01
C-002 shielded proof upgrade
Shielded spends must now use the hardened v3 proof format. Closes a value-conservation weakness in the legacy v2 format and adds stronger amount range-proof enforcement. Honest notes ride through unchanged.
Article · June 6, 2026 · Digital infrastructure
Block 123,000.
BTX activates hardening upgrades.
Roughly three months after genesis, BTX crossed into a new consensus reality. At block height 123,000, the network activated BTX 0.31 — a release that hardens the shielded transaction layer, tightens post-quantum signature enforcement, ships meaningful mining-side telemetry, and quietly lays the groundwork for the bridge and wrapped-asset infrastructure that comes next.
The headline for end users is the absence of one: ordinary wallets do nothing, existing shielded notes remain spendable, and the user-facing experience does not change. The headline for the network is that what was, until last week, a launch chain became a hardened production chain — on schedule, on the same wire format, and without the coordinated breaking upgrade most blockchains spend their first year planning.
block 123,000/shielded proof v3/FIPS-205 enforcement/wBTX spec
Whyte Consolidated Research · 2026-06-06· 9 min read
1 · The activation event
From launch chain to hardened production chain.
BTX shipped at genesis with post-quantum signatures from day one and a deliberately conservative launch surface. Twelve weeks later, at block 123,000, the network activated 0.31 — the first material consensus change since launch. Three things happened at the same height: shielded spends switched to a hardened v3 proof format under the C-002 upgrade; SLH-DSA verification moved to strict FIPS-205 behaviour for bridge attestor signatures and post-quantum paths; and the new mining-side telemetry that tells an operator whether it is safe to submit work became part of every node's response.
Operationally, this is a hard fork. Nodes that did not upgrade before the activation height risk diverging from the canonical chain. User-side, it is a tightening that ordinary wallets ride through without doing anything, because the new proof format is designed to accept the same honest notes the old format did. That asymmetry — consequential consensus change for operators, no migration for users — is the design point. It is what a chain that intends to host regulated activity needs upgrades to look like.
The timing matters too. Most chains spend their first year deferring meaningful upgrades because the wire format they launched cannot absorb the bytes the next change wants to add. BTX shipped the slack in advance, in the launch consensus, on purpose. 0.31 is the first activation that lands on that slack. It is not the last.
Diagram · BTX timeline
2 · The C-002 shielded proof upgrade
Tightening the shielded pool — without touching honest balances.
The headline protocol change is the move from the legacy SMILE2 v2 shielded proof to a hardened v3 format. The v3 proof closes a value-conservation weakness in the v2 system and adds stronger amount range-proof enforcement. Both are properties that, in a shielded transaction layer, govern the integrity of the entire pool: if value conservation can be violated in any non-canonical path, the supply of the asset stops being trustable.
Honest users do not need to migrate or re-shield anything. Existing notes remain spendable; the wallet simply re-proves them under the v3 format when they are spent. What the new rules reject is non-canonical or exploit-created shielded value — the kind that could theoretically have been spendable under the looser v2 format. The asymmetry is the whole point. A hard fork in a privacy layer can sound frightening; this one is designed so the only people who feel it are the ones trying to do something they should not have been able to do.
Self-service unshielding lands at the same height. A wallet can now build a shielded-to-transparent spend locally, without relying on the older operator-style bridge flow. The transparent amount leaving the shielded pool is cryptographically bound to the shielded value consumed — and that binding, built into the v3 proof, is what makes local unshielding safe. The user gets sovereign exit from the pool; the network gets a tighter monetary integrity guarantee. Both at once.
3 · FIPS-205 enforcement, height-exact
The post-quantum-only posture gets stricter.
BTX shipped with post-quantum signatures from genesis — ML-DSA-44 for routine spends and SLH-DSA-128s for recovery, covered in When the block reward is a matrix multiply. 0.31 moves SLH-DSA verification to strict FIPS-205 behaviour at the activation height. Bridge attestor signatures, script verification, and post-quantum signature paths now use height-exact rules so the old and new signature schemes cannot be mixed incorrectly.
The broader posture is defence in depth. Where BTX consensus expects post-quantum behaviour, legacy ECDSA and Schnorr paths are rejected more aggressively. There is no path through which a classical signature can quietly substitute for a post-quantum one. That kind of strictness is cheap to do during a young network's first hardening cycle and very expensive to add later — exactly the reverse of the way most chains have had to learn the lesson.
4 · The six concrete changes
What landed at the activation height.
The shape of a release tells you what the network values. Half of 0.31 is consensus and cryptography. The other half is operator ergonomics — what miners and node operators actually need to run the network safely.
02
Self-service unshielding
Wallets can now build shielded-to-transparent spends locally. The transparent amount is cryptographically bound to the shielded value consumed — sovereign exit from the pool with no operator in the middle.
03
FIPS-205 enforcement
SLH-DSA verification moves to FIPS-205 behaviour at the activation height. Bridge attestor signatures, script verification, and PQ paths now use height-exact rules so old and new schemes cannot be mixed.
04
Mining chain-guard RPC
getmininginfo now exposes chain-guard status, peer tip comparison, timestamp policy, near-tip peer counts, and a recommended action: continue, pause, or catch_up. The node tells the miner what to do.
05
MatMul diagnostics
Failed solve attempts now report how close the best digest came to target — and backend telemetry shows whether the daemon really used GPU, Metal, or CUDA, or fell back silently to CPU.
06
Fast shielded startup
Persisted shielded state plus a nullifier accumulator let nodes skip historical audits on every restart when the state verifies cleanly. Pruned-node recovery also stops crash-looping on missing historical blocks.
5 · Miner-side: the node tells the miner what to do
Less guessing. More visibility.
Mining safety is mostly about not submitting work the rest of the network is going to reject. Historically that has meant operators built their own monitoring around peer-tip comparison, timestamp policy, and reorg behaviour. 0.31 moves that work into the node itself. The getmininginfo RPC now exposes chain-guard status, peer tip comparison, timestamp policy, near-tip peer counts, and a single recommended action — continue, pause, or catch_up. The node tells the miner what to do, in machine-readable form, instead of leaving it to the operator's monitoring stack to triangulate.
MatMul diagnostics are the other meaningful change. When a solve attempt exhausts without finding a block, the node now reports how close the best digest came to the target. That does not change mining odds — it only helps distinguish normal variance from backend malfunction. Combined with new backend telemetry that shows whether the daemon really used the expected GPU, Metal, or CUDA path (or silently fell back to CPU), operators can detect a misconfigured fleet in minutes instead of weeks.
These changes matter most at the long tail. A hyperscale operator already has the monitoring stack to figure this out. A small operator running a Mac mini on Metal — exactly the profile covered in Mining pools, AI agents, and the Mac mini that earns — does not. Putting the visibility in the node levels the operator field in a way that compounds with the chain's broader bias toward small-operator participation.
6 · What 0.31 sets up for what comes next
Infrastructure for the next phase.
None of these activate user-visible behaviour today. All of them give the next set of upgrades a clean place to land. The pattern is consistent with the way the launch wire was designed — reserve the slack, then activate.
wBTX canonical spec
How wrapped BTX should look on EVM chains: 18 decimals, 1:1 value parity, 10^10 scaling from BTX satoshis. Standardises downstream bridge work without touching L1 consensus.
HTLC bridge helper RPCs
Hash-time-locked contract helpers for cross-chain swap construction land in 0.31 as a node-side primitive — the plumbing for atomic swaps and trust-minimised bridge designs.
Hybrid PQ transport (experimental)
Experimental opt-in for post-quantum hybrid v2 transport on peer-to-peer connections. Long horizon, but the slot is in the node already.
Signed auto-update framework
Infrastructure for cryptographically-signed update distribution. Reduces the operational tail risk of an unsigned upgrade path for a network meant to host regulated activity.
The wBTX spec in particular matters for the next round of integration work. By standardising decimals, parity, and the satoshi-to-wBTX scaling factor at the protocol-document level, BTX gives every downstream bridge implementer a single canonical reference to build against — instead of letting each one invent its own convention, which is the way the wrapped-asset surface on other chains has historically fragmented.
7 · The operator checklist
What miners and node operators should do.
The post-activation checklist is short. Run v0.31.0. Confirm initialblockdownload=false. Verify the chain guard is healthy. Keep peers near tip. Continue mining under the new rules. Earlier-version nodes risk validating a chain the rest of the network no longer recognises as canonical; the activation rule at block 123,000 is height-exact and unforgiving on that point.
Wallet users do not have a checklist. Re-shielding is unnecessary; legacy notes work; spends quietly use v3 proofs from now on. The clearest evidence that an upgrade did its job well is that the people it protects do not have to think about it.
8 · The release at a glance
Four numbers that frame the activation.
123,000
Activation height
C-002 + FIPS-205 height-exact rules
v3
Shielded proof
Hardens value conservation, range proofs
FIPS 205
SLH-DSA path
Height-exact post-quantum enforcement
0.31
Required node
Earlier versions risk consensus drift
Bottom line
The upgrade landed where the slack was waiting for it.
BTX 0.31 is the first material consensus change since genesis, and it tightened three things at once: shielded value conservation under a new v3 proof, post-quantum signature enforcement under height-exact FIPS-205 rules, and operator-side mining visibility through a chain-guard RPC the node populates itself. None of it required ordinary wallet users to do anything, and none of it required a coordinated breaking event for the rest of the ecosystem.
The release also seeded the next phase — wBTX as a canonical wrapped-asset spec, HTLC helpers for bridge construction, an experimental hybrid post-quantum transport, and a signed auto-update framework — without activating any of it. The pattern is the same one BTX has been quietly demonstrating since launch: ship the slack, then activate. Block 123,000 was the first activation. It will not be the last.
Frequently asked
BTX 0.31, in brief.
- Did wallet users need to do anything?
- No. Existing shielded notes remain spendable; the wallet simply re-proves them under the new v3 format when they are spent. The release was designed so ordinary users do not need to migrate, re-shield, or take any action.
- Are my existing shielded notes safe?
- Yes. Honest notes remain valid under the new rules. What the v3 proof rejects is non-canonical or exploit-created shielded value that could previously have been spent under the looser v2 format — the upgrade hardens the monetary integrity of the shielded pool without touching legitimate balances.
- Was this a hard fork?
- Operationally, yes — nodes that did not upgrade before block 123,000 risk diverging from the canonical chain. The user-side experience is closer to a tightening that ordinary wallets ride through without noticing, which was the design intent: real consensus change, minimal end-user friction.
- What is wBTX?
- Wrapped BTX — a canonical specification, introduced in 0.31, for how BTX should appear on EVM chains. The spec fixes 18 decimals, 1:1 value parity, and a 10^10 scaling factor from BTX satoshis. wBTX does not change BTX consensus today; it standardises how downstream bridge implementations should represent BTX off-chain.
- What happens to nodes that did not upgrade?
- They risk validating a chain the rest of the network no longer recognises as canonical. The activation rule is height-exact at block 123,000 — after that block, 0.30-class nodes will increasingly diverge from the consensus reality. The operator checklist in this release is essentially: run 0.31, confirm sync, verify chain guard health, keep mining.
Context & further reading
This article is a plain-language summary of the BTX 0.31 release and the C-002 activation at block 123,000. Internal links collect related pieces from this site; the items below are the primary sources for the chain itself.
- BTX — protocol home (btx.dev)
- BTX — Quantum: ML-DSA-44, SLH-DSA-128s, and SMILE v3
- Whyte Consolidated — BTX: when the block reward is a matrix multiply
- Whyte Consolidated — Bitcoin built the chassis. BTX changed the engine.
- Whyte Consolidated — Mining pools, AI agents, and the Mac mini that earns
- Whyte Consolidated — Machine-coded banking policies and pre-committed exit routes on BTX
For informational purposes only. Not financial, investment, or legal advice. Technical claims about BTX 0.31 reflect the project's released change set and may be subject to further iteration. Systems, protocols, and tokens referenced are described for context and are not endorsements. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals before acting.