qBitTensor Labs Live — January 8, 2026

In our latest qBitTensor Labs Live session, we covered updates on Subnet 48 and Subnet 63, the broader Bittensor ecosystem, Q1 goals, and community questions. Here are the key highlights.

Technical Glitches and Fresh Starts

We kicked off the session dealing with some streaming issues courtesy of our platform and the Colorado Quantum Incubator's internet. After about 22 minutes of debugging on production (everyone's favorite pastime), we got audio and video stabilized and started fresh. Transparency with our audience matters to us, even when it means admitting things are broken live on air.

Private Execution on Subnet 48

We launched Private Execution on Open Quantum. When we first showed Open Quantum in the early days, you may have seen this in the screenshots, but we initially launched with only free public execution that runs entirely through Bittensor. Public execution requires users to agree that we can use their data in an anonymized, aggregated open dataset. Private Execution changes that -- enterprise users and researchers building hardcore IP can now run jobs without any public exposure of their data. This opens up an entirely new market segment. Most importantly, Private Execution is revenue generating. There is zero free private execution; users must enter their credit card and pay. We have already generated hundreds of dollars in revenue in just the early days.

White Paper on Archive

White papers are a huge part of the scientific community, and we are not talking about a PDF on a website. We are publishing a formal white paper on Archive, the leading system for sharing research papers, with a target publication date of January 13th. When this launches, we will update the Open Quantum terms of use to require that anyone who uses the public tier and publishes work using it must cite our paper. This creates a virtuous cycle: researchers use Open Quantum, cite our paper, new researchers discover us through those citations, which brings in more scientific users and continues to build legitimacy.

Linked Wallet Credits

We received a ton of questions about this, so we spent extra time walking through the details. Linked wallet credits will start appearing in accounts on Friday, January 9th, based on calculations run at midnight UTC on January 1st. The goal is to bring outside capital into Bittensor -- if a user wants more free compute on Open Quantum, one of the easiest ways is to invest in our subnet, creating a recurring stream of credits that land in their account every month.

The formula works as follows: total credits equal the USD value of median Subnet 63 alpha holdings over the period, plus the USD value of median Subnet 48 alpha holdings over the period, multiplied by the monthly yield (currently 1%), normalized for the percentage of the period the wallet was linked. We walked through a detailed example on the broadcast and will have a review period of about a week between calculation and distribution to catch any edge cases.

Subnet 63 Validator Challenges

We want to be transparent about the validator situation on Subnet 63. We have gone through several iterations of designs based on validator feedback, each time asking whether a new approach would earn their support. Each time, new requirements have emerged, which has made it difficult to make progress. The latest requirement mandates fully autonomous validation with zero human review.

We now have plans that fully comply with everything the validators have suggested, and we are executing on them. Our new strategy is to build and ship rather than continue seeking pre-approval. There are many subnets -- some excellent, some questionable -- whose code the validators run without this level of scrutiny. If we build something that complies with every stated requirement and they still object, then the system itself is broken. We are confident the ecosystem will get behind us.

Pivot Toward Classical Computing Challenges

We had originally planned to launch with a Shor's challenge, which we believe will get a lot of attention. However, Shor's has a problem: you can brute-force factorization at larger scales than current quantum computers or simulators can handle, and without human code review (which the validators have ruled out), someone could simply brute-force it and pass. So we are pivoting the initial challenge to incentivize progress on classical approaches first. The idea is to establish how good classical methods can get, which moves the finish line for how good Shor's has to be and protects us from someone innovating in the classical space and surpassing quantum results.

Miners will submit source code that compiles into a Docker image run by validators. The first challenge is an N-bit semi-prime with a fixed time limit. After completion, the next milestone will be N+2 bits. We will not disclose N or the time limit until launch.

We are also bringing back peaked circuits, which have gained significant traction since our original Subnet 63 implementation. IBM has highlighted them as one of the best ways to benchmark quantum computers, and Scott Aaronson discussed them on the main stage at Q2B. We will provide miners with peaked circuits just outside the previously solvable range, increasing complexity with each milestone.

Bittensor and TauFlow

We continue to hold the same position on TauFlow: we ran the math, identified problems, and believe there are enough smart people running Bittensor that it will work itself out. Our key concerns are that TauFlow makes it difficult for subnets with high operating costs, allows deep-pocketed TAU holders to effectively buy emission, and gives speculation and financial manipulation outsized influence on emission. Bursts of speculative excitement actually hurt -- when speculators leave, the EMA downside hits after the upside has already worn off.

We are engaging with OTC buyers and DATs to inject longer-hold liquidity and eliminate mechanical sell pressure through recurring miner emission purchases. We believe TauFlow will evolve, and we have confidence in the Open Tensor Foundation and Const to iterate toward something better.

Q1 Goals

For Subnet 63, we plan to launch the factoring challenge and the peaked circuits challenge, secure one or more challenge sponsors from outside partners, integrate everything into the Open Quantum platform, and potentially accumulate up to a million dollars in prize pools. We also hope to award our first $50,000 in prizes to miners this quarter.

For Subnet 48, Private Execution is live, linked wallet credits are launching, and we plan to add at least three additional QPUs -- including a brand new QPU purchased by a partner in the Midwest. We also hope to offer on-demand hosted simulation, add Penny Lane support (and possibly Cirq), and introduce referral links as another way to earn Spark credits. Our user growth target is 2,000 to 10,000, with 2,000 as a practical goal and 10,000 on the optimistic end. We are also pursuing a substantial co-marketing opportunity with one of the biggest names in the ecosystem.

So as always, you know, the usual disclaimers, these are ideas, not promises, not investment or legal advice. Don't weaponize it or use it against us. And if you agree to that, we're cool and we'll keep doing these things. So let's roll. We're going to do some updates on 48 and 63. We got a little bit of cool meat to talk about there. We're to talk about Bittensor in general. There's kind of a lot moving with Bittensor these days. We're then going to talk about our Q1 goals. And then last, we'll take some community input as we always do.

All right, Subnet 48. We launched a cool thing called Private Execution. You might have seen this in the screenshots when we showed Open Quantum in like the early days, but when we launched, we only launched with the free public execution. That all happens 100% through Bittensor. We have now launched Private Execution. So what is Private Execution and why is it valuable? Well, first it's private. So what researchers and anybody using Open Quantum is giving up when they do the free public execution is they're essentially agreeing that we can use their data, that we can use it in an open data set in an anonymized aggregated way. But if you're trying to develop like hardcore IP, you don't want that. And so this opens up a whole new market, which is enterprise users, which is really where the money's at.

Also, okay, so I'll try to be concise about this, but white papers are a huge part of the scientific community. This isn't like a white paper like I generated a PDF and put it on my website. We're talking about actually publishing a white paper on Archive, which is the leading system for sharing research papers. That white paper is going to be out there in a way that it can be cited by anybody as they do their work. But why this is valuable is because we actually are going to change the terms of use when we launch this to require that anybody who uses Open Quantum in the public tier and publishes work using it actually has to cite the paper. And so what that does is it first continues to create like additional legitimacy for us, but it also creates this virtuous cycle in that as people use Open Quantum for real research, they cite our paper, people learn about our solution as they're reading other cool unrelated research. It legitimizes that, it brings in more scientific users. We're super excited about it and it should be published on Archive on January 13th.

All right, linked wallet credits. So, seen a ton of questions about this on everywhere. We'll spend a little bit more time. I won't go quite as high caffeinated fast through this. But the gist of it is that linked wallet credits are going to start showing up in your accounts this Friday. They will be based on calculations that were done on January 1st, midnight UTC.

That's going to be multiplied times the monthly yield, which is currently set at 1%. So 1% of everything you hold, you make in credits each month. And then that's going to be normalized for the amount of the period that you had your wallet linked. And so what that means is, as an example, if you have a period that's one month long, you know, I call it December 1st to January 1st, with a monthly yield of 1%, you linked your wallet on 12.5. That gives you a percentage period linked. Doing the math on this, I'm pretty sure 76% is wrong, though, I don't know. Like, I think that was just a mock-up value that was plugged in the slides. Say the median alpha holdings for 63 over that period was 2,000, and the alpha price at midnight was $2.46 USD, and you had a median holding on 48 of 1,000, and the price at midnight UTC was $2.64. Now those aren't the actual prices at midnight UTC either, but your total credits in this point, plugging all of those numbers, would be $2,000 for your 63 times the price, 1,000 times 48 times the price, times the 1% yield, times, in this case, 76% was your holdings, would be 57 credits. Okay, I'm gonna guess there's gonna be some questions on that.

All right, Subnet 63. So Subnet 63, we're super excited about it. We think it has like amazing potential. A lot of you guys do too. There's still a lot of interest from everybody in it. We also wanna make sure, like one of our things is we're not here to like hide things from people. We're here to be as open as we possibly can without creating opportunities to be exploited by being open.

And so on 63, what I first want to talk about is validator troubles. So we've kind of alluded to this in the past, but I just want to be super clear about it. We've gone through several iterations at this point. So we launched updated code that would just redirect all minor emissions to our prize pools and the validators said no way. Now we can see why they did that. They're trying to, you know, like if we were grifters and if they didn't know who we were and if we hadn't already shown

We've done that again and again. And this whole moving of the goalposts has made it really complicated to make progress on this. So the latest requirement that came in basically necessitated that there needs to be full autonomous, zero human, zero quantum physicists reviewing this stuff, has to be 100% facilitated by the validators. And that's forced us to adjust plans one more time. But at this point, we do have plans that fully comply with everything that they have suggested, and we are now executing on it. We actually have not run those plans by them because our new strategy on this is to just do instead of ask. There's like, there's so many subnets that do awesome stuff. There are also a lot of subnets that are like very, very sus and the validators run their code. So, I mean, if we build this all out, having complied with everything that they do, you know, and they still object to it, then the system's broken at that point. So our strategy at this point is if we keep asking for feedback, just like when you ask a lawyer to redline something, they're definitely gonna redline it if you give them the opportunity to. We decided that we're just gonna do the right thing and we think that the ecosystem will get behind us and support us. So we've got a solid plan, we're executing on it, we should be having really exciting updates on that in the next couple of qBitTensor Labs Live as we get ready to complete it and launch it.

So giving you guys a little bit more on how that impacts some of the challenges. I don't think we've actually disclosed what the challenges were going to be in the past, but we will disclose now what we're planning for it. So one of the plans was to launch with a Shor's challenge, a really strong Shor's challenge. We think it's going to get a lot of attention when we launch that.

The way these milestones are gonna work is the miners are going to have to submit source code that compiles into a Docker image that then gets run by the validators. And the first challenge will be an N-bit semi-prime, and they'll have a time period that they have to finish it in. After that's completed, the next one will be N plus 2, so essentially two bits larger. And we may adjust the number of hours, but we may keep the hours the same depending on sort of the approach that we see taken with the first milestone.

We won't tell you N or X until we launch this challenge. The next is peaked circuits. So peaked circuits are sort of old reliable for us. They provided a great challenge for the original manifestation of 63. Since that time, we've actually seen them continue to gain steam. We've seen IBM talk about them as one of the only good ways of benchmarking quantum computers.

But the fundamentals remain the same, regardless of design changes and the challenges. The fundamentals are that we want to open this up to real quantum researchers through openquantum.com. We want to use all of the eyeballs that we're gaining on Open Quantum and funnel them into these challenges. We want these to be submittable through the Open Quantum website or through a CLI that we are going to provide. There are going to be fees to submit. After we said that in a qBitTensor Labs Live, somebody called out revenue, which is true. Also, I do want to say that our intention is to use the fees that we charge to submit to buy the subnet alpha.

We do want to use leaderboards and status tracking on Open Quantum so that everybody can see what's happening there and where their submissions are. We are planning to make payouts available both as alpha or as US dollars, again, making it so that real quantum researchers who don't dabble in crypto can participate. All of this will be dual licensed, allowing us to also sell the IP and license it out to anybody that wants to use it. And at this point, even with the fluctuations and changes in schedule and changes in challenges, we still have interested and engaged partners in both the quantum and crypto ecosystem who are excited to help promote these, put their names on these challenges, to really try to

All right, Bittensor. Guys, we still doing okay? Is it still coming through all right? All right, I got some thumbs up. That drives me crazy that we spent 22 minutes wasting your guys' time because of Riverside earlier. All right, so there's all kinds of stuff playing out in the Bittensor community, especially on like TauFlow. We continue to hold the same position on TauFlow that we always held, which was we did the math, we ran some scenarios, and there are some problems with TauFlow, and we also believe that there's enough smart people running Bittensor that it's gonna work itself out. The number of times we've been in situations where people misstep, and you know they're misstepping, but you can't talk them into it, but they realize it because they learn, and then they sort of undo that step or they use the learnings of that step to actually make an even better step next. Like that's just how life works. Like everybody loves Bittensor. We believe in Bittensor. And because we believe in Bittensor, we believe that TauFlow will change.

So our key issues with it right now is just that it makes it difficult for subnets with high operating costs, which we originally were until we rejiggered our entire subnet plan to reduce our operating costs. Also, people with large outside capital or deep pockets with TAU can basically buy emission, which makes it very prone to corruption. It makes it so that instead of incentivizing technology innovation, we're incentivizing shady financial engineering. Also, speculation and financial manipulation have much bigger influences on emission than anything else.

Right, and so it creates problems where you just have to absolutely always be attracting new TAU to your subnet 100% of the time, or you're carefully monitoring it and injecting TAU or US dollars into TAU to avoid lowering your emission. Also, we're seeing that subnets with some 0% emission are starting to hit like the scary death spiral. Others are surviving it. I think the 0% death spiral is sort of differentiated between subnets that do real stuff and subnets that don't. But even some really good subnets have just been stuck at 0%. I mean, 48 right now is at 0%. And we're at least excited that the EMA will burn completely at some point here. And we'll see a big upside as people start seeing the value in what we're doing beyond just the smart investors that we already have. But it does create an environment where bursts of excitement are actually a bad thing. And like what you need is like, you don't want speculative investors. You want investors who believe, who stay with it, who hold your TAU or who hold your alpha.

But yeah, we believe this will change. We believe that there will be an iteration. There's going to be some learning from this. What we are doing now though, is we are engaging with OTC buyers and DATs to basically focus on two different things that are both going to help in TauFlow. One is injecting more liquidity into our subnets with longer holds. And two is eliminating mechanical sell pressure by things like agreements to buy miner emission on a recurring basis on 48. Those types of things can fundamentally work with the flow of TauFlow as opposed to sort of working against it like you might naturally do if you're just focused on innovation.

All right, so back to our subnets, Q1 goals. Subnet 63, the challenges, again, we'll launch the factoring challenge and we'll launch the peaked circuit challenge in Q1. We will have one or more challenge sponsors from outside partners who have their own platforms to promote. That will help us tremendously in terms of bringing interest into it. We will integrate this all into the Open Quantum platform in Q1. And we're hoping, depending on how quickly we can get the validators to stop burning the miner emission, that we could even have accumulated up to a million dollars in prize pools. We're also hoping that in Q1, we will have awarded our first $50,000 in prize pools to miners.

Our goal is for 48. We got Private Execution live. It calls it credit dividends, but yeah, the credit yields for linked wallets is live. We do plan to add at least three additional QPUs. This hopefully includes a brand new QPU that was just purchased by a partner in the Midwest and bringing them on board also. We also hope to have on-demand hosted simulation as an option for Subnet 48 in Q1.

And then from an outreach perspective, we do plan to increase our user base. Our goal would be to sort of get up to between 2,000 and 10,000. 10,000 is probably on the range of overly optimistic. 2,000 feels like a very practical goal. I'm hoping that we land in between those two. There's also a very substantial co-marketing opportunity with one of the biggest names in the ecosystem that we are trying to see if we can close and to onboard some of these OTC and DAT deals that we've talked about to further help the tokenomics.

All right, community and Q&A.

Are you able to give ARR estimates on 48 and 63? Okay, 48, we did do a qBitTensor Labs Live session where we talked about a market model that included recurring revenue. So maybe I'll point you back to that. That was probably two or three qBitTensor Labs Lives ago. 63, that will depend very much on how often people are submitting in terms of like the fees.

Happy New Year's team, happy New Year's. Can we please get comments in regard to emission for both subnets? What's the plan for revenue? Will we see buyback of alpha? Thank you. I think we actually hit all of those. 48 is currently at zero. We've been seeing a lot of selling. Actually, you know, we sort of have reason to believe that it's, you know, a friendly that's selling, but I think just maybe disenchanted with the ecosystem in general, but we're not 100% sure and we probably wouldn't share if we were. But we're very hopeful that that's gonna come into positive emission pretty quickly, just because we have a very valuable subnet, launched an enterprise stack on top of it with continued innovations to come with real revenue generating opportunities. In fact, we've already generated hundreds of dollars in revenue in just the early days. So yeah, we have high hopes for the emissions on that. What's interesting is that 63 is still positive emission, even despite the fact that the validators have been, you know, making that fun for us.

Elchemist, good morning, qBitTensor Labs. Can we get you guys to do AMA with the Subnet Summer? Okay, good call. I actually, and I'd love input on this from you guys. I don't know what we should be doing with podcasts right now. I sort of wish there was like a place for like subnet owners to strategize on stuff like this. So the podcasts are awesome. You want to get on them. You want to be out talking to people, getting them aware of your subnet. That is, I mean, that's a fact.

Send it in, okay, just remember. Hey, good call. Okay, so to Alchemist, good call. So one of the things I would say, there are like a couple of communities that are super active where a lot of the like really loyal qBitTensor Labs, DTOW investors hang out and talk. Do remember to leave that place and go talk at the other places. Once those communities were established, things like Discord channels on the main Bittensor community quieted down quite a bit. Like it's usually not a good sign. I think if your channels don't have chatter, all the communication that's happening in those things, that's really good, that's really fun. It's also especially nice to have a place where you can just like be real and like go have like, say the shitty things that you don't want to say in the other communities. Go have rigorous debate. But also don't forget to participate in everything else because we do want new people also to remain excited about this.

All right, this 67 shit show again shows detail how people rather rotate into garbage subnets. Yeah, totally. Hoping for a quick buck instead of solid teams like 48 and 63. Yeah, I do think that is, I mean there's truth to that for sure.

Let's see, JB Rings, I think the prove-it-required for quantum subs is much higher than other subnets after what happened on the novelty search. Yeah, okay. So I think what that's saying is novelty search, we announced compute was going to be an additional subnet as opposed to the same subnet, which is really like based on our learnings. That would be like a good example of what we probably don't ever want to do again, which is bring big news to people on a big public place. We want to bring smaller incremental news to people in places. Actually, and actually I will say, if we knew TauFlow was coming and how complex that was going to be, maybe we wouldn't have actually split our subnets into two. We might've spent like a harder, like a more effort in like architecting it into one subnet. If I'm being honest. But yeah, but I, you know, I don't think, I don't know, you know, there might be more context behind this, but I think at this point we've proven that we can launch like not just a Bittensor subnet, but an enterprise platform that lets like anybody around the world do quantum experiments on real quantum computers, like, holy crap, man. I mean, it is like, from a quantum user perspective, it is like legitimately very exciting and awesome. So yeah, I guess we'll be excited to show people through the results, I suppose.

Let's see here, trust me boys, quantum will be one of the top five. I hope so. Somebody said they'd get quantum tattooed on their ass if we hit a certain threshold. I wanna get a tattoo on your ass. Let's see what we can do. Our aim is always focused on doing the right thing first, but we have to be aware of the value of being a top five subnet and how much more that enables us to do. So we're 100% there with you.

Let's see here, last thought. Oh wait, Bob could easily send a couple tweets out and completely change the vibe around 63. Yeah, 63 has been a little bit of a weird one. So 63, there's huge potential for 63. Like we're so excited about 63. Also, I've never been more confused about like what you have to do to like appease the, you know, the men behind the curtain. You know, they're sort of like not necessarily perfect rules for people to navigate. And so we want to be careful around 63 because it has so much potential. But like until we actually have source code running on it, I am not 100% sure what the Bittensor, you know, the Bittensor governance community, the validators, et cetera, how that's all going to shake out. We're excited about it. We think we got the right plan. Once we get that out there and that's live, don't worry. We'll be talking about it plenty.

Hey, that was it. Okay. Sorry again, guys. For anybody that's still here with us, it's been like an hour and 22 minutes of that. We're the most frustrating 22 minutes of your life, apparently. So apologies for that. I'm glad that it ended up working in the end. Thank you everybody. Yeah, we'll see you on the socials and at the next qBitTensor Labs Live. Talk to you later.