qBitTensor Labs Live — November 20, 2025
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Open Quantum APIs and e-commerce go live with over 2,000 circuits executed in beta, Qiskit integration for seamless quantum computing access, and Subnet 63 prize pool updates with $275K accumulated from owner emissions.
Welcome
We kicked off this session with Ryan joining from the stunning backdrop of Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction, Colorado. It has been two weeks since our last broadcast and we had plenty to share.
Open Quantum Updates
We have been putting up the go-live feature checklist for the last several broadcasts, and we are making strong progress. The subnet code and Open Quantum APIs are done. On the web side, we have added e-commerce and the payout dashboard. Wallet linking is close but not finished yet. Once those items are complete, a huge amount of focus shifts to quantum framework integrations.
Our jobs dashboard is live at openquantum.com, providing full transparency into how much traffic is going through Subnet 48. We are still in private beta, inviting users gradually to work out the kinks and identify missing features. Even so, we just crossed 2,000 circuits executed on the platform, which is impressive given we have not opened it up to everyone yet.
E-Commerce Features
E-commerce is now live. Within hours of launch, we already had over $100 in transactions through Stripe. Users can purchase credits for extra processing power in Open Quantum. The base service remains free, but if you want additional shots beyond the default limits or want to jump to the front of the queue, you can pay for that.
Ryan also added new throttling features at the organization level. Currently, an organization can have up to 10 jobs running at a time to prevent congestion and ensure fair access for all users. These controls let us manage budget effectively and continue providing the best free quantum computing experience we can.
The Role of Qiskit
We demonstrated the Qiskit toolkit and how it integrates seamlessly with Open Quantum. The key takeaway: with just three blocks of code changed, users can take an existing Qiskit notebook and run it on a real quantum computer through Open Quantum instead of a local simulator. No rewriting required. We are meeting users where they are and limiting barriers to adoption.
Why did we start with Qiskit? According to the Unitary Foundation's annual survey of thousands of quantum developers, Qiskit holds roughly 70% market share. Beyond its reach, Qiskit has industry-specific toolkits for finance (portfolio optimization, risk analysis), chemistry (many-body simulations via Qiskit Nature), machine learning (QML via Qiskit Machine Learning), and optimization. With our single Open Quantum toolkit, users across all of those domains can plug in and start running on quantum computers for free.
Subnet 63 Updates
We structured the Subnet 63 update as good news, bad news, and silver lining.
Good news: As promised at the last broadcast, we have been routing all owner emissions into prize pools. This week we transferred 10,000 alpha (approximately $44,000 USD), bringing the total prize pool to 40,000 alpha, roughly $275,000 USD. The team is genuinely excited about funding these pools from our own wallet for participants of the network.
Bad news: Validators saw the code change redirecting miner emissions into the prize wallet and coordinated to burn those emissions instead of routing them. About 26,000 alpha (~$110,000 USD) has been burned. This is understandable from the validators' perspective -- they do not know the humans behind the code and a request to redirect emissions into a third-party wallet looks suspicious.
Silver lining: For DTAO holders, the alphanomics are actually favorable. Owner emissions going into prize pools create no sell pressure (the wallets are transparent and publicly listed), while the burned miner emissions create mechanical upward price pressure by removing alpha while tau still flows into the pool.
We have layered plans to resolve the validator situation, ranging from simple social solutions to fully on-chain validation of challenges and prize distribution. We are also encouraged by leaders in the Bittensor ecosystem praising subnets taking this type of approach.
TauFlow
Both of our subnets are performing well under TauFlow metrics. In the last 24 hours (at time of recording), Quantum Compute was ranked number one and Quantum Innovate was number three across all subnets. Over the last 30 days, both were in the top five. If emissions were 100% based on TauFlow today, we would be the number three and number four subnets in terms of emission.
We appreciate why TauFlow exists and believe it will harden the network and put positive price pressure on subnet alphas. However, our modeling suggests it may be challenging long-term for subnets with high operating costs (miners who must sell to cover compute expenses). We expect TauFlow will likely be iterated on over time.
Community Highlights
Scott Aaronson, widely respected as a chronic realist in quantum computing, posted that he now considers it a "live possibility" that we will have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor's algorithm before the next US presidential election. That is a significant statement from someone known for skepticism.
Vitalik Buterin (co-founder of Ethereum) was quoted suggesting there is a real chance quantum computers could break Ethereum and Bitcoin by 2028. We think that timeline is a bit aggressive -- IonQ's roadmap points to 2029, IBM's to 2030-2031 -- but the signal is clear that quantum is being taken seriously.
Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome to qBitTensor Labs Live. It is November 20th, 2025. Super excited to have everybody and to be with you guys. I can't believe that it's already like Thursday. That seems insane to me. I can't believe that it's been two weeks since the last time we did one of these because time is sort of like imaginary. It's an artificial construct that doesn't make any sense in my life anymore. But yeah, thrilled to be here with y'all. Happy to have Ryan back with me today again too. Ryan, what's your background today? People said you looked like you were in like a dungeon last time.
Yeah, brightened up a little bit this time. It's actually Colorado National Monument in Grand Junction, Colorado, and suggests going there and checking out the beautiful views.
Nice. Awesome. Super cool. Well, let's jump right into it. We have maybe a little bit less to cover than the last time, but I think it'll be really good stuff anyway. All right. So as always, the legalese warning that says that everything we're saying here are ideas, not promises. This is not investment or legal advice. You guys have been doing a great job of using the material for good and not evil. Keep that up and if you agree to do all of those things then we're cool. I do want to say, well these are ideas and not promises and this is not investment or legal advice. I've been pretty impressed with how you guys, Ryan, have delivered on all of the things that we've been talking about here. I don't think we've actually like fallen short on any of the ideas so far.
Yeah, we're shipping away pretty quickly here.
Totally. So OK, today we have in store a section on Open Quantum. We'll give some cool updates on that. Then we have a section dedicated to subnet 63. There's some kind of updates to share on that, just how things are going. Tauflow is sort of like the word du jour, so we should definitely spend a little bit of time talking about Tauflow and how that's looking for us. And then we'll go to community Q&A. So without further ado, Open Quantum.
All right, so yeah, we've been putting this slide up for like, I don't know, probably the last like three or four qBitTensor Labs lives where we've talked about all the features for the kind of go live. Again, subnet code's done, nothing's changed there. Open quantum APIs are done, nothing's changed there. Open quantum web, we have added e-commerce. We've also added the payout dashboard. We'll show you both of those items. Wallet linking is close, but we are not done with that yet. We do have some questions about that in the Q&A that we'll talk about more. And then once we get those items done, a huge amount of focus really just goes into the quantum frameworks. We're going to show you guys the Qiskit toolkit today to show you what that looks like. And I'll give you some perspectives on the market and why we started with Qiskit. But we'll really quickly get into additional toolkits beyond Qiskit right after that. So looking really good.
Yeah, there's a lot more to come though. I mean, this is just initial like MVP and we just haven't shown the next slide yet for this.
You mean I don't get to like say we're done and celebrate?
No, there's a lot more to come, a lot more features to add over time and a lot more value to add for users and investors.
You...
Awesome. OK, cool, cool. So yeah, the jobs dashboard is out there. You can go to www.qbittensorlabs.com to access this. This just aims to provide transparency into how much traffic is going through subnet 48. So keep in mind, again, that we are still in private beta. So this is just users that we've been inviting into the system rather slowly. We've used this to kind of like work out a lot of the kinks in the system, learn what features maybe we missed in the initial rollout that people are asking for. But yeah, you can go and explore it. I did take the snapshot like, I don't know, two minutes ago or something. So it probably won't be substantially different than it was before. But yeah, we just crossed the 2000 circuits executed on the platform threshold, which is wild considering we haven't even opened it up for everybody.
All right, so the other thing, e-commerce is live and I just checked Stripe. So this has only been live since like, don't know, well, I don't know. What time did you guys deploy this out, Ryan?
Was pretty early. Yeah.
It's early this morning. I wasn't sure if you guys did it late last night or early this morning, but this feature is hot off the press. And we currently have more than $100 in e-commerce transactions already, which is really insane. Again, because this is not even a production system.
Yeah, definitely a demand to kind of, you know, add credits and be able to run more shots and be able to, you know, up your priority in the queue and things like that.
Totally. Yeah. And yeah, crazy how quickly you guys were able to pull that all together. I remember like back in the olden days, it used to be like a team of people working for multiple sprints to add e-commerce. Now it's like you put a top-notch developer on it and they've got you done in 24 hours. So this will just take you right through the Stripe process. I blanked out the email address that I grabbed the screenshot from, but other than that, it's just a live picture of what it looks like. Transaction comes through and after you've finished paying, you have credits that you can spend on the open quantum system. So again, free for base circuits, but if you do want to do like extra shots beyond the limitations that we put in place, or if you're sick of waiting in our line and you want to jump to the front of the line, you can pay for either of those. Also, know, Ryan, you added some new throttling features around like the organization level. What's the new throttling that you had added?
Yeah, currently an organization could run up to have up to 10 jobs running at a time in order to try to not clog things up too much. And that way, you know, users could get in fairly as well as... Yeah, just being able to kind of control and limit where we need to place limits. And that way we spend the right amount of budget and that way we can continue to provide the best free quantum as we can for our users.
Cool, sounds good. Yeah. And the other thing that I'm super excited about with the payment processing is, if you think about Subnet 63, which we have a different section for, that's going to be about submitting your innovations that go into a system, validators run your code, make sure that it does what you think it does, and then you get paid a reward if you unlock the next milestone. And in that world, our intention will be to actually collect a fee for the submission of your projects. And that will actually be collected, again, outside of the BitTensor ecosystem, because a lot of the people that will be targeting for that aren't going to be the type of people who are willing to take risky, dabble in the risky affairs of cryptocurrency. And so e-commerce will be easily transferable into that when we get to adding those features into Open Quantum 2.
Cool, next, we'll talk a little bit about Qiskit, but before we do that, I wanna show you guys a video that was already played on Twitter. This was published on Twitter, I think this week, maybe last week. But this is basically how the base library works. We actually operate in Python. You register and grab an SDK key from us, but then once you have the SDK key, most users are actually gonna be running this stuff through Python. So they can just import the credentials from their key, they import the Open Quantum SDK, and then they can, no matter what framework they're operating in, they can use our horizontal base SDK to run their circuits. But it's not particularly integrated, and so there's sort of a lot of lines of code that you have to add. This is fetching the backend, now it's setting up the configuration for where you wanna do it. Above it was setting up the licensing and kind of plumbing the authentication stuff altogether. Now it is directly submitting a job from a file path that has a QASM file, which is, you know, normally people are sort of interacting with the circuit in Python, not just having it written to a file. We show that you can see the job running with the base SDK and once that job has completed,
you can see what the results are on the website. But obviously you can also pull the results back in. But it's sort of this like outside of your thing, you know, calling to download the job and get the JSON. And so like you can imagine how that would integrate into anything because it's basically like you compose your quantum algorithm, these QASM files. You can force your QASM file to go into open quantum. You can download the results and then presumably in most frameworks you would then load the results into the framework that you were using to do your sort of post-processing on them. And so the Qiskit SDK is going to show you how that works in a much more integrated way. Although, let's see here. OK, so the Qiskit version of the SDK. So this is just running first no open quantum. This is just how you do it in Qiskit. So in a super fast way, we're just executing all of the cells in an existing Qiskit notebook showing that with that really small circuit, you could simulate that using the simulator as it is. So now what we're going is we're going to go through, and I'll rewind it just a little bit, we're going to go through and make the modifications necessary to run this thing on a real quantum computer instead of just running it in Qiskit. And so the first thing that we do is we get rid of this backend that they had and the noise model that they had. And instead, we're going to import open quantum. We're then going to set up a lot of the basic stuff, telling it to list the organizations to prepare that for later. And we're going to set up the backend using, in this case, Rigetti's quantum computer through Open Quantum. Transpile it as we always did. We're going to set some parameters. We require, in Open Quantum, we require you to decorate your job with a little bit of metadata that helps enrich the data set that we're building behind the scene.
We're also going to again specify the backend class that we want to be running on. Here's the categories and subcategories. And then once you have that metadata set up, then you simply go in. In this case, we're not going to need any of this code because we're going to run on OpenQuantum backend instead of in Qiskit. We're going to import the sampler, which follows the exact same interface and completely plugs into Qiskit, except this is the OpenQuantum version. We specify the backend that we had above. And now that job runs on a quantum computer until it's done and then natively within Qiskit. You could see that at the very end, that was a little bit hard to spot it. Within Qiskit without ever leaving it, the same post-processing that you would have done to plot the results are plotted totally seamlessly within Qiskit. So essentially there's like three blocks of code that you need to change from the Qiskit version into the open quantum version. And you just leave the rest of your code the same. You don't have to like rewrite it or anything. And so we're really trying to meet the user where they are, limit the barriers to adoption. And so far, we've seen relatively good reception.
Okay, so why Qiskit? Well, Qiskit actually has like a 70% market share. This is information from the Unitary Foundation. I have the link down here if anybody's interested. These guys are super cool. They do a whole bunch of things, but one of the things they do every year is survey thousands of quantum developers asking them what technology they're currently using and what they plan on using next year. And in the latest results, yeah, you can see that Qiskit has 70% market share. They also are the top three items because for some reason in this survey, they broke out Qiskit AER and Qiskit IBM's transpiler. But yeah, more than a, I would say more than 70% market share.
The next guy after them you'll notice is Penny Lane, which has about a 30% market share followed by Nvidia that has about a 16% market share. And the other cool thing about Qiskit, and I think one of the reasons, like so one of the reasons it certainly has a huge market share is because it's been around for a very long time and it's by IBM. The other reason it has a really big market share is because they've built like a lot of stuff on top of Qiskit. So you can think about like finance is one of the big use cases in quantum. Well, Qiskit actually has a Qiskit finance toolkit where they have pre-built examples to do things like portfolio optimization, risk analysis, all kinds of different things are set up on these industry-specific toolkits. They also have what they call Qiskit Nature, which essentially does all of the many-body simulations that you would use for quantum chemistry, stuff like that. They have Qiskit Machine Learning, which does all of the kind of QML, quantum machine learning type activities. You know, again, pre-canned, beautiful functionality out of the box. And Qiskit Optimization, optimization happens to be like one of the use cases that's the most broadly, you know, applied across industries to add value. And so with this one open quantum toolkit, essentially your users who use any of those can just plug us in and start running on quantum computers for free, which is totally wild.
All right, so with that, that is where we are at with 48 and Open Quantum. I'll be excited to see what you guys think about the progress. We also will start bringing more people into the private beta. Essentially next week, we probably will pull in a few more today, but not too many more before the weekend, so we don't add a bunch of support over the weekend. But if anybody is eager to get their hands on that, hit us up.
All right, so 63 phase two, it's underway. So we've got some updates for you guys, and I'm going to structure this in kind of like the good news, bad news kind of way. And then there's also some silver lining to talk about. So the good news is we said at the last qBitTensor Labs live that we'd be routing all owner emission into these prize pools. And ever since we said that, we've been doing that, including the emissions from the weekend leading up to the Monday. Today we transferred this week's owner emission, which was 10,000 alpha or 44,000 US dollars. That puts the total prize pool at this point at 40,000 alpha or roughly equivalent at today's price is $275,000 USD, which is actually like, I mean, to be fair, an amazing prize pool.
And it's been really cool because like the team is excited to transfer. I mean, it's like owner emissions take out of our wallet, put into wallet for participants of the network and the team's not even like weird about it. People are excited to be giving away this owner emission in the current stage that we're at. Okay. So the bad news is, the validators saw the change that we put out to redirect the minor emission into this prize wallet and they decided to coordinate to start burning the minor emission instead of routing it to the prize pool. So all of the minor emission that should have been going into the prize pool has just been burning instead. Now, why would they do that? Well, actually, I think it comes from a place of really good intentions. Basically, if you imagine yourself in the shoes of the validator,
I don't really know the humans on the other side of this code, but they just push out a thing that says I'm supposed to redirect all my minor emissions into a wallet that they have custody of. Like, that seems fishy. So if I was a validator, I probably also would have had the same initial reaction that they did. Totally understandable. We are working with them to get through that. That may be something that we can get through just socially. It may also be something that we have to get through
by pretty steep technical changes in order to achieve it. But don't worry, we're working on it. To sort of quantify the impact of that, the amount of alpha that's been burned at this point is 26,000 alpha, or roughly equivalent to 110,000 US dollars. That initially might be like shocking and seem terrible, like because, hey, we could have prize pools that are worth 285,000 USD instead of 175 USD.
But there's a silver lining to that, which is if you are a DTAO holder, like the alphanomics on the validators deciding to burn all of that alpha is actually great, right? Because all of the owner emission is going into these prize pools. So we can't sell it. We transparently list the values of those on our website. Everybody knows what the keys are, right? There would be huge reputational damage if we started doing funny stuff with it. So like that money is safe and there's no sell pressure from that. The minor emissions burned actually creates this mechanical upward pressure on price because you're removing alpha, but the tau still goes into the pool. In the meantime, I would look at this as like it's a systemic social thing that we're going to have to get over to get to where we want to be, but that's a really good spot to be in if you're a DTAO holder watching this unfold as the prize pools are still growing with owner emission and the alphanomics are pretty solid because you know there's like no systemic sell pressure but there is systemic upward price pressure.
All right, so what are we doing next about that? We do have, like we have like layers of plans starting from like a very simple implementation that would be really low impact all the way up to like essentially doing all of this in network, like in the Bittensor network. So like actually having the validators be the ones who are actively validating, show them what all the challenges are in advance, you know, work out how to route that money in a way where the validators potentially even have some
control over when that gets issued. But we are hoping to kind of get through that in as lean of a way as possible with the validators. And we're super encouraged because we continue to see things from Const and other leaders in the BitTensor ecosystem where they're praising the subnets that are doing this thing, this type of approach. And I really liked this post from the other day that said, our stance should be, do whatever you want as long as you're not cheating TAO emission, and then let the investors decide. And so, yeah, we love that narrative. Also, if we were random people first showing up on scene trying to do something like that, I think it would be 100% justified to just burn the emissions. I do feel like we've put a lot of reputation on the line. And so hopefully we can get them to come around with as little impact to the plan as possible. And we do also have a plan C, which involves actually a relatively crazy way to do this without the validators, which sounds nuts, but it would essentially involve us just permanently funding prize pools through just a portion of owner emission. And so like, we're, mean, we're committed to making this thing work. We'll do it as cleanly as possible, but we'll make sure that we get to the point where this is delivering on the original vision no matter what.
Okay, so last, TauFlow. TauFlow, one of the things I'll sort of start with is saying it's cool to see a lot of the like systems in the ecosystem starting to publish TauFlow, but they're making it really easy for people to do analysis now on like how will things be when everything is 100% moved over to TauFlow. And so I wanted to share some perspective with you guys on that, which is that if you look at the last 24 hours, well, this was taken yesterday, so presumably it's similar, but this was a snapshot from yesterday. Quantum compute was number one out of all the subnets in terms of Tauflow in the last 24 hours. Quantum innovate was number three. And if you looked at Tauflow rankings over the last 30 days, quantum compute and quantum innovate were also both in the top five. And so if we were moved to a situation where 100% of the
emissions was based on TauFlow, we would be today, essentially the number three and the number four subnets in terms of emission, which is pretty amazing. That's a pretty amazing result. And so probably people would just assume that we love TauFlow and we're super happy with it. We totally appreciate why we're doing TauFlow. Our modeling has showed that it may be a little bit challenging for a lot of subnets in the future. And so we love TauFlow in the short term. We think that it's going to do a really good job of hardening Bittensor and making the quality really good. And it's going to put a lot of positive price pressure on all of the subnets alphas to make it a much more attractive place for outside TAO holders to start staking on subnets. So we love all of those things. We think all of those things are really good. We also do have some concerns. And so if you sort of say, is TauFlow a long-term sustainable option? Right now, we're going to take the stance of saying maybe, but we think there's sort of some systemic issues. And I would say it's more like maybe leaning slightly more towards no. And so the issues that we have right now are TauFlow does assume that a good subnet can have perpetual positive inflows, like that that's a practical thing to do. And it could become a practical thing to do. Like if all of the TAO from out in the market starts investing on subnets that actually, mean, there's still a finite supply, but like, you could imagine a world where you could actually hold this for a fairly long time. And with the positive pressure that TauFlow is creating on subnet prices, like all the charts used to be down. Now they're all sort of like flatter up. Like you can imagine that it's starting to look like a more and more attractive place for TAO to come in. And, but the truth is that like,
some of the best subnets actually have really high operating costs built into their subnets. Their miners have to spend a lot of money to do the mining, and so they have to sell. And the operators have teams of people that they're paying, and so they need to sell. And so this all works on the assumption that they can have continuous inflows where the inflows are more than those outflows.
And some of those are too big to fail, right? Like they're essentially like so big that other subnets are dependent on them. And then even if you look at like the new subnets, there's a little bit of a challenge because like if I reflect back on like our launch, there's some huge inflows at the beginning when people are trying to figure out what's going on and are trying to speculate. And then there's really big profit taking which would systemically crush your emission. And so I do think that it's probably challenging and will probably be iterated on. Our models suggest that if things stay consistent with historic behaviors, top subnets where people sort of see them as safe bets and they can attract outside institutional money will likely result in having the highest emission. Whereas the subnets that have either innovators who aren't constantly fundraising or they're subnets that actually are like, you know, not good performing will essentially bottom out and get zero emission and ultimately fail. We believe that the quantum subnets are actually both really well situated here. And again, we don't think that this is, like, I don't even, I don't think that this is a mistake. I don't think that this is, that there's anything wrong with this. I just think that there's a very likely chance that TauFlow lasts to sort of like harden the network, to put people through a little bit of challenges to see how it works and there's likely to be an iteration would be my best guess.
All right, next. TauFlow was just kind of talking about the money and mechanics. So I thought I'd take a little dedicated section to help clear the air on some speculation. So we have noticed people picking up on the fact that people like Siam pumped a lot of money in, a couple wallets have pumped a lot of money into the subnets. That is true. We have been doing an OTC-ish deal. So OTC deals are deals where you're essentially trading alpha in your subnet for US dollars. And as a part of that, you're usually providing some kind of discount. The cool thing in doing those types of deals is it avoids the downward price pressure or the tau outflow. We actually have flipped that on its head. Instead of doing OTC deals where we take US dollars and give our own alpha, we've actually been doing deals where we will attract new alpha purchases and we will match to a certain level depending on the sort of quality of the deal. And so premium investors basically get premium conditions. We offer this deal for either of the subnets, it's available for 48 or for 63. And the higher the dollar commitments, or the longer the hold commitments equals the higher matching that we do. This does have minimum deal sizes and it has minimum holding periods. It also requires like a traditional contract. So it does involve actually like getting in touch with us. We have to know who the humans are or the entities that we're transacting with. And we put the traditional contract in place. But if that is something that you are interested in, feel free to reach out. We've done this deal with some of the people that we know in the ecosystem, but there's nothing, this isn't sort of the good old boys club. We're happy to do this deal with people who are interested, who kind of meet that minimum deal size.
All right, community and Q&A. Wow, we're already at the community and Q&A. So this was a quiet little thing. Scott Aaronson, he's actually the guy that did a lot of the work, at least was certainly responsible for popularizing the Peaked Circuit work that 63's original challenge was on. I always talk about Scott Aaronson as a quantum god, but he's also what I would call a chronic realist. And what I mean is like when he speaks, everybody listens. And the reason he has that credibility is because usually he's saying things that are like much more skeptical and unhypy about quantum computing. And so when he posted this on his blog on the 13th, I was pretty blown away. It says, I now think it's a live possibility that we'll have a fault tolerant quantum computer running Shor's algorithm before the next US presidential election. So that is an intense statement from a chronic skeptic.
Big deal.
Now, yeah, totally. Now, hopefully that's commentary on quantum technology and not on the state of US politics. Like the next election will happen in three and a half years. But assuming that's what he's trying to get at, that says a lot about quantum. And so yeah, chronic realist, I think, starting to become much more bullish about the state of things, which is a really big signal. Also, I mean, this sort of lit up Twitter yesterday, but the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik, was quoted as basically saying that quantum computing, well, mean, okay, so these guys kind of made like some clickbait on this. He didn't actually like say these exact words, but through a long meandering set of conversations, he basically said that there's a real chance that quantum computers break Ethereum and Bitcoin by 2028. I actually think he's being a little bit too bullish on those timelines. I don't think it's 2028. I do think that if, you know, if IonQ's roadmap holds, 2029 would be the right time. I think IBM's roadmap is very believable. If that's the case, I would say 2030, 2031. I think right now the skeptics think 2035. And so yeah, QBitE.
All right, questions from the community. This is on subnet 48. It says, what's the sustainable real world demand for quantum workloads on subnet 48? Let me hit that. I'll hit that one in a second. The next one says, what's the competitive advantage that prevents others from replicating this? And how is the experience from the 1,000 workloads so far for users and for the subnet owner? OK, so.
Competitive advantage, obviously, nobody knows how to do this at the types of discounts that we're able to provide purely because of the innovation of the BitTensor ecosystem. And if you're a quantum person, that is our competitive advantage. If you're a BitTensor person and you wanted to create quantum compute too, there would be massive challenges in them getting into the quantum ecosystem. So I think, mean, like, I think there is a competitive advantage. I think once we do the land grab and we have every quantum user in the world using open quantum, it's going to be very hard to take us out of that space, even if we reduce from just pure free quantum compute into like subsidized quantum compute or free quantum compute for certain situations.
Experience for the first 1,000. Man, I'm so glad that we did a private beta launch. We have, I don't know, many people, Ryan, how many people do you think we have working on this, like on 48? I would guess it's probably like seven or eight, maybe. Okay, so lots of different moving parts and it's all built in an extra complex way because we actually submit these jobs to validators who submit them to miners. The miners go and execute them, feed them back to the validators, feed them back to Open Quantum.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, there have been a couple of hiccups along the way that the team has had to debug. We also ran into a funny situation where, like, you know, the way we were talking to the QPUs, we had some corner cases, some bugs. So it's been really, I think, valuable to, like, harden the system while we're in this free private beta. But they've gone pretty well so far. Ryan, what's your thoughts?
Yeah, you know, it's good to have that kind of like ramp up in terms of users because, it definitely is good to spend, you know, some time, you know, triaging, looking into experience issues people might be having, being able to add the last little bits and features that we think we need for a full public launch. So, yeah, I mean, it's been extremely useful to have those first 2000 circuits come through and be able to really put the system through its paces and work out things with validators and miners too.
Yeah, you know, and I think like, so the way that the public dashboard works, I guess it shows like the last seven days and then it shows the last 24 hours. But I bet people could like go through the last 24 hours and like figure out when we had like defects that we're working on. Cause there'll be these little blocks of time where it's like jobs get submitted, but we can't process them because you know, we're in the middle of fixing some funny corner case. Yeah.
Little blips, but I mean, we're squashing things every day and, you know, working towards a near perfect system.
Yeah, totally. OK, so on that first part of the question, what is the sustainable real world demand for quantum computers? I'm actually going to go to a slide that I had in the last qBitTensor Labs Live. And you see these screens in the background. I'm going to zoom way in on a version of what cycles through those screens. And I'm going to call out a couple numbers for you. So this is a dashboard that is available at IBM's headquarters. And it shows you some crazy data. The first data that it shows you is that IBM's quantum computers have executed like three trillion quantum circuits. So that's big. I mean, that's huge, right? On top of that, you can see on the right-hand side, right now it says that the current queue for this one quantum computer is 332. Now I asked them like, do those queues ever go to zero? And they said, never. Now actually, if you look at these charts it looks like they do go to zero sometimes so they were speaking in hyperbole but basically they have a continuously executing their quantum computers and they have a lot of quantum computers. This is just like one of the systems. This cycles through like all the different computers and shows all of theirs and it would always show queues between like you know a few hundred to a few thousand things in the queue. And so I mean I think the answer is there is like, they are such a scarce resource that there is essentially unlimited demand for it. Like there's more demand than you could actually service the need for today.
What else is cool about it is that there are quantum computers out there that are not operated by the quantum computer manufacturers. Most of them are operated by like government labs or, you know, sort of like private public collaborations and sort of have like some specific purposes that they are intended to be used for. But there are also a couple leading companies that have started purchasing them with the intention of using them for their own advantage, but then trying to find people to time share them. And so we are working deals to make sure that we can actually start adding more capacity on the supply side once we launch and demand starts to get really high.
Okay, so next questions. We're also on 48. We'll take this one up here at the top. It says, yeah, what about the staking? When is the staking going to be ready? Ryan, I'll give you that question actually. I don't know. When is the staking going to be ready?
It's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. What an unexpected timeline. You know, I think we're really close. We're just working through a little bit of the design right now. I would expect in the next few weeks we might, you know, probably the next podcast here we'll be talking about it, I'm sure.
Nothing like putting the head of the dev team on the spot...
Yeah, cool. And what I will say also about that is there's another question, I guess, in another section about pricing of 63 versus 48 and how they should relate to each other. But the cool thing about that staking feature is we're actually going to have the ability to dynamically determine how much stake on which subnet results in how many credits being added to your account. And so that'll give us a little bit of an incentive mechanism to kind of like encourage, you know, a little bit more, you know, money to go to the subnets that sort of need a little bit more.
Okay, so the next question was from Neve. It was, how do the likes of IonQ, Rigetti, IBM, and others view BitTensor? Honestly, I mean, for the most part, the conversations don't go deep enough. They find out that you have access to dollars and they're happy to sell you stuff. IonQ, Rigetti, that's true. Actually, IBM, a little bit worried about what their long-term strategy is going to be on quantum. I do think that they present as a very open ecosystem right now. And at the software level, that has historically been true. But they are not keen to have resellers of their systems and if in the event that they do, they still want like everything centralized through IBM. So I'm not 100% sure those guys will be quite as open to it as others, but for the most part, people are excited to sell quantum compute time to people that have access to capital.
How deep have they explored Subnet 63 for innovation and have they used it to then execute jobs on open quantum? Okay, yeah, those IonQ, Rigetti, IBM, they won't be the initial intersection with quantum innovate. That'll be sort of like higher up in the supply chain. It'll be people working on more foundational problems. Ultimately, people are gonna be really excited about that. I think some of those people are gonna wanna put their names on challenges. They'll wanna
collaborate on challenges, but we'll need to launch the initial challenges to sort of like have the idea how they're understandable before we try to engage with those guys on that. But yeah, good question. Okay, and then the last one was, this might be a really stupid question. If I was a miner and had to work on solving algorithms, et cetera, and only get paid if I'm the first to solve the issue, why would I mine the subnet? It's a big risk for the miner. What am I missing? Yeah. That's right, yeah, it's a risk for the miner for sure. So the miners, like what we initially are setting this up for is to have substantial rewards for unlocking milestones. But if you're working on something and you can't unlock the milestone, then you don't get paid. Yeah, that's true. You definitely should not mine this if you don't think you have a path to achieving the milestone.
The types of users that we're trying to attract to this are not going to be as much your traditional Bittensor miners, though some have shown in the first manifestation of 63 that they probably have the capacity to play at that level. Most of the people here, and the whole structure of this is going to be to try to attract people from outside, where a lot of this is actually like thought work. It's not necessarily just intense compute resources. It's sort of thought work to better optimize the solutions. And if that's not something that you can do, you definitely don't want to waste your time mining this. We want to bring really high quality talent to BitTensor.
And actually interesting, I don't know if that slipped onto the SN48 slide, but that's definitely a 63. So my bad on that. We are switching to 63 here though. I'll hit, okay, JB rings over on the left. Can you guys go in depth on what 63 success could look like. Are 63 prize pools gonna be sized relative to the IP predetermined value? How will outside investment be used to support development on these methods that 63 is aimed at, especially if the outside party is a partner in the effort, any partners interested? Okay, so I'm gonna say I understand the first half of that question and I probably don't quite understand the second half, so I might need clarification. We can hit it up next time. But on 63,
So there will be layers of success. I think initially simply having high dollar amounts published with the challenges is in and of itself going to be a success. Say hypothetically we totally botched it and we designed challenges that are way too hard and nobody can solve them, but we have on Open Quantum a listing of these milestones that you can unlock and they have big prize pools behind them. That alone is going to be wildly successful. Think about, okay, so think about like at that layer of success, no sell pressure on 63 because the minor emission fills up these pools until they're full and then it burns. If people aren't winning the prize, then they're not selling that emission. But media, quantum media is gonna go crazy about hundreds of thousands of dollars of prizes available, which is going to attract more and more users into open quantum. And the whole system is going to, so call it like failure is basically success, which is crazy, right?
Okay, next layer of success is people start solving the milestones. So as people solve the milestones, they're going to be submitting their source code to us in a way where we can license it. Once people unlock the first milestone, we get to make a big splash about how much money was moved and the fact that this innovation was only made possible by BitTensor. Big money moving is going to be exciting. Again, media is going to pick it up. That's going to attract more users to the system. It's going to attract more investors to the system. It will be exciting.
Success next is if we can actually license that technology out. Now I am going to say there's a very strong chance because we need to get a challenge launched relatively quickly because of the validator pressure and them burning all of the minor emission, that the initial challenge will probably be a little bit less valuable on the IP perspective, which will just be in the interest of getting the idea out there. But we'll be adding more and more valuable challenges over time with more and more opportunity to license IP. And if things go according to plan, the second challenge is actually essentially going to be very much aligned with the entire reason that billions of dollars in federal funding
have gone into quantum computing. And so I do think that challenge number two could have very good opportunity for IP licensing.
Okay, the outside investment one I didn't quite follow, but JB, I'm sure you'll clarify that and we can catch that next time or follow up offline. Okay, Nova also said, quick question. We seem fairly confident that the new 63 tokenomics will be of benefit. How can you be sure that the DTAO tokenomics emissions will also support and thicken the liquidity?
Okay, so, I mean, if you think about how this all works, there's like buyers and sellers. Most subnets operate on the context that like the mining operations are very computationally intense. They come with very high costs. The miners are happy to spend that money because they're making a little bit more money than that in their reward, hopefully. But then in order to cover those costs, they need to basically sell that, turn that into US dollars, pay the bill for their compute costs, and then continue on. They have some margin that they've made, but it's relatively small. But it comes with systemic sell pressure, unless you happen to be one of the rare subnets where people are just convinced that it's going to be to the moon and they decide that they want to hold your alpha instead of paying off their compute bill, which is a pretty dangerous risk.
By moving 63 into this new mode, we're removing all of that systemic sell pressure. So that's really positive. We get to attract TAO in because this is going to be very high visibility. Like these prizes will be marketed like crazy. And so if you start seeing marketing happen from the quantum insider, the quantum computing report, things like that pointing to these things, as opposed to just a little bit of noise within the echo chamber of Bittensor, like that's going to attract a lot of attention also. Then if we actually can license these things, so again, like third layer of success, that buys alpha, holds alpha, that even further drives this positive. So mean, yeah, I feel really good that we've essentially eliminated the systemic problems with the tokenomics and with the emissions, and there's a lot of upside, if that makes sense, Nova.
All right, what do we have? Excited and I have one request. We saw what the market for quantum compute looked like in the previous show. How can we see what the revenue estimates look like for quantum software IP? Yeah, that's a harder one. That's a way harder one to quantify. So I don't know if any of you guys have started startup companies in the past, but one of the funny things most people will tell you is you need to have a market model. It's going to be total bullshit. Like you need to have it. You need to have a very specific reason why you built it that way. It needs to be very like evidence driven and mathematically correct, but like, it's going to be guaranteed to be wrong. I think that this is absolutely in that category. I think this is going to be highly dependent on how the community delivers on the problems, how effective we can be at licensing those out. I mean, this could be very, very big. It could also just be a layer one or a layer two success. OK. But yeah, we'll see what we can do to spend a little bit more time in a future episode building that. But yeah, probably not something to build in the day before.
OK. And the last one, man, that's a good question. OK. So last one is, I might as well ask, since it's on everyone's mind, does your team believe subnet 63 is only half as valuable as subnet 48? I don't believe that. In fact, I think we've seen massive appreciation on both of those subnets. In the last week, I think both of them have made a lot of appreciation. It is interesting that 63 is trading at about half of 48. I think I would say on that that really, like we all go and we try to say that everything is based on like economics and it's based on tokenomics and it's based on revenue potential and stuff like that. In reality, a huge amount of the alpha price is really based on like, if people are excited about the idea or not, if people understand the idea and if they're excited about it.
And I think, honestly, I think probably the biggest reason for the price difference between the two
is that 48 is just like, it's really easy to understand, right? You run quantum computer, period, right? And 63 is like, we are going to fund innovation through prize pools and license it back. It's a more confusing concept. Which one am I personally more excited about? Kind of 63, but that really has to do with the geek in me, that really wants to see the quantum industry move a lot faster. And both of these subnets are going to support that in a really strong way. But I think the people vote with their TAO. And yeah, right now, probably because of the simplicity of the story would be my guess, 48 is 2x 63. I don't know, Ryan, your thoughts? I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, really two different things. And that's sort of why there's two subnets at this time. And it's solving two different types of problems. One is industry problems you can't really see or can't really understand. And then there's openquantum.com. And it's something we could show off. We've, you know, sexy screen grabs and features and a lot of excitement behind it, but I think both have really good value in terms of trying to move the needle for quantum. And that's the real purpose here is moving the needle for quantum, bringing in outsiders into Bittensor and really providing value that is sustainable.
Yeah, and I actually, you know, the way you said that, you know, it's like, it's a thing that you see in as tangible. Actually, I don't want to like design or like strategize live here, but like, I do wonder if the simple act of publishing the challenges to open quantum would significantly move the needle for 63. Now, 63 is actually positioned, like it's actually positioned really well right now, so I'm not like, there's nothing wrong with it. But I wonder if like, that wouldn't help codify the concept for a lot of people and simplify it and just make it, you know, make it so that the people who are interested in innovation, first and foremost, sort of see what it is and understand it.
Yeah, okay. There were a couple questions on exchanges. I had to work with the team to make sure I knew what these things were. Thank you for calling these out. We don't currently have any concrete plans to work with any of these as we've been like exploring them ourselves. We've sort of noticed some things that we really like about the exchanges in terms of like being able to access additional liquidity and stuff like that. There are also some downsides just in terms of like how sporadic the liquidity is. Like, do these people actually know what your subnet does? Are they investing because they believe in you or are they just investing because they like the trend and they like the way that the chart looks and stuff like that. And so we have taken the action to connect with a couple of the people that are sort of much more Bittensor oriented to sort of like really understand the pros and cons of these and to come up with a plan on it. But yeah, appreciation for bringing these points up.
And then sentiment, I think this is probably our last slide, if I'm not mistaken, but I always love this slide. Actually, I always loved this slide. One of my guys puts it together and I'm always worried that he's just like cherry picking the good things, but I was happy. There's actually a kind of like a dig down here on us on one of them. So that made me feel like good about it. But yeah, lots of positive things. People seem to be excited about the team, the work that we're doing.
I don't remember giggling about running QPUs on Bittensor, but I think it is freaking awesome that we're running QPUs on Bittensor. But yeah, like things seem to be really solid. We're also getting a lot of like positive attention on the socials, you know, Const reposting, a lot of visibility on that. Yeah, this is bullish. Yeah. Okay. So the one doubt, the one that I saw in here that was a criticism was, as far as I can tell, the only real threat to quantum subnets being absolutely massive are the fact that they are actually QPU hardware, and that isn't decentralized enough. And actually, I will address that point because I think that's actually a good point. That's true. There's only a few hundred quantum computers on the planet. And so, yeah, that is a fairly centralized resource.
We are using decentralized mechanisms to get them out there. And we're trying to take the ones that are currently centralized and out of use and get them out of those and into the hands of other people. And so I think even though that's 100% true that these are centralized resources, we are doing a pretty good job of using the decentralized mechanisms of Bittensor to democratize them and bring anybody into quantum, which we really couldn't have done otherwise. So yeah.
But yeah, overall, bullish. Appreciate all the support as always, guys. Thank you for continuing with us on this journey. And yeah, if anything we said here does not resonate, hit us up and let's talk about it more. All right, thanks everybody. We'll talk soon.