and researchers with a live environment to evaluate how quantum-resistant Bitcoin transactions function. BIP 360's P2MR output type preserves the scripting capabilities that power Lightning, BitVM, and Ark while eliminating the key-path spend that exposes public keys to quantum attack via Shor's algorithm. Complete wallet RPC support enables users to create, fund, sign, and spend P2MR transactions on testnet, moving BIP 360 from proposal to usable, testable infrastructure. Bitcoin Quantum now serves as a live environment for testing post-quantum Bitcoin infrastructure, with 50+ miners, more than 100,000 blocks mined, and an active open-source contributor community. BTQ expects to operate a Bitcoin Quantum mining pool with a 3% fee on all block rewards and projects accumulation of approximately 100,000 BTQ tokens in the first 12 months of network operation, while building future monetization pathways across security-as-a-service, premium settlement infrastructure, and quantum certification as tokenized assets are projected to exceed $16 trillion by 2030. While BIP 360 remains a draft proposal within the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, BTQ has already built, tested, and activated the upgrade on the Bitcoin Quantum testnet, providing developers, miners, and researchers with a live environment to evaluate how quantum-resistant Bitcoin transactions function in practice. With this release, BTQ has moved BIP 360 from concept into usable, testable infrastructure. BIP 360 addresses one of the most important long-term security questions facing Bitcoin. Taproot, activated on Bitcoin in 2021, is foundational to Bitcoin's scaling and programmability roadmap. It underpins advanced functionality used by innovations such as Lightning, BitVM, and Ark, and is widely regarded as critical infrastructure for Bitcoin's future evolution. However, Taproot's design includes a key-path spend mechanism that can expose public keys on-chain. In a future with sufficiently powerful quantum computers, exposed public keys could become vulnerable to attack via Shor's algorithm. BIP 360 addresses that risk by introducing Pay-to-Merkle-Root, a new output type that commits directly to the script tree's Merkle root without relying on an internal key or tweak. This preserves Taproot's scripting capabilities while eliminating the key-path spend that creates quantum vulnerability. In practical terms, BIP 360 offers a path to preserving the functionality that powers Bitcoin's next generation of applications while reducing one of its most important long-term cryptographic risks. Although BIP 360 has now entered Bitcoin's formal proposal process, implementation across the broader ecosystem has not yet advanced. BTQ has gone ahead and implemented the upgrade in Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0, making it available as a functioning environment for real-world experimentation and validation. Bitcoin Quantum's BIP 360 implementation includes: Full P2MR consensus: SegWit version 2 outputs with bc1z address encoding (bech32m), Merkle root commitment verification, and control block validation; All five Dilithium post-quantum signature opcodes enabled in P2MR tapscript context, providing real quantum-resistant signature verification inside the script tree; End-to-end CLI wallet tooling: Complete wallet RPC support enables users to create, fund, sign, and spend P2MR transactions on testnet; Live, testable infrastructure: The release includes functional validation across address creation, funding, transaction construction, signing, mempool acceptance, broadcast, and confirmation; Network activation: BIP 360 functionality has been activated across Bitcoin Quantum's testing environments. This release moves BIP 360 beyond a technical proposal and into a practical environment where the broader ecosystem can observe how a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction model operates. Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 includes several improvements designed to support continued testing and development of post-quantum Bitcoin infrastructure. These include: Optimized block cadence with one-minute target block spacing to support faster iteration and testing; Refined emission schedule with a 5 BTQ block subsidy and 2,100,000-block halving interval to maintain Bitcoin-like monetary behavior; Dilithium signature hardening through improved sigop counting and tapscript security fixes; SegWit discount restored, which is especially important for post-quantum signature schemes, because these signatures are substantially larger than traditional Bitcoin signatures. Together, these enhancements are intended to make Bitcoin Quantum a more practical and scalable environment for testing quantum-resistant blockchain infrastructure. Bitcoin Quantum continues to show measurable progress as a live testing ground for quantum-safe Bitcoin infrastructure. More than 50 miners have joined the network, demonstrating operators' willingness to run post-quantum Bitcoin infrastructure. More than 100,000 blocks have been mined. The project has now advanced into its fourth testnet iteration, with each release incorporating lessons learned from prior versions. The network has also attracted an active open-source contributor community of more than 100 cryptographers, developers, and miners working to validate and improve the protocol. This traction reinforces BTQ's broader strategy of building practical infrastructure that allows quantum-safe blockchain systems to be tested before migration becomes mandatory. The release of testnet v0.3.0 comes as governments and critical infrastructure stakeholders accelerate planning around post-quantum migration. U.S. federal agencies face an April 2026 deadline to submit post-quantum cryptography transition plans under NS M-10. In Europe, the European Union has set a target for critical infrastructure quantum-resistance by 2030. In Canada, new federal procurement requirements aligned with post-quantum cryptography take effect in April 2026. These developments reflect a broader shift: post-quantum cryptography is no longer a distant research topic. It is increasingly becoming an operational and policy priority across public-sector and mission-critical systems.