BTQ Technologies (Nasdaq: BTQ), a Vancouver-based quantum security company, announced today that it has shipped the first working version of BIP 360—a long-proposed but never-before-implemented Bitcoin security upgrade—on a live test network.
According to the official press release, the company’s Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0 includes the first functional implementation of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360, a security update that was formally accepted into Bitcoin’s proposal repository earlier this year.
The network is already seeing real activity. More than 50 miners have joined, over 100,000 blocks have been mined, and a community of more than 100 developers and cryptographers is actively testing and improving the code.
“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, BTQ’s CEO and Chairman. “Bitcoin Quantum exists to prove that quantum-safe solutions work in practice, not just on paper.”
Full release notes can be viewed here: https://github.com/btq-ag/btq-core/releases/tag/v0.3.0-testnet
Why Quantum Computing Threatens Bitcoin
Here’s the problem in plain terms: Bitcoin transactions rely on a form of math that is essentially impossible for today’s computers to break. But quantum computers, which harness the laws of quantum physics to process information in fundamentally different ways, could eventually crack that math, potentially allowing bad actors to steal funds from exposed wallet addresses.
The specific vulnerability relates to a 2021 Bitcoin upgrade called Taproot. Taproot was a major improvement to Bitcoin’s capabilities, enabling smarter, more flexible transactions. But part of how it works involves briefly exposing a cryptographic public key on the blockchain. In a world with sufficiently powerful quantum computers, that exposure could be enough for an attacker to reverse-engineer someone’s private key—essentially copying their wallet credentials.
BIP 360 fixes this by changing how transactions are structured, removing the step that exposes the public key in the first place. BTQ’s implementation goes further, layering in a new type of quantum-resistant digital signature approved by U.S. standards agency NIST.
That said, BIP 360 is not a complete solution. Christopher Tam, BTQ’s head of innovation, has noted that while the proposal can help secure future transactions, it does not retroactively protect older Bitcoin addresses that may have already exposed public keys over time. Millions of coins sitting in legacy wallets would remain vulnerable regardless of whether BIP 360 is ever adopted.
- Also read: El Salvador Splits National Bitcoin Reserve Across 14 Addresses Amid Quantum Security Concerns
Bitcoin’s Upgrade Problem
The awkward reality is that Bitcoin itself hasn’t moved on this. A 2025 analysis from Chaincode Labs, one of Bitcoin’s most respected research organizations, found that post-quantum efforts within the core ecosystem remained at an early, exploratory stage. That’s not surprising since Bitcoin’s governance model is designed to be conservative and deliberate. SegWit, a major prior upgrade, took roughly 8.5 years from idea to activation. Taproot took about 7.5 years.
That historical pace applied to quantum resistance would push full adoption well into the 2030s—a timeline that makes many security researchers uncomfortable.
BTQ has effectively sidestepped this process entirely by launching its own separate testing network rather than waiting for consensus within the main ecosystem.
But that shortcut comes with real limitations. Bitcoin Quantum does not share Bitcoin’s ledger or balances. It launches from a new genesis block with its own asset and ruleset, meaning users would need to actively opt in rather than automatically inheriting any upgrade. It is rather a parallel experiment, not a change to Bitcoin itself.
Tam framed the deeper obstacle candidly. “It’s a social problem,” he told Decrypt, pointing to the difficulty of coordinating change across a decentralized network with entrenched stakeholders. Getting miners, developers, exchanges, and users to agree on a major security overhaul—especially one that changes how transactions fundamentally work—is a political challenge as much as a technical one.
“The industry can’t afford to treat quantum resistance as a theoretical exercise,” Roussy Newton added. “Every developer, researcher, and institution that wants to understand how quantum-safe Bitcoin actually works now has a live network to test against.”
What BTQ Gets Out of This
BTQ is not purely altruistic here. The company plans to run a Bitcoin Quantum mining pool, taking a 3% fee on block rewards, and projects accumulating approximately 100,000 BTQ tokens in the first year of operation. Longer-term, it envisions revenue from security services, compliance infrastructure, and quantum certification—against a backdrop of tokenized asset markets the company projects will exceed $16 trillion by 2030.
Those projections carry real uncertainty. Whether Bitcoin Quantum ever becomes more than a testing ground depends on adoption dynamics that remain highly speculative.
What BTQ has demonstrated though is that the upgrade can be built, run, and tested today. But the harder problem is convincing a decentralized, consensus-driven network of millions to use it. Whether BTQ’s proof-of-concept accelerates Bitcoin’s own internal deliberations, or simply runs quietly in parallel, may ultimately depend less on engineering and more on the slow, messy work of building human agreement.