We'd be happy to cooperate with anyone who wants to have a go at an implementation. While we have poked around in the bitcoin source code a bit, I'm afraid we're not familiar enough with the code to pull this off easily ourselves.

I'm also very interested in establishing a testnet that will be stress tested with many transactions per second. If you have an idea on how to do this, I'd be happy to know.

Feel free to email me directly regarding any of these projects.