BIP110 Soft Fork Progress: ~4.7 % Node Support, Mining Pools Absent
BIP110 was proposed in early December 2025, introducing a temporary, consensus-level limit on the amount of data transmitted in transactions, aimed at mitigating spam. According to data from BitcoinPortal, as of January 30, 1097 out of 23217 Bitcoin nodes (~4.7%) signal support for the BIP110-based soft fork. Support is limited to Bitcoin Knots nodes, with no signals from the top 20 mining pools.
QRAMP: A Two-Phase “Quarantine Mode” for Post-Quantum Migration
Bitcoin developer Bnav proposed a new approach to addressing quantum threats, as an alternative to “freeze/sunset legacy signatures” in QRAMP (Quantum‑Resistant Address Migration Protocol).
The proposal introduces a “quarantine mode” for legacy spending. Instead of making old ECDSA outputs invalid after a cutoff, existing Bitcoin UTXOs would remain spendable after post-quantum activation, but only through an on-chain two-phase “commit → spend” process. Users must first submit a commitment transaction that binds the final recipient address and amount. After sufficient confirmations, the actual spend can occur, preventing destination tampering even if private keys are compromised by quantum attacks.
This scheme requires consensus enforcement, does not rely on historical tx lookups (pruned nodes / no txindex), and allows recipients to pay fees on behalf of senders to improve usability. The goal is to provide Bitcoin with a smoother, more practical post-quantum migration path.
BitMEX: Dual Taproot Spending for Pre- and Post-QDay
BitMEX Research introduces a quantum safe Taproot design that allows a Bitcoin output to be spent via two tapleaves: one quantum safe and one quantum vulnerable.
Before QDay, users can continue using the more efficient, quantum vulnerable path and benefit from smaller signatures. Given the uncertainty around the timing of QDay and the long safety buffer required by any coin-freezing scheme, the author argues that such flexibility is not only desirable, but potentially necessary.
Eliminating Silent Payments Scanning with Nostr Notifications
Setavenger proposed a design that uses Nostr (or other channels) to send notifications for Silent Payments, eliminating the scanning effort for individual transactions. This builds on the idea of “Stealth addresses using Nostr.”
Under this design, senders notify recipients via Nostr with the transaction ID and tweak data, allowing wallets to immediately locate and verify received funds without full scanning. If notifications are missing or untrusted, wallets can always fall back to on-chain scanning. This preserves privacy while significantly improving efficiency, especially for mobile wallets. The approach is wallet-agnostic; Nostr is merely an optional communication layer.
Parallelization Brings Post-Quantum Signature Verification Throughput Close to Schnorr
Conduition demonstrated that the common assumption that post-quantum signature schemes like SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+) are impractically slow may be misleading. By leveraging massive parallelism, performance changed dramatically.
Using a custom tool called slhvk, built on the Vulkan API and running on GPUs or multi-core CPUs, Conduition showed that SLH-DSA signature verification throughput can match—or even exceed—that of traditional schemes like Bitcoin’s Schnorr signatures. Under heavy load, the parallelized SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s verifier achieved performance comparable to single-threaded Schnorr verification, though still slower than multi-threaded Schnorr.
A Mathematical Theory of Payment Channel Networks
René Pickhardt posted a new paper, A Mathematical Theory of Payment Channel Networks, formalizing several long-standing observations about payment channel networks—particularly the Lightning Network—within a geometric framework.
The paper addresses phenomena such as channel depletion, capital inefficiency of two-party channels, the benefits of channel factories, and the idea that the true bottleneck is feasibility rather than routing. The work aims to explain why these issues are structurally true and how they are connected.
Argo Delivers Another 1000x Off-Chain Cost Reduction for BitVM3
Robin Linus, Liam Eagen, and Ying Tong Lai introduced the {ideal} project, whose first contribution is a new garbled-circuit scheme, Argo. Building on prior BitVM3 efficiency gains, Argo reduces off-chain costs by another 1000×, resulting in an overall 2000× efficiency improvement.
Argo MAC efficiently encodes elliptic curve point bit decompositions into homomorphic message authentication codes (MACs), significantly improving the efficiency of the garbling process.
Epoch Bitcoin 2026 Report: Bitcoin L2s Consolidate Around Technical Credibility
Bitcoin infrastructure-focused VC firm Epoch recently released its Bitcoin Ecosystem 2026 Annual Report, covering themes such as: price action, adoption, media perception, treasury companies, business models, protocol development, regulation, and venture capital.
In the Protocol section, the report highlights:
The Bitcoin protocol landscape consolidated in 2025. Most nominal L2 projects failed to achieve either decentralization or real usage, while only a small number of technically credible systems continue shipping.
A clear divergence between technical scaling and economic scaling: the former extends Bitcoin’s security model off-chain, while the latter is dominated by ETFs and wrapped BTC exposure products that capture most capital inflows.
From a user perspective, cross-chain bridges remain a “binary custody” problem. Demand is polarizing toward either extreme convenience (ETFs and custodial wrapped assets) or extreme sovereignty (script-enforced unilateral exits), leaving middle-ground designs at a disadvantage.
Looking ahead to 2026, the report argues that the real inflection point is not throughput, but custody. Extending self-custodied BTC into more expressive execution environments could reshape the competitive landscape and favor systems truly anchored to Bitcoin’s security model.
New ECDLP Quantum Circuit Advances Put P-224 at Minute-Level Risk
A recent study presents optimized quantum circuits for implementing Shor’s algorithm on elliptic curves. The authors introduce improved quantum point-addition circuits that reduce circuit depth while balancing qubit counts, achieving up to a ~40% improvement in the qubit-count × depth metric compared to prior work.
Based on these circuits, the study reassesses the post-quantum security of elliptic curve cryptography. Under NIST’s MAXDEPTH constraint (limiting circuit depth to 2⁴⁰), the maximum depth for P-521 is 2²⁸—well below the threshold. For another NIST metric—the product of total gate count and full circuit depth—the complexity on the same curve is 2⁶⁵, far below the 2¹⁵⁷ requirement for post-quantum security level 1.
The authors also estimate fault-tolerant physical resource costs. P-224 (roughly equivalent to RSA-2048) could be broken in 34 minutes using 19.1 million physical qubits, or in 96 minutes with 6.9 million physical qubits using their optimized methods.
RISC-V ISA Extensions Boost Multi-Precision Crypto Arithmetic
This paper proposes instruction set extensions for RISC-V (RV32I / RV64I) that enhance unsigned integer multiplication, addressing the minimalism of existing instructions. Designed for cryptography and other multi-precision-heavy workloads, the extensions add multiply-accumulate and carry-handling instructions.
Experimental results show that for X25519 scalar multiplication, the extensions yield performance improvements of 1.5× (full radix) and 1.6× (reduced radix) on RV32I, and 1.3× and 1.7× respectively on RV64I.
World Economic Forum 2026 Signals Digital Assets as Financial Infrastructure
At the 2026 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, prominent industry figures—including David Sacks, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Binance’s CZ, Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse, and Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson—participated in discussions on integrating digital assets into mainstream finance, regulatory frameworks, tokenization, and stablecoins.
The Davos 2026 discussions signaled that digital assets have transitioned from fringe speculative tools to core components of global financial infrastructure. The focus has shifted from disruption to regulatory compliance and tokenization. Stablecoins were repeatedly described as “internet-native money,” with growing recognition of their role in cross-border trade, humanitarian aid, and small-business financing.
Key takeaways include:
Blockchain as infrastructure: Moving from experimental deployments toward enterprise-grade integration into core financial systems.
Regulatory clarity driving adoption: Regulated stablecoins and digital assets are seeing broader institutional and corporate uptake.
Improved financial access: Stablecoins lower barriers for cross-border payments, humanitarian aid, and small-business financing, enabling faster, cheaper, and more transparent value transfer.
Systemic transformation and technological convergence: Tokenized assets, AI-driven systems, and future quantum technologies are reshaping financial flows—while introducing new technical and economic challenges.
Overall, cryptocurrencies and digital assets are entering a “systems phase”: no longer experiments, but integral components of global financial flows and infrastructure.
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