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BTC Blockstream officially submits BIP for SHRINCS quantum resistance signature scheme
Blockstream, led by Adam Back, has released its Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) on SHRINCS, an experimental post-quantum signature scheme that marks one of the most concrete steps the industry has taken in protecting Bitcoin from future quantum computer attacks.
SHRINCS was designed by cryptographers Mikhail Kudinov and Jonas Nick at Blockstream Research. It is a hash-based scheme built specifically for Bitcoin's constraints, rather than being modified to accommodate these constraints. It relies solely on the security of SHA-256-the same hash function that Bitcoin already uses in proof-of-work, address derivation and Merkel tree-which means it does not introduce any new cryptographic assumptions into the system.
Jonas Nick of Blockstream Research says it is the first specific proposal designed specifically for Bitcoin. However, Nick made it clear that SHRINCS is not intended to be the ultimate signature scheme for Bitcoin, but rather positions it as a pragmatic near-term option for the entire community to refer to in the process of setting long-term standards.
Has been tested in a production environment, but there are still trade-offs
In March 2026, Blockstream deployed SHRINCS verification on the Liquid Sidechain main network via Simplicity smart contracts and broadcast records of what it claimed were the first post-quantum signature transactions completed in a Bitcoin Sidechain production environment. Recently, the company has also demonstrated that SHRINCS and a series of other post-quantum signature schemes can work effectively on common hardware wallets.
SHRINCS provides two signature paths for a single public key: a compact stateful path for daily use, with a signature size starting at 324 bytes, and each additional signature grows by about 16 bytes; the other stateless fallback path, which works normally even if the signer loses state, but at the expense of a larger signature size.
The core challenge is scale. Quantum secure signatures are much larger than current signatures, and larger signatures take up more space in each block, meaning fewer transactions can be accommodated and costs rise. The compact SHRINCS configuration achieves 3 transactions per second with a 580-byte signature, compared to approximately 0.36 transactions per second for NIST standardized SLH-DSA.
Adam Back, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, is known as a quantum computer skeptic, but his company is one of the leading organizations in developing practical solutions. Back said earlier this year that the "safe approach" is to be prepared to respond to threats in advance.
Critics point to additional complexities. Yoon Auh, founder of BOLTS Technologies, pointed out that in the process of reducing the signature size, the designers of SHRINCS added "statelessness, compact signature paths, fallback mechanisms, assumptions about the number of seed initializations, and rules for when a device must switch to a larger stateless signature."
Implementation at the Bitcoin base layer will require a separate soft fork. Blockstream points out that the opcode can be implemented via Taproot, the proposed Taproot v2, or the P2MR leaf of BIP-360.
