Major Revision to BIP 360 Introduces a New Output Type to Mitigate Quantum Threats
In a collaborative effort to proactively address potential threats from quantum computing and strengthen Bitcoin’s security, Hunter Beast (cryptoquick), Ethan Heilman, Isabel Foxen Duke, and other contributors have made significant revisions to BIP 360. The update introduces a new output type Pay-to-Tapscript-Hash (P2TSH), designed to mitigate potential risks to elliptic curve cryptography without immediately adopting post-quantum signature schemes.
The revision focuses on improving Bitcoin’s resilience to quantum-related risks and outlines a strategy that avoids premature migration to post-quantum cryptography. The proposal also includes Python and Rust test vectors to facilitate understanding, verification, and participation from the developer community.
A Minimal New Introspection Primitive as a Potentially Simple Quantum-Safe Upgrade
Erik Aronesty has proposed a quantum-resistance mechanism grounded in economic assumptions and on-chain data. The proposal introduces a minimal new introspection primitive to enhance Bitcoin’s security without requiring a comprehensive redesign of Bitcoin Script. This design enables quantum migration without changing address formats, inflating transaction sizes, or introducing fragile cryptographic assumptions.
The mechanism follows a commit–challenge–response framework: a transaction must satisfy both a traditional signature check and a delayed, chain-conditioned hash-based proof. This reflects a conservative approach to achieving quantum resistance without major infrastructure changes.
A Standardized and Extensible P2P Feature Negotiation Mechanism
Anthony Towns has published a BIP on peer feature negotiation, proposing a standardized and extensible mechanism for P2P message. The goal is to simplify the introduction of new features into the Bitcoin P2P protocol without coordinated protocol version bumps or network splits caused by message incompatibility.
The core of the proposal is a new P2P message type, feature (for protocol versions ≥ 70017). The feature message is explicitly designed to be sent only during the initial handshake, between version and verack, enabling flexible feature deployment and versioning without increasing the protocol version number. Nodes implementing this proposal are required to ignore unknown feature messages, ensuring backward compatibility.
Bitcoin Optech’s 2025 Year-in-Review Special
Bitcoin Optech has published its 2025 Year-in-Review, summarizing major technical developments and discussions across the Bitcoin ecosystem over the past year, including:
1. Core Protocol and Research Progress
Privacy and signature technologies: Updates to the ChillDKG draft (a distributed key generation protocol for FROST threshold signatures); discussions on DahLIAS interactive aggregate signatures.
Network relay and performance: Continued progress on Erlay integration in Bitcoin Core; research into improving Compact Block reconstruction efficiency; analysis of network partition attacks via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) interception and potential defenses.
Mempool management: Focus on the development of Cluster Mempool to improve miners’ transaction selection logic and addressing complex dependency handling.
2. Lightning Network and Layer-2
Channel management: Introduction of ephemeral anchor outputs based on TRUC (Topologically Restricted Unexpected Confirmations) to improve fee bumping.
Channel jamming mitigation: Proposals using upfront fees and hold fees to mitigate channel jamming attacks.
DLC optimizations: Proposals for off-chain DLCs (Discreet Log Contracts), enabling cooperative contract updates without frequent on-chain interaction.
3. Vulnerability Disclosures
More than a dozen vulnerabilities were disclosed in 2025, including:
LDK and LND: Multiple vulnerabilities related to HTLCs and forced channel closures, some of which could result in funds being stuck or lost.
Privacy issues: De-anonymization weaknesses identified in wallets such as Wasabi and Ginger that rely on centralized CoinJoin protocols.
Bitcoin Core: Fixes for several low-severity vulnerabilities.
4. Soft Fork Proposals
Transaction templates: In-depth discussion of CTV (BIP119), CSFS (BIP348), and LNHANCE, aimed at enabling advanced features such as vaults and LN-Symmetry.
Consensus cleanup: The release of BIP54 to address legacy consensus edge cases.
Opcode proposals: Introduction of OP_CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY (BIP443), viewed as a more general alternative to the earlier OP_VAULT proposal.
5. Infrastructure Updates
Stratum v2: Significant progress on the next-generation mining pool protocol. Bitcoin Core 30.0 added experimental support for its IPC interface, enhancing miner decentralization in transaction selection.
Other major infrastructure projects: BDK (Bitcoin Dev Kit) released v1.0.0; LDK added support for BIP353 (human-readable addresses).
6. Miscellaneous
Simplicity language: Russell O’Connor provided in-depth insights into the design philosophy of this smart contract language.
SwiftSync: A technique that significantly improves initial block download speed.
Taproot Assets v0.7: Static Reusable Addresses, Auditable Supply, and Optimized Large Lightning Payments
Taproot Assets, the first multi-asset Lightning protocol on Bitcoin mainnet, has released v0.7. This release focuses on simplifying real-world flows like on-chain sends and receives for users, hardening supply-proof infrastructure, and smoothing price-quote negotiation across multiple peers. Key features include:
Static, reusable addresses: With AddressV2, addresses can continuously receive a specific asset without generating a new address for each payment, while preserving fungibility across asset batches.
Fully auditable circulating supply: New grouped asset supply commitments enable on-chain verification of minting and burning history, allowing users, explorers, and third parties to independently audit total supply.
Larger, more reliable Lightning transfers: Support for Multi-RFQ Send aggregates liquidity across multiple channels, improving the success rate and speed of large asset payments.
The Cardano ecosystem recently hosted the inaugural UPLC Programming Language Conference 2025 and published a conference recap. The event focused on the evolution of Cardano programming languages, smart contract optimization, and new formal verification tools. The conference also explored new tools such as a Jai-to-UPLC compiler, the UPLC-CAPE benchmarking framework, zk-SNARK integrations, and the roadmap for Plutus V4.
BOB Reduces BitVM3 On-Chain Costs to Roughly $10
BOB has implemented a cut-and-choose mechanism (a cryptographic technique for verifying honesty in garbled circuits) for BitVM3, combined with Verifiable Secret Sharing Schemes and adaptor signatures, and has submitted transactions to Bitcoin mainnet for the first time.
As a result, the cost of assertion transactions was reduced by approximately 87% compared to previous implementations using SP1 soldering methods. Further improvements are expected, though at the expense of increased precomputation time and storage requirements.
This paper presents a hardware benchmark study implementing and synthesizing Verilog HDL designs for SLH-DSA and a range of classical digital signature schemes (RSA, DSA, ECDSA, EdDSA) on a unified Xilinx FPGA platform.
The analysis shows that SLH-DSA has higher logic and memory requirements, significantly longer signing latency and larger signature sizes, but competitive verification performance. Based on mature hash-function security assumptions, the study concludes that despite its higher computational cost, SLH-DSA’s architecture and strong security model make it a viable specialized option for applications where long-term security is prioritized over signing speed.
