qBitTensor Labs Live — October 16, 2025

Miner Fairness and Scoring Adjustments

We made targeted adjustments to how new miners are scored and how long the immunity period lasts. Previously, new miners were evaluated against the full 48-hour scoring window, which put them at an immediate disadvantage since they could only accumulate a fraction of the circuits that established miners had completed. The updated model normalizes scoring based on time alive rather than the full window, so new miners can establish themselves on a more level playing field. We also reduced the immunity period from roughly 50 hours down to 36 hours, which means fewer immune miners cutting into the earnings of productive miners while still providing ample time for newcomers to ramp up.

Circuit Timing Investigation

We acknowledged that the community had noticed a slowdown in peaked circuit generation over recent days. While we kept the details light, we shared that we had a strong theory about the root cause -- specifically that a participant appeared to be intentionally slowing down the ecosystem, since fewer circuits at the same emission rate means less compute cost per miner. The Shor's branch and new telemetry tooling were expected to help us confirm that theory. We appreciated the patience from miners as we worked through the issue and the creativity from the community in finding novel ways to game the system, even if we would prefer that innovation be directed toward advancing quantum computing.

Telemetry Dashboard

We announced a cost-effective telemetry solution that all validators would be able to participate in. The dashboard will surface key miner metrics including maximum difficulty requested and solutions per 24-hour period, along with validator-side data such as circuits generated, circuits verified, and heartbeat information. For miners, this means being able to see how the competition is performing -- not just relative rankings, but the underlying activity driving those rankings. The telemetry UI was built on top of Open Quantum infrastructure and will ship with the Shor's branch, viewable on the qBitTensor Labs website.

Shor's Challenge Launch

The Shor's branch went public in the repository ahead of a Monday, October 20th deployment. Miners were advised to review the branch and ensure their synapses are compatible before it goes live. The branch bundles the new Shor's challenge -- based on Peter Shor's 1994 factoring algorithm that ignited the quantum computing investment wave -- along with the telemetry system and some adjustments aimed at the circuit generation timing issue. For this initial version, validators generate the Shor's circuit and miners execute it faithfully, with verification on the backend. We signaled that even bigger plans for the Shor's challenge space would come with Phase 2 of Subnet 63.

Phase 2 Prize-Pool Economics for Subnet 63

We laid out the emerging design for Phase 2 of Subnet 63, which restructures miner emissions into three tiers of prize pools. The operational pool provides a steady reward to whoever holds the top spot on a given challenge. Milestone pools accumulate emission and unlock when miners achieve defined incremental accomplishments, with estimated payouts in the $10,000 to $50,000 range. Grand prize pools target breakthroughs believed to be possible but not yet achieved, with potential awards from $100,000 to $1 million depending on subnet performance. Once all pools are full, excess emission gets burned. We increased the share of emission reserved for these pools from 10% to 15% and will continue ramping it up as we approach the transition, which is designed to reduce miner sell pressure and attract significant attention from media and the broader industry.

Open Quantum Q4 Release Plan and Community Engagement

We shared that Open Quantum is firmly on track for a Q4 launch across three stages: a private release with hand-selected users and real QPUs running on Bittensor, a beta release through an integration partner's community, and finally a full public release with traditional marketing and media coverage. The subnet code has moved to end-to-end testing, the Python library supports circuit execution, and the website now has API key management and account management integrated. On the community side, we recapped recent quantum events including hosting the Iterate on AI conference in Boulder and sponsoring a quantum hackathon in South Carolina, with upcoming appearances at Chicago Quantum Summit, QEDC in New York, and Q2B Silicon Valley in December. We also acknowledged community feedback that our social media presence had been too quiet and committed to increasing the cadence of updates beyond the biweekly live broadcasts.

So let's dive right into it. As always, the usual disclaimers, these are ideas, not promises. We don't give any investment or legal advice. We appreciate all the work you guys have been doing to use this content for good and not for evil and avoiding the temptation to weaponize it and use it out of context. And if you agree to do that going on, then we're all good and let's keep rolling.

OK, so today, as always, we've got some tech support stuff. So we've been going kind of as a recurring theme on this topic of fairness. We'll hit on that a little bit more today. If you follow the subnet on Discord, you know that in the recent days, there's been a little bit of conversation about circuit timing. And so we'll talk just a little bit about that. And then.

Cool news, we've got big updates on telemetry. I know we had talked about Grafana a little bit ago. We'll talk about a different direction that we're going, which is actually way sicker. And I'll look forward to showing that to you guys. On the R&D front, we've got some really exciting stuff going. You're right on the cusp of Shor's launch with us today. So we're going to give you some updates on the timing on that and what to expect in that branch. We'll also talk a little bit more.

Kind of continue to build the vision for what Phase 2 of Subnet 63 looks like. I know we talked a little bit about that the last time we talked, but we'll go just a little bit deeper on that again. In Open Quantum, my gosh, it is getting so close. So we'll talk about updates on that and a little bit about how we're going to launch Open Quantum. And then we'll go into community and market. We're going to talk a little bit about some quantum events that

ShorShot's here because we've got a lot of updates on the code for the subnets. So Ryan, I'll hand it over to you to talk about fairness.

To try to support fairness.

So when new miners show up, they immediately start spending money on compute, but their earnings were scored based upon a 48-hour window, putting them at a disadvantage. You know, immunity period had to be higher due to the scoring and the number of peaked challenges being generated before the performance enhancements.

You know, longer immunity period also means more immune miners cutting into the good miners, including good new miners as well. You know, so now, you know, we're trying to balance incentive based upon the time alive rather than the full 48-hour period. That way tries to introduce some fairness for new miners. And then we also reduce the immunity period to 36 hours. You know, there should be fewer new miners cutting into less good miners and you know, it's plenty of time to establish yourself, especially with the changes on the scoring.

We'll talk a little bit more about the timing and stuff like that later, but it should be a pretty healthy amount of circuits in the first few hours, therefore allowing you to establish yourself and then be ranked based upon the difficulty and the scoring. And I know with peaked circuits right now, kind of being capped at 39 and everyone being at 39, there's not a whole lot of diversity there.

And same with HSTAB, but as we introduce Shor's and potentially other changes to peaked, it'll become more obvious who the good ones are and who the bad ones are.

36. I think it's around 36 or 38. Yeah, can't remember exactly.

Yeah, you know, we're going to be a little bit led on the details. The community has noticed, you know, circuits have slowed down a bit. You know, I'll just say, you know, I think we're on it. We're actively validating our theory. You know, we're going to -- new telemetry and the Shor's branch will help us confirm our theory, I think. So we'll try to share more details when we can. We do notice that the peaked generation has been slower than what it should be and what it has been in the past couple of weeks.

Solutions per 24-hour period and simple filtering to find the information that you need. And then from the validator side, like circuits generated, circuits verified, heartbeat inversion to make sure things are up and running. So we could go yell at people if it appears that their validator is down, that type of thing. Getting more visibility for the whole community. And then we could always use suggestions and we'll take them and try to run with them if we can. And some things are just unobtainium.

Yeah, hopefully we could start to break some usefulness in terms of the, you know, this information to the community.

You can also check, and it's not in the mock-up here, but there's a miner section and a validator section. So you can also see how the validators are performing. So when you have some of these questions about like, the circuit grid is changing, is that, am I seeing a weird problem? Is it a problem specific to a given validator? You can actually check it out on the dashboard and see how the validators are performing, see which ones have updated code, which ones haven't, et cetera. Now, the little visual here is a mock. But it's like,

Sorry, mocked data plugged into the real UI because the data that we have right now is on testnet. But this will go out with the Shor's branch. So this will be essentially, well, we'll announce the Shor's date in just a minute. But this will be out really soon for everybody.

Cool, continuing on.

Shor's updates. All right. So yeah, we originally said this paper was coming when we were on novelty search. We've been talking about it for a while as we've been going with it. The Shor's branch is live now. So if you guys want to go check it out, if you're a miner, you're going to need to do some updates to make sure your synapses are compatible. But go check it out. It is ready for you guys in the public repo.

But all this code will go live this Monday, October 20th. And the intention is to put it out bright and early US time on Monday. So be ready for it. Don't get caught flat-footed on this one. We are good to go. And yeah, in case anybody doesn't remember the context of Shor's -- it is essentially the algorithm that Peter Shor published in 1994 that essentially sparked all the major investment in quantum computing because it essentially has the promise to break RSA encryption.

With a properly sized quantum computer. And so we're super excited to have this challenge running. In this one, you're going to be running a version of Shor's that we are generating the circuit for, and we're going to be verifying that you've executed it faithfully. But as we start talking about the transition into the next generation of 63, we've got even bigger plans for what we want to do with this space. So maybe we'll talk just a little bit about Phase 2 of

63. We've been using the analogy of quantum computing, the Subnet 48, which is getting closer and closer to launch every day, is sort of the Shoals for quantum. And Quantum Innovate is going to be working towards this Ridges for quantum. And so I think everybody kind of understands the story with 48. But we're going to keep continuing to release more on the vision for 63.

Which we'll actually be getting to really quickly after we launch Open Quantum. And so last, last qBitTensor Labs Live, we talked about this idea that we're going to preemptively be starting to turn some of the emission and go from the challenges that we currently have today and start reserving it for the prize pools for kind of the next generation of this. And so I wanted to talk about what that actually is probably going to look like. Again, this is in the ideas, not promises category, but this is

That pool will just be a very small subset of the total miner emission. And so the leftover miner emission will fill these other pools. These other pools are unlocked by achieving major accomplishments. And so the next layer is what we're calling these milestone pools. This aims to produce awards that can be won. They're very, you know, very much are accomplishable incremental steps. Essentially, we'll see things get closer and closer.

Until somebody hits the milestone and unlocks that reward pool. These numbers are going to be, call it like $10,000 to $50,000 type reward pools depending on subnet performance. But then on top of that, we're also going to have these grand prize pools. So as the milestone pools are full, the alpha will start accumulating in these grand prize pools, which are sort of more for these unbelievable accomplishments. So you can think about these as things that are sort of

believed to be possible, but people actually don't know how we're going to achieve them yet. And when, I mean, there we're talking about $100,000 to $1 million prizes, again, depending on subnet performance. The cool thing about this is that that type of prize attracts a huge amount of interest from the industry and from media, which is really cool. Now, once those pools fill, then any additional emission that isn't going into filling one of these pools gets burned.

And so the cool thing is, I think if you're like, if you are a miner, this is awesome because if I can win the top spot and just collect the operational pool over and over again, I'm essentially making more cash than I'd make being one of the top quantum developers at a quantum computing company. If I can unlock milestone pools, we're talking about fairly significant awards. And if I can unlock a grand prize pool, I'm talking about kind of life-changing money for people.

And that will continue to increase as we start to prepare for this transition and start to fill those pools.

And again, yeah, just to recap, I guess, the goals of that are really systematically reducing miner sell pressure, reducing the amount of -- increasing the amount of alpha that's locked up in these prize pools, creating these massive prize pools to really drive attention from the market and from outside media. And, you know, if people actually unlock these, when they unlock these, those will be even bigger events. I mean, you can imagine those being covered by like Wired and stuff like that, right? Now, the really cool thing, if you're looking ahead and

this is probably a topic for a future qBitTensor Labs Live if the community sort of asks for it, is how that IP that's generated becomes licensable IP and becomes revenue and sort of the strategy for crowdsourcing the creation of new IP that will actually accelerate quantum computing in a fairly substantial way.

All right, that was 63. Let's spend some time on 48. We're going to go through Open Quantum updates. So again, we showed this view the last time we had a qBitTensor Labs Live and sort of said, we're going to be in progress for a little while. And so we need a deeper click. You will notice that the subnet code has moved to end test, which should be pretty telling in terms of how close we're getting to putting real freaking quantum computers on

That's always the stuff that we save for last because, I don't know, developers. The Open Quantum API making massive progress, like we said, telemetry. In fact, the telemetry that we're going to be showing you guys on 63 is actually Open Quantum telemetry. So we actually have a subsection of Open Quantum live on production today running all the telemetry stuff. We've also brought it to full end-to-end testing.

So we're now running jobs on quantum computers, getting the results back and being able to see those results both in the API and in the website. We've deployed a dev environment hidden behind a firewall on our side. And as soon as we get testnet out, we're going to connect dev up to testnet. So really the big thing left to do there is credits, e-commerce, and then all that pesky testing and all the off-happy-path stuff.

Website also making awesome progress. It's integrated in the API key management. So now you can grab your keys out of the website and start using them with the Python library. We also have added account management. The remaining items there are polish and wallet linking and e-commerce. And then on the quantum framework, also making good progress, we have the base Python libraries available for internal testing, does all the key management stuff, and you can actually execute

quantum circuits through the Python API. Now what we need to do is start working on integrating into other quantum toolkits. And the cool thing about this, like, I don't think people probably understand the cool part about this. Everything we show you guys is on websites because it's like eye candy. But this Python integration is what's actually going to be game changing because developers essentially already author their code in some quantum framework. They'll just pip install Open Quantum.

So we're trying to avoid telling you guys a date, but what I will tell you guys to sort of indicate how close we are is that all three of these events will happen in the fourth quarter. We are officially in the fourth quarter right now. And so we're going to start with a private release. The private release means we're going to put the subnet live and real quantum computers are going to be on Bittensor at that point. There will be real quantum jobs executing on real quantum computers.

And the costs of those will be offset by miner emissions. We're going to launch the platform at that time, but new users aren't going to be able to execute their own jobs until they are whitelisted by us. Real QPUs will be running. The users will be hand-selected by us. By the way, while we're mostly going to be focused on quantum users, if there are people in the DTAO ecosystem that want early beta access,

hit us up, we're only going to let a few in, but we'd be happy to have somebody in there trying, even if you don't totally know all the physics behind what's happening with executing these quantum circuits. After we do that and the hand-selected users have gone through a round of user feedback, we're going to do a beta release. That private release is also going to allow us to give the keys to our integration partner that will start tying it into an existing quantum developer ecosystem.

The beta release will be opening it up to their community. So instead of opening it up to the entire community, we're going to let their users have access to it ahead of the entire community. That's going to give them a little bit of goodwill so they can attract users into their platform because of Open Quantum. But it's also going to give us the ability to get a much higher set of user feedback before just broadly opening up to the whole market and make any fine tuning that we have to do.

OK, market. So we're calling this community -- we started calling it market because as we transition from building this stuff and operating in the Bittensor community, we're now going to be talking also about engagement in the quantum community because we're getting ready to launch. And so we'll talk about quantum events and then we'll come back and hit all the good Bittensor stuff that we usually talk about. So from a quantum events perspective,

you guys might have noticed that we sort of have started recently. We haven't posted all this stuff out socials yet, but we're starting to. So we hosted the Iterate on AI conference in Boulder. We had a bunch of CEOs and VPs from a lot of tech companies in town for this Iterate on AI event. And a lot of them flew out a day early and took a bunch of tours around both the quantum incubator and a bunch of quantum companies in the area.

We also took them out to Elevate Quantum's Quantum Commons facility and just kind of gave them the red carpet treatment to teach them about quantum. Super exciting stuff. Everybody was like very bullish on it. I think a lot of them were pretty blown away with how far quantum has come since the last time they looked at it. We also had our man Rob out representing Quantum Rings at a quantum hackathon in South Carolina last weekend. It was super awesome.

You know, hey, that's cool. They put us on as a supporter. We were very last minute to this one. So we love sponsoring hackathons. It's a great way to get in front of like, you know, a lot of kids that haven't constrained their ideas of what's possible yet. We jumped in and decided to help these guys really last minute. That's really cool that they put us on as a supporter. I didn't even notice that until right now. But yeah, great stuff. Super innovative. There are a bunch of hackathons that we tend to participate in regularly.

cool quantum platform. You should Google them if you've never heard of them before. They're good friends of ours. They're putting on a Quantum Developers Day. We're going to sponsor that event. We're going to be out that same week at the Chicago Quantum Summit and then jump on a plane and fly out to New York for the QEDC. That's a big DC-based organization. It's one of the biggest nationwide quantum consortiums.

We'll be at the annual meeting there. I'm also hosting a panel on October 30th, which is coming up really soon, with a bunch of people from the Accentures and the Deloittes and stuff like that to sort of just talk them through what it looks like to be a consultant in the quantum ecosystem today. And then sort of one of the biggest shows, which we will be taking a booth out at, and actually if you guys are in the Valley, it's a great event to go to if you want to get exposed to quantum, is Q2B Silicon Valley.

The first week of December. And so, yeah, we'll keep you guys posted on cool news and announcements from those events. Okay, so back to the Bittensor world. Yeah, one of the criticisms, which is actually a totally fair criticism, is that people have felt like we've been a little bit quiet on the socials. So with the qBitTensor Labs Live, what we were sort of hoping to do was, instead of these little

innocuous, vague kind of updates that a lot of subnet operators do to kind of keep people feeling like something's going on on socials. We wanted to do like much beefier, polished updates every couple weeks. And so we sort of have reduced the amount of attention that we're putting on to like, you know, these little keep-the-community-engaged kind of updates and really focused in on this. We hear you though. People are saying we need more of it. I think you guys are probably right.

are all about the validators sort of slowing down, getting stuck. We think we know what that is. We think we're fixing that. The fix is not in the Shor's branch, but there is some stuff in the Shor's branch, again, with telemetry, et cetera, that's going to let us confirm, validate or invalidate the theory for what we think is happening there. So yeah, thanks for holding us accountable to that, guys. That's totally good. And on the left side, we have the

announcement that we're getting ready for Shor's. This does say the public branch was going to be 10/17, which is tomorrow. Public branch is out. So I guess we originally delayed till the 17th, but now we're ahead of schedule from the delayed schedule, I guess. And then yeah, the live date is spot on. We don't deploy on Fridays. It ruins miners' weekends. It ruins our team's weekends. We deploy on -- we like Mondays. So that code will ship Monday. So everybody get on it and be ready.

Also, we appreciate the love. We totally feel it. Totally unexpected shout out from Const. I guess maybe we lucked out on our subnet number or something like that and got put right in the middle of the pack of people that he said were some of the top subnets. That's super cool. And yeah, we totally appreciate all the love from the community. You guys have been great.

Not all of our employees are on the socials, but we do take the stuff that you guys are saying and sort of aggregate it and share it out. So thanks for that. The other thing we did, I just saw this, actually haven't looked into it much at all, but this looks freaking awesome. So I just thought I'd put it up here and acknowledge it. But yeah, it looks like Yuma is doing some investment. And when they put together their material on investment, they talk about,

that limits that vision to AI. And with our two subnets in quantum, I feel like without looking further into this, that this is a huge shout out to the mission that we're on, that big money sees what's happening here. And man, we are just at the beginning. We haven't even left the runway yet. So we are so excited to have you guys all here with us on this journey as we get ready to take off and launch.

I have never seen things move as fast as this moves. And when we start tapping into the community and not just having like our teams innovating to keep the community rolling and keep the community operating, but actually like turn that community innovation into commercial value, commercial success revenue. I mean, man, it's gonna be to the moon. This is crazy. Yeah. All right. Well, hey.