Bitcoin Developers Advance BIP360 Quantum-Resistance Proposal With Testnet Deployment
Bitcoin developers merged the BIP-360 Pay-to-Merkle-Root draft into the bitcoin/bips repository on Feb. 11, marking early work on a proposal intended to improve quantum resistance in Bitcoin’s transaction design.
Bitcoin developers advanced BIP-360 Pay-to-Merkle-Root, an early quantum-resistance proposal, by merging the draft into the bitcoin/bips repository on Feb. 11. The proposal would remove Taproot key-path spend in favor of outputs based on a script-tree Merkle root. This update adds technical detail to ongoing work exploring how Bitcoin could adapt its transaction architecture to address potential long-term quantum computing risks. Existing reporting had also noted a related testnet deployment, indicating the work remains in an early development stage rather than a production rollout.
- BIP-360: A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal focused on Pay-to-Merkle-Root, an early design intended to strengthen Bitcoin against potential quantum-computing threats.
- Pay-to-Merkle-Root: A proposed Bitcoin output structure that uses a script-tree Merkle root to define spending conditions instead of relying on Taproot key-path spending.
- Taproot key-path spend: A Taproot spending method that allows coins to be spent with a single signature path; BIP-360 proposes removing this path in the new design.