BTQ Unveils First Bitcoin Development Testnet Designed to Prevent Quantum Attacks
BTQ Technologies moved a key security proposal for Bitcoin (BTC) from theory to practice on Thursday, releasing the Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 with the first implementation of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 (BIP 360).
The development—which aims to make Bitcoin transactions resistant to future quantum-computing attacks—provides developers, miners, and researchers with a living environment to test how quantum-resistant transactions can work on a functional network.
How Bitcoin Can Protect Keys From Quantum Attacks
BIP 360, also known as Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), was merged with Bitcoin’s official BIP repository earlier this year but remains a draft proposal within the wider Bitcoin ecosystem.
BTQ data testnet release delivers the first operational implementation of that proposal, allowing participants to create, fund, sign, and use P2MR transactions and oversee the full lifecycle from mempool adoption through distribution and validation.
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The importance of BIP 360 comes from a long-term cryptographic risk: in the future when quantum computers reach enough power, the exposed public keys in the chain—the result of the Taproot key-disposal project—could be vulnerable to attacks using Shor’s algorithm.
Taproot, which was activated on Bitcoin back in 2021, supports many advanced features and scaling efforts of the protocol, but its reliability 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 the script tree rather than relying on an internal key or tweak, retaining the flexibility of Taproot’s scripting while removing the key mechanism that would expose public keys.
Devs Can Now Test Quantum‑Safe BTC Transactions
The BTQ Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 uses the full P2MR consensus rules, including the release of SegWit version 2 with bc1z (bech32m) encoding, Merkle root verification, and control. block verification.
The release also enables all five Dilithium post-quantum signature opcodes within the P2MR tapscript context, providing true quantum-insensitive signature verification within the script tree.
To support the developer’s workflow, BTQ has included a command-line wallet tool with full RPC wallet support so users can create a complete P2MR transaction flow on the testnet.
BTQ And CEO Warnings
Olivier Rousy Newton, CEO and chairman of BTQ, framed the launch as a practical development of industry readiness. “BIP 360 represents the Bitcoin community’s most important step towards quantum resistance, and we’ve turned it from an application into a working code,” he said.
The company also said that the testnet’s live verification—including address generation, funding, transaction creationsigning, mempool acceptance, streaming, and authentication—gives implementers and auditors an opportunity to see how P2MR works end-to-end.
It also showed that the BIP 360 implementation is active on the network in all Bitcoin Quantum testbeds, confirming that the feature is available to anyone participating in the testnet.
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However, the company warned that waiting until a a powerful quantum enemy The implications can be dangerous, and he urged the industry to go beyond mere theoretical discussion. “The industry cannot treat quantum resistance as a theoretical exercise,” Newton said, adding:
BIP 360 was a landmark proposal, and we have turned it into a landmark implementation. Every developer, researcher, and institution that wants to understand how a truly secure Bitcoin works now has a live network to experiment with.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $69,534, recording a 3% loss in the last 24 hours after testing the $76,000 resistance wall earlier this week.
Featured image from OpenArt, chart from TradingView.com
