BTQ Technologies Implements BIP 360 Quantum-Resistant Bitcoin Transactions on Testnet

Insider BriefPRESS RELEASE — BTQ Technologies Corp. (“BTQ” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: BTQ) (CBOE CA: BTQ) (FSE: NG3), a global quantum technology company focused on securing mission-critical networks, today 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.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 represents the Bitcoin community’s most significant step toward quantum resistance and we’ve turned it from a proposal into running code,” said Olivier Roussy Newton, CEO and Chairman of BTQ Technologies. “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.”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 today as a functioning environment for real-world experimentation and validation.Bitcoin Quantum’s BIP 360 implementation includes: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.Beyond BIP 360, Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 includes several improvements designed to support continued testing and development of post-quantum Bitcoin infrastructure.These include:Together, these enhancements are intended to make Bitcoin Quantum a more practical and scalable environment for testing quantum-resistant blockchain infrastructure.Full release notes: https://github.com/btq-ag/btq-core/releases/tag/v0.3.0-testnetBitcoin Quantum continues to show measurable progress as a live testing ground for quantum-safe Bitcoin infrastructure. To date: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 NSM-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.Despite BIP 360’s inclusion in Bitcoin’s official proposal repository, broader implementation across the Bitcoin ecosystem remains limited. A May 2025 analysis from Chaincode Labs noted that Bitcoin post-quantum initiatives remained at an early and exploratory stage. More broadly, Bitcoin’s conservative governance culture has historically made major protocol upgrades slow to move from concept to adoption. SegWit took approximately 8.5 years from conception to adoption, while Taproot took approximately 7.5 years.Against that backdrop, Bitcoin Quantum is intended to help close the gap between proposal and practice by providing a fully functional implementation that developers, researchers, and operators can evaluate, test, and iterate on today, without waiting for broader ecosystem consensus.Bitcoin’s governance and development model is intentionally conservative, which can make security upgrades slow to move from proposal to adoption. BTQ’s view is that the industry cannot afford to wait until a crisis point to begin understanding how quantum-safe Bitcoin infrastructure might work in practice.Bitcoin Quantum helps address that gap by providing a fully functioning environment where developers, researchers, and infrastructure operators can test and evaluate quantum-resistant transaction models now.“The industry can’t afford to treat quantum resistance as a theoretical exercise,” concluded Roussy Newton. “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 believes the transition to quantum-safe infrastructure will create opportunities across both blockchain networks and enterprise security environments. In addition to advancing the technical development of Bitcoin Quantum, the Company is building infrastructure intended to support multiple potential commercialization pathways as post-quantum adoption accelerates.BTQ expects to operate a Bitcoin Quantum mining pool, which is designed to generate mining-related revenues while enabling the Company to accumulate and hold Bitcoin Quantum tokens as a strategic treasury asset. BTQ believes this early positioning may allow it to participate directly in the growth of a quantum-safe proof-of-work network as adoption develops.Through its mining pool model, which is expected to apply a 3% fee on block rewards, the Company projects accumulation of approximately 100,000 BTQ tokens during the first twelve months of network operation, excluding any tokens mined directly by the Company. These holdings are expected to be retained on the Company’s balance sheet, with potential uses to be evaluated as the network matures.Beyond network participation, BTQ sees longer-term opportunities to monetize the infrastructure required for post-quantum migration. As quantum-resistant transactions and cryptographic standards become increasingly important for high-value digital assets and mission-critical systems, BTQ believes its platform could support future offerings spanning security-as-a-service models, premium settlement infrastructure, and quantum certification services.BTQ’s strategy is designed to capture value across both enterprise and permissionless markets. On the enterprise side, the Company’s broader Quantum Secure Systems and Networks (QSSN) platform is intended to support managed offerings with the compliance, integration, and service requirements expected by regulated institutions. In parallel, decentralized products such as Bitcoin Quantum provide open infrastructure for developers, miners, and network participants building in public blockchain environments.This dual approach positions BTQ to pursue commercialization opportunities tied both to institutional adoption of quantum-safe systems and to the organic growth of open blockchain networks.Share this article:Keep track of everything going on in the Quantum Technology Market.In one place.