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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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