qBitTensor Labs Live — February 12, 2026
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Updates on Subnet 48 including IonQ Forte integration and OAuth for third-party access, Subnet 63 challenge design and treasury wallet progress, strategic meetings with Const, the iQuHACK hackathon at MIT, and community Q&A on federal quantum policy and investor value.
In our latest qBitTensor Labs Live session, we covered a wide range of updates across Subnet 48, Subnet 63, strategic initiatives, events, and community questions. Here are the key highlights.
IonQ Forte and QPU Integration
We are excited to announce that IonQ's Forte has been integrated into the Open Quantum platform. This marks a significant addition to our Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) offerings and represents IonQ's premier machine. Users can start utilizing Forte immediately, and our SDK has been updated to support it. We also have another QPU ready to launch, pending co-marketing coordination.
Enhancements in User Experience
We have implemented improved chasm parsing with better error-checking mechanisms that catch potential issues before they reach the QPU. This proactive approach saves resources and reduces frustration by surfacing errors before a job is submitted and credits are deducted.
OAuth Integration for Third-Party Access
A new OAuth integration allows third-party applications to run jobs on behalf of users, expanding the platform's accessibility. This opens the door for collaboration with platforms that have existing user bases and quantum workflows, driving growth through established communities rather than solely through our own marketing.
Q1 Goals Progress Check
We reviewed our Q1 goals at the midpoint of the quarter. IonQ Forte is live, hosted simulation groundwork was advanced at iQuHACK, and the referral program is performing well. Penny Lane and Cirq support has been deprioritized since no users have requested it. Co-marketing and OTC deals are in progress but under wraps until announcements are ready.
Community Engagement and User Adoption
Our user adoption metrics are all trending up and to the right -- and not just linearly, but parabolically. The referral program, which gives new users $50 in free quantum compute credits and lets them earn more by referring friends, is driving 30% of new user signups. Active users are also more engaged since the referral program launched, creating the virtuous cycle that every SaaS application wants to see.
Subnet 63 Progress
Treasury wallets remain the primary blocker for Subnet 63. While the Bittensor team has published documentation for treasury wallets, the feature is not yet live. Having the docs has allowed us to move past prerequisite work and into more rigorous implementation. Design work is complete on the subnet code, both challenges, and the Open Quantum integration. Significant implementation work is in progress across miner and validator plumbing, milestone definitions, and integration handshakes.
We detailed our two initial challenges. First, a classical factorization challenge that serves as a precursor to quantum factorization (Shor's). The initial implementation is in test and we are running benchmarks to set milestones. We expect early milestones to be cleared quickly, but the problem is known to be exponentially hard -- that is by design, because the comparison with the future Shor's quantum challenge is where the real insight lies. Second, a peaked circuits challenge designed in partnership with a well-known quantum company (to be announced), where miners must develop novel algorithms and submit source code that is verified against circuits they have never seen before.
Strategic Meetings and TauFlow
We shared takeaways from a call with Const. Notably, he pushed back on the narrative that subnets should be generating revenue and be profitable, emphasizing that the aim should be driving innovation and advocacy. He also indicated that TauFlow is here to stay, which demands strategic creativity for long-term sustainability. We have signed an initial term sheet with a DAT to find ways to get liquidity -- especially for miner emissions -- without adding sell pressure. We also highlighted Subnet 127's Astrid Vault as a promising developer tool for the same purpose.
Events
We sponsored and attended iQuHACK, MIT's annual quantum hackathon. Our challenge had teams building machine learning models to predict simulation runtime and resource requirements, creating foundations for on-demand simulation on Open Quantum. Ryan attended an FBI quantum security briefing focused on nation-state threats and post-quantum readiness. We also extended an open invitation for anyone attending ETH Denver to meet up for coffee.
Federal Quantum Policy
We highlighted two important federal developments. The White House released a draft executive order re-elevating quantum as a national priority, with a notable shift toward adoption of quantum technologies within federal agencies rather than just funding basic research. The National Quantum Initiative was also reauthorized through 2034 with bipartisan support, underscoring that quantum remains a strategic priority regardless of political regime.
Reframing Subnet 48 Value
We proposed a reframing of how to think about Subnet 48: it is the only cryptocurrency in the universe that can only be mined using quantum computers, and it is mined by doing useful work from real users rather than wasteful hashing. The free and subsidized quantum compute that users receive is a side effect of that mining, not the primary purpose. Extremely small portions of miner emissions have been sold to date, and our DAT and OTC strategies aim to further eliminate sell pressure.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to qBitTensor Labs Live. We're thrilled to have you with us again today. As I have been for the last couple of weeks, I'm joined again today by ShorShot Ryan. Welcome, Ryan.
Hello, how's it going?
Good. Your video looks solid. So Ryan is actually at the office and your video looks solid, your audio looks solid, the lighting looks solid. The internet's okay today?
Hopefully, we'll see how goes, I guess.
All right, yeah, I may risk it on the next qBitTensor Labs Live and take it from the office again then. But yeah, thanks again, everybody, for joining us. Let's jump into it. So as always, you can pause and read this disclaimer if you actually want to. But what we're saying here is that these are all ideas, not promises, that we're not giving any investment or legal advice, regardless of what anything might sound like. And we've totally appreciate you guys using this material for good and not evil. As long as you don't weaponize it, we'll keep doing it. And if you're still here, then you agree. And so we'll continue. OK, so today we're going to talk about Subnet 48, quantum compute. We're going to talk about Subnet 63, quantum innovate. We're also going to talk about a number of just strategic meetings that we've been having and how those play into what we're doing with the subnets. We'll talk about some events from mostly outside of the BitTensor ecosystem. And then we're actually going to spend a good chunk of time on community. There were some really good questions that were submitted this time, so a little bit deeper answering there. So without further ado, Ryan, I think the first slide is yours, so I'm going to drop into it on Subnet 48.
Yeah, so now we have IonQ's Forte on the platform. Could go to the next slide. Yeah, I mean, just get another QPU offering in our system and yeah, it just appears alongside with all the other QPUs and you should be able to use it starting today. And we have also updated SDK as well to support that. And as you could see, there's a little question mark here. We have more coming.
Yeah, yeah.
in the future. So, in the near future. So, yeah.
Yeah, I think that miner... Yeah, totally. And that miner just went live like yesterday around like five o'clock or so, is that right? When did we put it up on Open Quantum?
Yep. Yeah, was yesterday afternoon we did.
Awesome, super cool. Well, yeah, congratulations to you and IonQ for getting Forte up on Open Quantum. The cool thing is that's sort of like IonQ's premier machine. The other machines that had been on here are still super useful, but not sort of their best in breed. And their other server, ARIA 1, ARIA 1 actually went down for maintenance forever ago. Like since before we launched, like it's been up and it's had a minor running, like the machine itself is offline. When did that, how long has that been offline since?
Yeah, I gotta say at least November or October and and like It's expected to come back online I thought it was gonna be last week, but now I'm seeing I think a few days from now So I don't know they might keep pushing it and might come back online. We'll see.
Yeah.
Yeah. Fingers crossed that ARIA 1 comes online this week. But anyway, congratulations on that. That's super cool. And you also did this chasm parsing. Tell us more about that.
Yeah, you know, we really want to improve. I guess, you know, I guess we said previously we're in O and operations and maintenance mode, but it's like, we're still doing new features like constantly, even though like kind of the initial feature set is live, we're going to keep on adding things to open quantum as time goes on. And we really wanted to improve the initial experience with like submitting initial chasm and being able to like determine like is there a problem before it actually goes and hits the QPU? So we have a little bit better parsing. There's still a little bit more to do here with hardware specific stuff, but I think it's a good start to help to improve the user experience.
Yeah, and so for everybody's benefit, Chasm is like the source code of the program that you're going to run. It's like the quantum assembly. And if somebody submits like crap Chasm, then it can go all the way down. I mean, it has layers of checks throughout the way, but I mean, it could go all the way down to like the quantum computer and then just like bar fall over it, right? And so this just pushes that error collection like way left so that we don't waste resources or your time.
Yep.
Right. Yeah, you get it before the job even gets submitted and credits get deducted and things like that. So it's nice to have that right up front.
Yeah, super cool. And then the OAuth integration, first off, cool job using AI to just generate this. But tell people a little bit about what this OAuth integration actually is, because I think OAuth means different things to different people.
Yeah, I'm generally terrible at creating pretty diagrams, so I use any tools I can to help communicate things to others. So we have the capability now to have third parties come in and be able to request. You could link up with our system open quantum from a third party and be able to give consent for that third party to run jobs on your behalf. So it allows us to integrate with any third party that wants to come in here and be able to start to execute jobs. And, you know, basically it just involves really the third party, you know, communicating with us and getting credentials as a trusted third party. And then having a user workflow where the user logs in with their open quantum credentials or their social login to open quantum. And then that third party system gets authorization as long as you want them to run jobs on your behalf. There could be usefulness, for example, just other systems that have, like QBraid, that have existing workflows to contact third-party systems and create quantum jobs. We could do the same.
Yeah, yeah, I think maybe like the biggest thing there is just easy access to the floodgate of other people's users, you know, as opposed to just continuing to build our own user base through our own marketing, launching on a platform with existing user bases just opens floodgates from those. Super cool. Okay. So maybe I'll jump in from here. You know, we put up this slide, I guess, in early January talking about what some of our Q1 goals are. Here we are sort of like halfway through the quarter. So we thought we'd give some updates on those. Okay, so on additional QPUs, we announced Forte availability today. We have another one that is ready and just waiting for co-marketing opportunities to actually launch. And so that'll be coming soon. Hosted simulation, where we run simulations on Open Quantum instead of running quantum computers on open quantum. We actually did an event, and we'll talk about this in a little bit more detail, but we did an event the weekend before last at MIT where we actually had a whole bunch of smart kids from various East Coast universities sort of doing some of the pre-work for us on that. And so we'll talk through what that is and what some of those outcomes were. Penny Lane and Cirque, we actually did not... Like we've not had users asking for these. So we were planning on implementing these relatively quickly because the data that we had done from like market research was that, you know, about like 78%, something like that of users use Qiskit. And then Penny Lane was the next most used framework. We've had zero users ask us about it. And so we kind of just keep deprioritizing those. They still seem important to us, but we also like to listen to our users. And so we may sort of continue to slide those until we have people asking about it. Referral program. OK, so I don't want to give away a spoiler alert because we'll talk about this later, but the referral program is up and running and doing awesome. So essentially, when a user first signs up for Open Quantum, they get credits worth $50 in free quantum compute. Once they burn through those, they can get more credits by referring a friend. And that feature has been pretty successful so far. We'll share some data on that in a little bit.
User adoption, so we're expecting that to be kind of non-linear. So I wouldn't expect that to be like 50%, even though we're 50% of the way through the quarter. But I will say that's starting to build momentum. And again, we'll share some more info on that. Co-marketing and OTC deals, we will talk a little bit about, we'll touch on the OTC topic. We won't touch on the co-marketing. All of that we're gonna be tight-lipped about until the marketing happens so that we can get the most mileage out of it. Okay, so user adoption. what? Hold on. Hold on. All right, I'm gonna actually pause that and find out what just happened there. Sorry, y'all. All right, there is.
Little slide snafu. It looks right on the slide deck, yeah, for some reason the presentation got messed up.
Yeah, it's good. We got ourselves a Google Slides kerfuffle, but that's okay. We roll with the punches here. Things don't always go perfect. Okay. Couldn't have moved on without getting that fixed because these charts are all fricking amazing. So what we're looking at is the quintessential up into the right chart that everybody wants to see. Whether we're talking about open quantum user onboarding, whether we're talking about active users, whether we're talking about jobs being completed, or whether we're talking about the percentage of users coming from referrals, all of the charts are up and to the right, which is fricking bomb. The other thing about this is they're not just linear, they're looking like parabolic up and to the right, which is exactly what you want to see. The thing that gets me the most excited about these charts is the bit right here. So where you see this really steep active users by week, you it's not to scale but these three weeks right here are the three weeks that we've had referrals online and so what you're seeing is that referrals are driving a huge amount of user signups and the active users are much more likely to be active because of the referral program and so 30 percent of our new users are now coming from our existing users. Which means less burden on us to go out and organically build those to go to our own marketing. Users are driving users. And so that is the virtuous cycle that you want to see. This is exactly what a SaaS application wants. So solid stuff. I'm super stoked about this. And I look forward to continuing to watch this as time goes on.
All right. So subnet 63, I will say I've seen people all over the board in terms of where subnet 63 is. You know, some people say, you know, expecting us to drop it today. Other people saying it's three to four weeks out. There's a lot of guesswork. And so we want to start to do on 63 is like actually get into the details. We're big on transparency here. And so let's just dive right into it. The elephant in the room is treasury wallets. The validators, as you guys all know, if you've been with us on this journey, cut off all of our minor emission because they said we had to wait for Treasury wallets before they'd let us reroute minor emissions into a prize pool. So how are Treasury wallets doing? Well, if you look, we were super excited because we kind of got the news that Treasury wallets were ready. They were just waiting on voting power and they'd be delayed any day. Then we sort of got this update that it'll be available starting next week. Then we got this update that will probably be available in the coming weeks. And so progress is clearly being made. We know people are doing it. We can see where they're doing the work. But the timing and the details are still a little fuzzy. Is it going to be exactly what we expect it to be? Are there going to be changes? Almost certainly something's going to change. This is bit tensor. They keep you on the edge of your seats. It's fun. But we do have the documentation now. And so because we have the documentation, we've been able to clear a bunch of the basically like points that we were paused at in terms of not wanting to go too far because we would have to rework when we got the design. And so because of that, we're actually going to start talking about details.
Will this design stay the same or will it throw us a curveball? I'm going to get, like, there will be a curveball. I'm almost positive. But we're implementing as if we know what it's going to be when it ships. And so from a development perspective, first we'll hit the challenges, then we'll hit the subnet. We talked about the two challenges we were going to launch with being first a classical factorization, which is a precursor to a quantum factorization, the Shor's challenge, and then a peaked challenge that builds off of all of the millions of circuits that we saw executed in 63's early manifestation and in partnership with another quantum company that is really well known for peak circuits. And so the factorization challenge, the initial implementation is in test. That's as a standalone application that was independent of how the subnet was going to work. That code is in test. Running benchmarks to sort of figure out what we should set as the initial milestones to break.
But to set expectations on this, classical factorization has been a huge area of focus for like decades and decades. Basically, since RSA started, people have been trying to figure out how to factorize things faster. Because the whole basis of RSA is that you can't factorize things fast. So setting expectations on this, we do expect that there will be early milestones hit when we put this out, because we will sort of do the best we can do, and then we're going to open it up to this whole world of really smart people, and somebody is going to outsmart us and do it a little bit better. So we are expecting the first milestone to be cleared, maybe the first couple of milestones to be cleared. But then this problem is known to be exponentially hard. Like nobody has figured out how to make it not exponentially hard other than Peter Schor when he one day has a utility scale fault-tolerant quantum computer. And so we do expect that that will stop. And that is by design. Because if people could keep making progress on it, we wouldn't care about quantum computers. Nobody would use RSA. Why is that valuable? Well, it's really valuable because when we launch Shores, we're going to expect that to continue to make progress. And seeing those two data sets and seeing where they're going to intersect and what trajectories they're on are what's going to be really important.
OK, flipping over to the peaked circuits. So peaked circuits, that challenge is actually being designed in partnership with another quantum company that we have no stake in. It will be a very good brand to associate with this. I think people will be excited about it. I don't want to make an Epstein files reference, but we're going to redact who that is until they're ready to announce. But with that, for each of the milestones, we're going to provide a few samples that are representative of a piece of code that generates challenges of that complexity. And then when the miner submits their solution, which is source code that will run on the validators, they will actually run against circuits that they've never seen before. And so that sort of allows for this idea that miners have to develop an intellectual property, like a new algorithm that's capable of solving this thing that's not currently solvable, submit it into us. We will run it and verify it against something that they've never seen before. And if it succeeds, then it wins. OK, so cool. Clear on what the two initial challenges are.
So how are we doing implementing everything. All right, so we're doing okay. Now that we have the documentation for treasury wallets, we've been able to move past a lot of the easy work, like the prerequisite work that we could do ahead of having that. And we've been able to move into the more rigorous implementation, but you're gonna see a lot of items are in progress as opposed to complete. We've been able to complete all the design work on the subnet code. On both of the challenges and on the open quantum integration. We have a huge amount of work in progress with how the miner plumbing is actually going to work, how the validator plumbing is actually going to work, what the actual milestones are going to be that we set for these challenges, how that actually is going to integrate. And with open quantum and all the handshakes are going to work now that we have a firm hypothesis about treasury wallets, we still do consider treasury wallets to be a blocker. Because until that functionality is live, we're going to sort of, if we hit that point before it's available, it will prevent end-to-end testing. It may require a lot of rework after that. So we do still consider that to be a blocker. But we've got, by having the docs, we've freed up a lot of throughput, and we're making progress on it. So if you're one of the people that were expecting 63 to be live today, where I don't know where that came from, it's not. We never meant to give that impression. If you're one of the people that said, it's a few weeks away, that's probably order of magnitude, right? Cool.
So strategic meetings, other stuff that's been going on. First, we did have a call with Const. He put out that note saying, hey, I got some money. Talk to me about your subnets. Our takeaways from that conversation, one, I was really surprised that Const, one of the things he brought up was that this whole revenue concept that subnets should be generating revenue and be profitable. He doesn't know where that comes from, apparently, and that's not one of his narratives. Reading his emotion, I would almost say he was a little bit annoyed by the dominance of that narrative. And he sort of highlighted that despite what people say, there actually isn't a single profitable subnet on BitTensor. And the aim shouldn't be profitability. The aim should be driving innovation and getting people excited and creating value that you couldn't create without this decentralized innovation mechanism. So his big thing was focus should be on both innovation but then advocacy, so going out and telling people what you're doing and why it's innovative and advocating for it. People should be focused on building cool stuff, and the value should come if you build cool stuff and tell people about it. He also had this notion that we really need to focus on selling the vision of quantum, which we're going to start doing more and more beyond just qBitTensor Labs, because that seems like a thing that is actually easy enough to pull investor attention in on.
So the other thing that he said, and this is not a thing that my heart likes, but he said, TauFlo is here to stay. I was actually sort of assuming that at this point he would have seen enough data that he might have come around to, OK, TauFlo needs to change. But no, the take I got was TauFlo is here to stay. And I do want to say, in the science community, it's really important that we highlight that correlation doesn't mean causation. Just because a chart shows something and you can correlate it to a specific event, that doesn't mean that that event caused it. This is a hilarious version of this. There's all kinds of these on the internet. But this is like short.
I prefer Internet Explorer causing deaths. That's a really old one.
I feel like there was another one that was like, Britney Spears' popularity causes teen suicide or something like that too. Like, but okay, so in this example, ice cream sales and shark attacks correlate extremely high, which doesn't mean sharks attack because people buy ice cream. It means that people buy ice cream in the summer and they go swimming in the summer and therefore get attacked by sharks in the summer.
Yeah, yeah.
But you know when I when I do look at like, you know, tau price for example. It's really hard to not sort of like look back to November when tau flow launched and where we are today even even though I know I know that the macros are crazy in general also. Okay, so again living in this world of tau flow is here to stay that demands strategic creativity like it demands long-term strategies to be able to survive in TauFlow, not just survive until TauFlow runs its course. And so we've very much focused in on some of these upcoming DATs that are looking to provide creative options to get you liquidity without selling and adding alpha to your liquidity pool, which negatively impacts your price and taking the Tau out, which hurts your TauFlow. And so we have actually signed an initial term sheet with a DAT. And part of the term sheet is that we can't talk about the deal at all. But the idea is if we can bring this across the finish line, it's going to be to find ways to get liquidity, especially for minor emission, so that we can alleviate any systemic cell pressure. And then all TAU in and all TAU out would really only come from the investors, which is a good world to be in.
Also, even though they've taken a little bit of heat on the socials on this, I really like what Subnet 127 is doing. So this is Mark and Siam's subnet. They have this thing that they call Astrid Vault, which basically is going to allow anybody, not just people who can sign a contract with a DAT, but anybody to exchange alpha from one subnet into the alpha for subnet 127, which you can then sell. They don't mind if you sell their alpha. They will hold the alpha that you traded in with them. There's going be like a discount rate in order for them to hold it. But it essentially creates a way where if you want to not negatively impact a subnet, but you need liquidity, you can get liquidity through that mechanism. Now, a lot of people look at that and they say, oh, this is like financial engineering and that's not what we want to drive. I look at that and I say, that's a developer tool. That's a tool that makes subnets work for subnet operators in TauFlow. Because it essentially creates paths for you to, even with your owner mission, if you want to do, to take a discount and pay your developers. And in situations like ours, where we have access to the miner mission on behalf of the miner to implement those mechanisms as core tenants of the subnet so that you remove the systemic cell pressure that most subnets face. And so the key thing here is either the DAT or 127, when available, could completely eliminate minor cell pressure on both 48 and on 63, which I think is going to be amazing.
All right, podcast tour. So I put up this post, this was in response to JB Rings who said a thing that I agreed with that's not totally uncommon, by the way. But yeah, basically said, probably time for a podcast tour. We asked for suggestions and a lot of you guys gave us suggestions and so we've kind of distilled that into this list of kind of the top ones that we probably need to hit. We will start working on those. The aim of those though, and the aim for any of you guys that are trying to drive attention to our subnet is we don't want speculators. We want people that can see the vision and buy it. Like our subnet, in my opinion, which is not investment advice, feels like a value right now. Tau, in my opinion, feels like, I mean, it was at 500 before and it's at, what is it, 124? I don't know, I'm a little out of date. That feels like a value. And so the more we can sort of get out that these are very good subnets that get you exposure into quantum and get you like the upside of a depressed crypto price, the better. But we're not looking for people that are going to come in to make a quick buck. That hurts us in tile flow. We don't want pump and dumps. We want sustainable, smart investors that understand what they're getting into.
All right, events. iQwack, i-q-hack, which is pronounced i-quack. Embarrassingly, you see their logo. Ryan is a, it's like, you know, a duck. It's like Schrodinger's duck. It's dead and alive simultaneously. Super nerdy. I totally did not understand until like halfway through the first iQwack that I went to why it was a duck, but it's i-quack.
Why is it? Well, yeah.
Right. So yeah, anyway, this is MIT's annual Quantum Hackathon. It's like the biggest Quantum Hackathon, the most prestigious one. We were a sponsor of that this year. We went to that event. It was at the Stata Center, which is this really cool building that you always see pictures of at MIT. It's actually, in my opinion, super cool. Also one of the worst buildings to be in, because it doesn't make any sense while you're inside of it. That happens to be a guy named Yudong, who's the ex-CTO of Zabato, which was a cool quantum startup, giving a dissertation to people on quantum hackers here, some of our science. That's one of the founders of QBitcoin, who we met and built a relationship with at last year's iQuack. Really a great event. One of our marketing people did put together a quick little video that runs through it.
You'll see people like really organized, clean cut, working on stuff. It starts off in this hall. They're brainstorming, planning, getting to work. It's real funny because we're a bunch of geeks. Hold on, I'll pause for a second. I'll get back to it. You know, we're a bunch of geeks at this hackathon, but, and it was on Saturday. And so in the building we're in, it's just everybody coding, huddled up around tables, starting to get a little bit stinky. And then, over here, the building right across the way is like the rec center. So it's a bunch of fit athletes working out the whole time. And so it's like a tale of two cities. Yeah, so as you get into it though, we fast forward. And 20 hours into it, people are exhausted. Half the people are asleep. They've been working through the night. And then they prepare presentations for the judges.
Yeah.
The project that we had our people doing during this hackathon, like we alluded to earlier, was prerequisite work for running on-demand simulations on open quantum. And so what we did was we had pre-ran a whole bunch of simulation data. One of the hard things with simulations is you have no idea how long it's actually going to take to run a simulation. You have no idea how much memory it's going to take to run a simulation. Like those things, there's not a formula to calculate those because they use like incredibly complex math throughout. And so instead of generating a formula, what you do is you create a massive dataset and then you create machine learning models to be able to predict it. So ahead of the hackathon, we created a massive dataset of, you know, all of these different runs of circuits of all kinds of different variety, all kinds of different size. And the hackers were tasked with creating AI models that would be able to what do you have to set in order to achieve a certain accuracy on your simulation? How long will it take to run that simulation? And one of the things that we didn't ask them to do but is a continuation of it is how much memory is going to be your peak memory usage. The key thing there is then when we go to open quantum, we can give a more accurate estimate in advance of how many credits it's going to take to run the simulation so that people don't get stuck with a giant bill because it's they accidentally ran something that took five days on an H200.
Lots of people presented. We actually were oversubscribed, so the organizers had to turn teams away and have them work on other people's challenges. But the teams that did this did great work. In this case, we did see some teams that were able to achieve a fairly high accuracy. The work that they did is not sufficient, because what we need for production will be a little bit more complicated and take have more things that need to be estimated, but they created actually really good foundations for us to start to build off of, which is exciting.
And then Ryan, you were at this FBI quantum security. I think this was while I was there, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah, at least at the start of it. Yeah, I mean, they're just trying to bring all the quantum heads in the area around. There's even people from Chicago Quantum Exchange there. But really, it's like they want, you know, there's a lot of focus on this when it comes to other state actors and other threats. And they just want to make sure that everyone's aware of not only those threats, but, you know, how it could damage a lot of companies that exist in the United States. So it was good to attend that and meet some peers and see some familiar faces and yeah.
Yeah, awesome. Well, it was cool and I thought that that social post was like, I thought it was funny. Although, you know, like it's probably not a good time to be like trying to crack jokes like in BitTensor, but I thought that was funny when, you know, somebody posted up that they pulled you in. Okay, ETH Denver. So real quick shout out. I've never been to ETH Denver, but it's coming up. We are in Boulder, which is, you know, 30 minutes away from Denver. And so I had posted up on Twitter, but if anybody is coming to ETH Denver and they're interested, I'd be open to having some of the people from my team, including myself, set up kind of like an open coffee hour where we could grab a spot near the venue, buy anybody coffee, talk about whatever you guys want to talk about. Ironically, out of all the posts I've ever made on Twitter, and I've done some really stupid posts on Twitter, I'm pretty sure this got the least engagement out of any post I've ever put on Twitter. In fact, I don't even know. In this screenshot, it has a promote button. That doesn't look familiar to me. Do they only do that on posts with crap engagement? I don't know. But yeah.
Does no one care about Ethereum or is there just really no cross-section between bit tensor and Ethereum?
Yeah, no idea. But what I will say, I'll just kind of repeat the offer here. And you can totally hit up a comment on this on Twitter, or hit up BeyondNISQ on Twitter, or hit up qBitTensor Labs on Twitter. If you are interested, still an open offer. We'd be happy to spend some time with you. And we'll buy you a coffee. But hopefully, our time is worth more than the $5 coffee.
All right, so QA and community. First thing I wanted to just shout out about was TauFlow 2. I think this is, to be honest, I don't spend as much time in the details of the innards of bit tensor until things become pretty hardened. But my takeaway on this was there's a bad actor, guess subnet 104, who's basically forcing it so that validators don't have any say in their subnet. They don't want that. And so they started creating a programmatic way to detect that problem. And then they had a mechanism to cut your tau in emission down to zero because they appreciate how shitty it is to have zero tau emission if they detect that. It also sounds like they backed down on that plan and instead created a button that the root validators can just decide to push, which takes any subnets emission down to zero.
That's scary. That's super scary that someone has the power to do that. And it's not the first time it seems that there's been some kind of power like that that's not decentralized, I guess.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, so I got to say, I got two halves of my brain on this one and they're fighting with each other. The little bit tensor champion is over here being like, this is a great idea because people always grift and we want to stop them from grifting. Yeah, and then I got the other person over here is like, the whole point of bit tensor is to be decentralized and this is really, really centralized. So I'm not sure, I'm somewhere in between those two, but I actually don't know who this, what is it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Right, yep.
I don't even know. From Lead Poet. I don't know who this guy is. I kind of want to meet this person because they seem to be sort of like advocating for the truth.
It's a play on the Pepe Lipiu, like the skunk from Litty Tunes or something like that, Pepe Lae Plutus, maybe. It's probably two plays on things, but it's probably two plays on things and I can't get the second one.
OHHHH
Nice. Yeah, yeah, totally. That sounds better than whatever I said.
I feel like Tylenol. I'm going start calling him Tylenol. Acetaminophen. All right. No? Too soon? Okay. Anyway, that person is speaking a lot of truth that resonates with my heart, which is, can we actually just pause for a minute and talk about governance? Because it does seem like more and more really important decisions are just being made in some private dark room. And they have huge impact on everybody. They really, I do resonate substantially with that. Governance where all the participants, not just the elite few have some say in it, would really make a huge amount of sense in this type of stuff. But obviously, we're a big fan of BitTensor. We believe in the leadership. We hope that they go more and more decentralized. But we'll roll with the punches.
Cool, there was another question that came up from Bess, and this was a very good question. In fact, we just take this stuff for granted in quantum because we live and breathe it, but we should have been on the socials posting these ones up. So Bess was asking about a couple different things that have been going on kind of in the federal government, and the two big things to sort of note, and they play off of each other quite a bit. The first was a big one, which was that the White House put out this like a pre-released memo. I don't know if they like, I don't know if you'd say they leaked it, but it was like a draft memo for what they wanted to do as an executive order around quantum. And what this really does, if you look at the material that was released, is it sort of, you know, I would say like re-elevates quantum as a national priority. Now I'm sort of soft on that language because quantum is a national priority. It absolutely has been. But I think it's also important that we periodically beat the drum. And so this is sort of a beating of the drum. One of the things that's interesting in here is it really supports cross-agency coordination in terms of what technologies people want to adopt. So today, we actually hosted three different three-letter acronyms in our office last week. Was it last week? The week before, maybe. You know, of like presenting out on some of the capabilities of quantum rings. And each of them independently would make a decision about if they wanted to do anything with us or not. I think this aims to do a lot more coordinated approaches so that you don't have like, you know, seven different organizations all going out and doing vendor selection. Also, the aim is to really boost innovation and commercialization.
But really, in my mind, the biggest thing here is like an acknowledgement that a lot of what we've seen from the federal government supporting quantum in the past has been focused on developing the science and developing from science through the low TRL levels, technology readiness levels, into the more commercial. And this is much more focused on adoption of these technologies within the agencies, which is actually a really important stance change and probably should be getting more attention. We should be giving it more of a shout out than we have been.
Yeah, and you know at the FBI there was a lot of focus on like, you know, there are free services in terms of cyber security that, you know, the Department of War, the NSA, other groups can provide, but they'd probably not be using open quantum, they'd be using closed quantum when that came around. You know, there's a little bit of benefit here I think we could get, but it's not going to be like, you know, full-on participation from the perspective of the bit tensor subnets.
Hehehehehe
For sure, yeah, they won't be running quantum workloads through. But on the flip side, 63 potentially might be generating stuff that could be usable by them. Very much so.
Great. Yeah, absolutely.
Cool. So the other thing is, and this was a little bit older, but I think happened in Q1. I'm relatively sure it happened in Q1. Was a reauthorization of the Quantum Initiative, the National Quantum Initiative. So essentially, the National Quantum Initiative really focuses on the earlier stage organizations doing research, coordinating on the research. That's something that had been established quite some time ago. I think it started probably in 2018, but was set to expire also. This simply extended that through 2034, which is just really cool because it essentially as a testament to the fact that they're getting value out of it. They're seeing results out of it. And what was most exciting to me about this is it really doesn't matter what regime is in control. Democrat, Republican, Independent, everybody supports quantum. And this bill had bipartisan support in Congress. So, yeah, I guess what this should probably tell people is the whole government sees quantum as a strategic initiative. They see both the science and investment in the science as strategically important to keep our leadership position, but they also see the adoption of the technology that's coming out of industry as also a critical initiative. So yeah, good call out. We should spend more time talking about those types of things that we kind of take for granted being in the space.
All right, one question came up about investor value. I want to take a minute to just reframe how we think about 48 and the value of 48. Because in reality, 48, if we can accomplish the plan of creating mechanisms to avoid the minor cell pressure, if we completely reframe this, we're essentially saying that the only crypto current that has, sorry guys, let me say that again. We want to reframe this to say that this is the only cryptocurrency in the universe that can only be mined using quantum computers, right? You can't mine this using classical computers. It is the only cryptocurrency in the universe that can only be mined by quantum computers. And also, it's not doing wasteful hashing functions on quantum computers. The only way you can mine it is by doing useful work from real users. And so some people look at 48 and they say like, well, it's just subsidized quantum compute. This is just, you no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like the fact that users get free and subsidized quantum compute is a side effect. That's like, that's the accidental offspring of mining this. If you're participating as a miner, you are doing this because you sit on one of the scarcest resources in the world and you are using that resource to get the alpha. As a result of that, people are getting their quantum workloads done.
Yeah, it's like you own the gold mine, you're letting people come in and mine the gold.
Totally, yeah, yeah. And, you know, so I think like there's really a story here that people aren't looking at because people have been like so focused on this whole like financials and revenue and growth. Like, and it's like, well, actually, we're growing, we're creating more and more volume, which lets these miners mine more, which lets, you know, a little bit more of this coin come, but you can't get this coin unless you buy it from somebody who literally used one of the world's scarcest resources to go and mine it. So yeah, I do want to just kind of reframe the way that we think about that. And when it does come to like the mechanical pressure on the alpha, you will notice that extremely small portions of the miner emission have been sold up until now. And so like that's not mechanically holding it back.
Okay.
We do have these plans to work with DATs to buy it and to hold it. So that should create even more sustainable avoiding of that downward pressure. I said that terribly. I don't know. Hopefully you guys see what I'm saying. But this needs to become, in my opinion, a core narrative of how we talk about 48.
All right. We got a lot of questions about subnet operating expense. And I can totally understand why people are asking the question. Basically, it's like, hey, do you have enough runway as a company or do you have to start selling your ownership emission soon? How can you keep costs lean? Yeah, so apparently lots of subnets have increased the selling of ownership emission. That doesn't surprise me because I think that there is a lot of fear. The price is going down on TAU despite the aims of TAU flow to stop subnet alphas from going down into the right. They still are going down to the right in most cases. So I can understand people wanting to limit their exposure to this. We don't need to take money out for OpEx. For us, we are really looking at BitTensor as a way to tap into innovation. We are not looking at BitTensor as a way to fill our coffers. Take that for what it's worth. I mean, you should probably assume that every subnet that gets ownership admission needs to spend their ownership admission to offset OpEx. Maybe at some point that gets to be a problem for us too, and I can't say that we'll never do that, but that's sort of not our primary aim. Our primary aim here isn't for funding, it's access to intelligence.
All right, 63 partnerships structure. Oh, this was a good question. Yeah, so this question was from JB. It's basically saying, what's the structure of the partnerships on 63? This is where we're going to have the challenges, right, to create quantum IP. Will they get a percentage of IP revenue, a percentage of the prize pool? Prize pool, that is the answer, not revenue. So the way that that works is we have our prize pools, which are going to be in treasury wallets, which is such a core part of this. That, you know, it sort of played such a big part of our schedule conversation. All miner emission gets routed into the prize pools. When somebody submits a solution that wins, which can happen whenever a researcher operating as a miner or that in a lot of cases, we will manage the miners for the researchers through open quantum, that will unlock the milestone. The money, a certain amount of money associated with that milestone will then be redirected out. And some of that will go to the researcher, which will be the advertised prize amount. And some of that will go to partner fees.
Now, there are also, I should also highlight that if all goes according to plan, this isn't going to just sell on the market and negatively impact price. This will sell through DATs or OTC deals or 127, which means that the amount of money that actually gets unlocked will be sufficient to fund the partner fees, the research, and the overhead of the transaction, which is not on this chart. And that partnership fee is how the partner gets their earnings from this. On top of that, while we get benefit from them using their brand to promote the challenge, they also get benefit from our brand being a part of the challenge. I mean, most of the leaders in this space like to be on your website because then it makes it look like they're doing bigger and better things too. And in this case, we're basically partnering with people that we really benefit from. Again, all of that part being facilitated hopefully through DATs, OTCs, or 127 or other things like that to remove any cell pressure.
Okay, we're wrapping up, we're getting close to the end here. So sentiment, I actually, in the past, most of the sentiments just been like positive. So I didn't do this, but this is a trend I'm gonna start to try to do. So I'm sort of highlighting the items in blue that are kind of like positive and the items that are kind of like negative or neutral, I'm highlighting in orange. And so if I were to summarize this so we don't need to read this whole wall of words, networking, people are positive on our networking. They like that we're going to events. They like that we're publishing about those events on the socials. People are very excited about the project itself like what we are doing. People buy the vision and that's fabulous because those are the types of investors we want to have. They like the support, this one Ryan calls out specifically some support that you provided with wallet linking. People feel like when they need support they get it. And they like what we're doing on the socials. So thank you for that. We've been trying real hard on that. Where we see the negatives are the macros, Bitcoin prices, TOW prices. We do also see negatives on people just want 63 to be there sooner. And so we hear you. I mean, had we not had the blocker with treasury wallets, we would have had it a lot sooner. We also would have really big prize pools at this point. We are with you in that one. We have that pain also.
And then the last was this conversation, which I thought was just really interesting, was about Shores. So we basically put out the white paper for Shores and then TauFlow got announced. And it was like, great. We shouldn't be launching new challenges into this super minor intensive ecosystem where people have minor cell pressure. That's going to work against us in Tau, which is why we held that back. So I mean, I do appreciate the sentiment on this one. I actually think we could have done a better job about communicating that, but this very much, like that very much was a part of TauFlow causing us to accelerate phase two, which is why we never did anything with Shores. But yeah, but I do appreciate the sentiment.
Okay, and then the last one, which I think Omar put this one in here to pick on me, but I totally appreciate it. Kwas asks a really fun question, which is, I only have one question, and this is my favorite topic of all time. Would love to know your thoughts. Will quantum computing be able to help humanity finally understand how consciousness ties into quantum physics? This is the number one thing I'm trying to discover. I'm gonna say, if I answered that question in its fullness, 70% of people would think I was a total quack. Probably the other like 25% of people would be like, maybe this guy's off his rocker. And then the last people would be like totally into it. So I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this question. But if you hang on after we end, I will say just a few quick words, quaz. From a Taoist perspective on that subject. So for everybody else, thank you for joining us for qBitTensor Labs today. And if Quaz is here, hang on for another two minutes. And Ryan, you had something?
Yeah, I was going to say I probably need to be higher than 5,000 feet to think about that one a little bit more.
Totally. Okay. So thanks again for joining us. Okay, Quaz, if you're still here, I'm going to say a few words. First thing I'm going to say on this one is... The one who knows cannot say. Anyone who says don't actually know. Those who seek won't find. And those who found it not by seeking. And what I mean by this is, if you think about, if you think about the, like, to give a crazy metaphor for this, which is like a common, like, I Buddhist metaphor also, if you say, like, does a wave understand the ocean is a wave capable of understanding the ocean. It's like, no, a wave, it can't understand an ocean. But like the ocean doesn't exist without the wave. And Ryan's wishing right now he had like, toked up before the stream today. But a wave is not a wave, an ocean can't exist without a wave. An ocean is the wave and the wave is the ocean. But the wave has no senses to even create the words to describe it. And all of our idea of knowledge requires us to have words and math and put them on top of it. And consciousness is something that we definitely, it's definitely real, right? There's no disputing that. But we're limited by the fact that we have eyes to see, nose to smell, mouth to taste, hands to feel, and other humans have that same experience. And so they, we can create words. I can call this thing that I roll around a mouse and I can call this thing a table. And because you have the same senses as me, those words can make sense. But when it gets beyond the things that you can sense, there's just no way that you can actually put words on it. Like you can't create the words for it.
And so, yeah, that's probably enough said. If I tried to say more specifically than that, I'd probably sound like a real wacko and most scientists have some stance on philosophy, which will be either extremely spiritual or extremely unspiritual. I happen to fall more into the leaning into spirituality, not because it simply is a way to easily explain what we can't rationalize in our heads, but to acknowledge that we can only rationalize in our heads those things that we have been limited with our senses to explain. And so it certainly exists. I don't think quantum computers are going to help you understand it necessarily in a better, but it might give you some ability to sense some things that you can't currently sense and then put words on those things. And so it may be a milestone towards it, but it's certainly not going to be like a silver bullet to help us understand consciousness and the universe and the existence of time and space and what's beyond time and space. Those things I think are a lot harder to understand. Okay. Super weird softball to end on. Hopefully the 70% of people that would think I was a quack already left and didn't stay on for the whole stream. Thanks again, everybody. And we'll talk again soon.