BTQ Unveils First Bitcoin Upgrade Testnet Designed To Thwart Quantum Attacks

BTQ Technologies moved a key Bitcoin (BTC) security proposal from theory to practice on Thursday, releasing Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 with the first working implementation of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 (BIP 360). 

The upgrade—aimed at making Bitcoin transactions resistant to future quantum-computing attacks—gives developers, miners, and researchers a live environment to test how quantum-resistant transactions would function on a running network.

How Bitcoin Could Shield Keys From Quantum Attacks

BIP 360, also known as Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), was merged into Bitcoin’s official BIP repository earlier this year but remains a draft proposal within the broader Bitcoin ecosystem. 

BTQ’s testnet release delivers the first functional implementation of that proposal, enabling participants to create, fund, sign, and spend P2MR transactions and observe the full lifecycle from mempool acceptance through broadcast and confirmation. 

The importance of BIP 360 stems from a long‑term cryptographic risk: in a future where quantum computers reach sufficient capability, exposed public keys on-chain—an outcome of Taproot’s key-path spend design—could be vulnerable to attacks leveraging Shor’s algorithm. 

Taproot, activated on Bitcoin back in 2021, underpins many advanced features and scaling efforts for the protocol, but its reliance on on-chain public keys creates a potential attack surface in a quantum-enabled world. 

P2MR addresses this by committing directly to the Merkle root of a script tree rather than relying on an internal key or tweak, preserving Taproot’s scripting flexibility while removing the key-path mechanism that could expose public keys.

Devs Can Now Test Quantum‑Safe BTC Transactions

BTQ’s Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 implements full P2MR consensus rules, including SegWit version 2 outputs with bc1z (bech32m) address encoding, Merkle root commitment verification, and control block validation. 

The release also enables all five Dilithium post‑quantum signature opcodes within the P2MR tapscript context, providing real quantum-resistant signature verification inside the script tree. 

To support developer workflows, BTQ included end-to-end command-line wallet tooling and full RPC wallet support so users can perform the complete P2MR transaction flow on testnet.

Olivier Roussy Newton, BTQ’s CEO and chairman, framed the launch as a practical advance for industry preparedness. “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. 

The company further said the testnet’s live validation—covering address creation, funding, transaction construction, signing, mempool acceptance, broadcast, and confirmation—gives implementers and auditors the chance to observe how P2MR operates end to end. 

It also signaled that BIP 360’s implementation is network-activated across Bitcoin Quantum’s testing environments, ensuring the feature is available to anyone participating in the testnet.

However, the firm warned that waiting until a quantum-capable adversary emerges would be risky, and urged the industry to move beyond purely theoretical discussion. “The industry can’t afford to treat quantum resistance as a theoretical exercise,” Newton said, adding: 

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.

At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $69,534, having recorded losses of 3% in the past 24 hours after testing the $76,000 resistance wall earlier this week. 

Featured image from OpenArt, chart from TradingView.com