BTQ Technologies said its Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 now includes the first working implementation of BIP 360, a proposal designed to make Bitcoin-style transactions more resistant to future quantum attacks. The release matters because it takes a draft idea in Bitcoin’s standards process and turns it into live infrastructure that developers, miners, and researchers can actually use.
BTQ Puts BIP 360 Into a Live Test Environment
BTQ said the new testnet release delivers the first functional implementation of BIP 360, also known as Pay-to-Merkle-Root, after the proposal was merged into Bitcoin’s official BIP repository earlier this year. The company framed the launch as a move from theory to execution, noting that Bitcoin Core itself has not yet advanced toward an implementation. In practice, that gives the broader ecosystem a place to test how quantum-resistant transaction flows might behave before any production-level consensus forms around them.
The company’s release includes full P2MR consensus support, SegWit v2 outputs, bc1z bech32m address encoding, Merkle root commitment verification, and control block validation. BTQ also said all five Dilithium post-quantum signature opcodes are enabled in the P2MR tapscript context, with wallet RPC support allowing users to create, fund, sign, and spend these transactions on testnet now. The validation path runs through address creation, transaction construction, signing, mempool acceptance, broadcast, and confirmation, making the feature set broader than a narrow proof of concept.
CEO Olivier Roussy Newton positioned the rollout as an industry-wide testing tool rather than a closed internal milestone. “BIP 360 represents the Bitcoin community’s most significant step toward quantum resistance and we’ve turned it from a proposal into running code,” he said. “Bitcoin Quantum exists to prove that quantum-safe solutions work in practice, not just on paper. By shipping a full BIP 360 implementation on testnet, we’re giving the entire industry a live environment to validate these critical protections before the quantum threat arrives.”
Bitcoin Quantum Testnet Targets Taproot Risk
The technical case for BIP 360 centers on a specific long-term concern around Taproot. BTQ said Taproot remains essential to Bitcoin’s scaling and programmability roadmap, supporting constructions associated with Lightning, BitVM, and Ark, but its key-path spend mechanism can expose public keys on-chain. In a future where sufficiently capable quantum computers exist, that exposure could make those keys vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm, turning what is currently theoretical into a security issue for advanced Bitcoin usage.
BIP 360 is designed to remove that attack surface without giving up the scripting flexibility Taproot made possible. Instead of relying on an internal key and tweak, P2MR commits directly to the script tree’s Merkle root, preserving script-path functionality while eliminating the key-path spend that creates the quantum exposure. BTQ’s argument is that this gives developers a path to keep the infrastructure needed for next-generation Bitcoin applications while reducing one of the most discussed cryptographic risks around long-term network security.
That message comes with a broader claim about urgency. “The industry can’t afford to treat quantum resistance as a theoretical exercise,” Roussy Newton said. “BIP 360 was a landmark proposal and we’ve turned it into a landmark implementation. Every developer, researcher, and institution that wants to understand how quantum-safe Bitcoin actually works now has a live network to test against.” BTQ tied that urgency to policy timelines, citing an April 2026 deadline for U.S. federal agencies to submit post-quantum transition plans under NSM-10, the EU’s 2030 target for critical infrastructure quantum resistance, and new Canadian procurement requirements taking effect in April 2026.
The testnet itself has also grown beyond an early experiment. BTQ said more than 50 miners have joined the network, over 100,000 blocks have been mined, and the project is now in its fourth testnet iteration. Version 0.3.0 also introduces one-minute target block spacing, a 5 BTQ block subsidy, a 2,100,000-block halving interval, Dilithium signature hardening, tapscript security fixes, and restoration of the SegWit discount to better accommodate larger post-quantum signatures.
The immediate takeaway is not that Bitcoin is about to adopt BIP 360, but that a concrete test bed now exists for one of the more serious post-quantum proposals in the ecosystem. For builders and infrastructure operators, that shifts the conversation from abstract debate to observable behavior, and for BTQ, it creates an early proving ground as post-quantum migration moves closer to an operational requirement.
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