They publish BIP to begin shielding Bitcoin with anti-quantum addresses

BIP-360 was published, a technical proposal that seeks to shield Bitcoin against the threat of quantum computing through a new type of address. The standard, called Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), proposes the creation of SegWit version 2 exits that hide users’ public keys, preventing them from being exposed on the blockchain before being used.

This document was formally incorporated and assigned in the official Bitcoin repository this February 11. The announcement of its publication was made by Mark Erhardt, known as «Murch», an engineer at Localhost Research and official editor of the BIPs. With this step, The work enters the official draft phase, allowing its technical analysis and debate by the Bitcoin Core developer community.

For its part, a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) is a technical document that functions as the standard for introducing changes, new functions or corrections to the protocol. Anyone can propose one, but it must go through a rigorous review and consensus process by the developer community before being considered official.

The central objective of BIP-360 is to neutralize «long exposure» attacks. In current address formats, the visibility of public keys would allow a quantum computer with enough power to derive private keys. P2MR uses hash resiliency so that an attacker has no data to process while funds are at rest. These addresses would use the bc1z prefix and would only reveal the information necessary to validate a transaction once it is issued to the network.

BIP-360 seeks to mitigate the “harvest now, decipher later” strategy (harvest now, decrypt later) by preventing public keys from being permanently recorded and readable on the blockchain. By using the P2MR format, funds remain protected under a hash that is opaque to today’s attackers, preventing them from collecting the data needed today to conduct a quantum computing key recovery attack in the future.

Origin and development of the BIP-360 proposal

This initiative has been in development since December 2024, as reported by NoticiasVE. Led by researchers Hunter Beast, Ethan Heilman and Isabel Foxen Duke. The team has worked on defining an output type that inherits the benefits of Taproot, but eliminating the vulnerability that represents public key exposure for elliptic curve signatures given the advance of advanced computing.

The authors detail that the measure is focused on protecting the long-term storage of funds. Although it does not eliminate the risk of “short exposure”—the interval in which a transaction waits in the mempool to be confirmed—the proposal establishes the structural basis necessary to integrate post-quantum signatures in the future without requiring disruptive changes to the protocol consensus.

The assignment of the BIP number and its inclusion in the GitHub repository this February 11 provides a formal framework for the technical discussion. Your publication does not represent immediate activation nor consensus for its implementation, but the beginning of the standard review and testing process for any change to the Bitcoin software.