qBitTensor Labs Live — April 23, 2026

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [00:06]

Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Today is April 23rd, and we're excited to have you all here. We're going to do something a little bit different today. ShoreShot told me that I was being a little bit spicy last night when we were wrapping up these slides. I don't disagree. You'll get a little spicier version of me than you usually do. I'm going to open up with just a few of my own things before we kind of jump into the regular material.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [00:30]

Also, before we start, we got a third person on with us today. Say hello, Omar. I think people have probably heard me talking to you in other qBitTensor Labs Lives. Omar is usually the man behind the curtain. But today, Omar is going to be joining us to talk about some of the social and marketing updates that we've done. So welcome, Omar.

Omar [00:41]

Hello. Thank you.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [01:04]

A few things before we dive into the regularly scheduled program. I just want to say that when I heard about Bittensor, before I was a part of the ecosystem, it was a really exciting concept to me. And as I've gotten to know it more, I've become more convinced than ever that it has so much potential. It's an incredible ecosystem. It has scrappy hacker-type people. It has incentive mechanisms. It has decentralization with validators, access to HPC. There are so many amazing things that we're going to be able to do with that combination of things. And we've been trying our best to bring deep tech researchers into this ecosystem too. And I think we're going to be ultimately successful with that mission.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [01:45]

But I also want to acknowledge that as I've become a part of Bittensor, I've realized that one of our biggest obstacles is ourselves -- that we, Bittensor, are probably the biggest risk to Bittensor. It's not an outside thing. It's more of like, can we do it right together? And what I've noticed is that we've really put a huge amount of intention into disincentivizing bad actors, as opposed to incentivizing innovation. Instead of focusing on making people as successful as they possibly could be, there's a lot more concern about how do we stop people from exploiting the design. And it's added a lot of additional complexity over time -- and with complexity comes a lot more opportunity for bad actors.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [03:25]

TaoFlow -- really cool concept, designed to make subnet operators feel more responsibility for the financial performance of their alpha by associating emission with TAO flows. The downside is that subnet operators now, instead of just building awesome stuff and telling people about it, also need to put on a fundraising hat 24/7, 365. You really can't take a break from trying to make sure that there's new investment coming into your subnet, which means people have to spend a lot more time doing financial engineering and a lot less time innovating.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [04:10]

It also opens up opportunity for people with outside TAO to have an outsized voice and outsized power in the community. In fact, I'd say as much as a fifth of the emission in Bittensor is probably going to subnets that most of us would prefer they not go to, because people are using financial engineering to buy emission.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [04:40]

Treasury wallets -- excellent idea. You don't want subnet operators who a lot of times are strangers collecting a bunch of alpha and TAO into their own wallets that they say they're going to use for one purpose, but there's no contract enforcing it. So it sounds really smart. But we've been about five months delayed in a really critical time for us to launch Enigma because the rollout of this feature has been really slow and untested and under-invested in.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [05:20]

And then conviction -- a reaction to some of the recent high-profile rugs. Great idea: put some constraints on subnet operators so they can't rug, or at least investors know how ruggable they are. But it has this downside of now having to worry about locking up your TAO -- which is the only thing that gives you power in this ecosystem -- into one place, just to prevent other people from coming in and using their TAO to take over everything you've built.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [05:52]

In my opinion, we're spending a lot of time building walls, but there's so much beautiful stuff in Bittensor already. We really should be asking: should we be building walls, or should we be building rockets and going to the moon? Should we be spending our time being defensive and trying to protect what we have, or should we be trying to grow this thing like crazy?

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [06:35]

Bittensor isn't somebody else -- it's you. We are Bittensor. Are we going to try to dominate and land-grab at this beautiful time of deep tech, quantum, AI, where all of a sudden all attention is on the space that we own? Or are we simply going to try not to lose?

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [07:10]

That's kind of where my head's at. I have so much respect for all of the hard work that's been put into this ecosystem. We have such an incredible trajectory. TAO could be worth thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of dollars. I'm so excited about the future of it. I just hope we can stay out of our own way.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [07:40]

All right, into the regularly scheduled program -- which is still a little salty, if I'm totally honest. As always, these are ideas, not promises. We'll say some things that probably have financial implications, but this is in no way financial or legal advice. Please don't weaponize any of this content, and we'll keep it going.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [08:10]

Today's agenda: we're going to spend a bunch of time on SN63 Enigma, which is very exciting. It is right there. The time is perfect for it. It's the confluence of everything -- we just need to get out of our own way for a second and it's going to be live and game-changing. We're also going to talk about SN48 Quantum Compute, which continues to make amazing progress. We've got some really big stuff in store, but we're holding some of it because we want to give Enigma its moment to shine.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [08:54]

Starting with Enigma -- beautiful new logo, by the way. Thank you, Omar and team. Last time on qBitTensor Labs Live, there was a mixed reaction. A lot of people were excited and bullish. A good number of people were like, hey, what the hell? Why didn't we launch yet? I thought the marketing made us think we were about to launch.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [09:20]

I'm big on radical transparency. So let's do a recap of where we're at, what got us here, and exactly where we are at this moment in time. Back on November 10th, we released subnet code for SN63 that would start filling the prize pools. We were pretty excited about it. But we were quickly rejected by the validators. They all agreed that instead of running the code, they would start burning emission because they didn't want it building in a custodial wallet.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [10:00]

We highlighted that this is what we're doing with it. You know who we are. We're not mystery people on the internet. Other high-profile subnets are doing this approach. And the response was, well, we're not discussing all the subnets. We're talking about your subnet, and your subnet doesn't get to do this.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [10:30]

We politely said OK. We put together a whole deck addressing all of the concerns. I actually took time away from my Thanksgiving vacation in Florida and recorded a video at three in the morning on a porch of the Airbnb outlining everything we were going to do. That took up the entire month of November. We didn't hear back until December.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [11:00]

In December, the response was: that's all good, but treasury wallets are coming and they'll be here very quickly, so you can't move until there's treasury wallets. We said, sounds good. We're an ecosystem player. We'll wait for it. We were supposed to get updates the next day. We pinged. A couple days later, we pinged again. Got acknowledgment that they were waiting on devs for answers. A week later, still waiting -- but "we could wrap this up tomorrow."

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [11:40]

Then we got a message: it's going to be two weeks. Treasury wallets will be out in two weeks. OK, that was the first signal that things were going to take longer than expected. But two weeks, no big deal. We'll have it done before the first of the year.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [12:10]

We finally got a pull request for voting power on January 12th. It wasn't deployed to mainnet until March 19th. And on top of voting power, the rest of the treasury wallet functionality hadn't been tested and didn't work. There were major gaps. As we went to implement it, we realized we were quickly becoming the experts in the ecosystem on how this worked.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [13:00]

Earlier this week, knowing the last blocker was about to be resolved, we pulled all the validators together and let them know we were going to launch. We provided a ridiculously detailed Discord message on all the plans. The initial response was great: "Hey, cool. Validators launch at 3 PM. As long as you get us the code, we're all good." And then two minutes later: "Wait. Hold on. You guys use treasury wallets? Whoa. We're going to need to talk about this."

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [14:00]

We said, hey, if it would be better, we'll hold the treasury wallet feature and just do it with self-custody wallets. The answer was no way -- especially in the wake of SN3 and the lead-up to conviction, there's no way you could do this with a team-holds-all-emissions strategy.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [15:23]

Why do I take you through all that? Not to air grievances, but to have a transparent retrospective. Shining light on things is what makes us do better. We share your frustrations in the wait time on SN63. We're frustrated too. We think we're right there. We thought we would be out today. Quick shout-out to ShoreShot and Entangle This, who have been in the ecosystem helping close a lot of the gaps -- both highlighting functionality mismatches and helping fix them.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [16:20]

The last feature was originally scheduled for April 14th. We were skeptical because we've had a lot of false starts. We finally saw a mainnet deploy planned for it. Yesterday, I was 99% sure I'd be showing you a slide that says "We have pulled treasury wallets across the finish line, kicking and screaming." We were watching it unfold live -- it cleared the voting gate, the PR was approved, and we're sitting there on chat: yes, yes, yes, yes. And then boom. Another pull request. Delayed again.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [17:30]

We are so close. The higher they build the walls, the deeper they test our resolve. I'm willing to throw a team of developers at this for five months. They can take all emission and burn hundreds of thousands of dollars of it. If anybody was ever wondering what our conviction was -- we are in this. We are going to launch this and it is going to be amazing.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [18:23]

So much cool stuff has happened in the industry. It needs this product right now. It needed it months ago. If we had launched months ago, it would have been in Wired magazine right alongside all these major announcements around breaking encryption. It would have been in the Wall Street Journal. We would have been a major factor in moving TAO price. And I think we still can. The time is still available.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [18:50]

Just a couple of weeks ago, Google published a paper showing that with between 1,200 and 1,400 logical qubits, you can break Bitcoin. IonQ's roadmap targets 1,600 logical qubits in calendar year 2028. That means in 2028, we're going to be looking at either Bitcoin running on a post-quantum cryptography alternative, or Bitcoin having fallen apart and the entire crypto world on fire.

Ryan (ShoreShot) [19:32]

Or they think they're quantum-safe and they're not quantum-safe. That's another thing that needs to be proven.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [19:42]

Or IonQ fails to deliver on their roadmap -- that's also a possibility. But there are really only two major technical obstacles remaining. One is integrating qubits from a recently acquired technology provider. The second is scaling their systems by interconnecting multiple quantum machines. And earlier this month, on the 14th, IonQ announced they'd successfully interconnected them. That milestone is in the rearview mirror. All they need to do is integrate the qubits, and that's the last technical risk on their roadmap.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [20:30]

So how are you going to know when your Bitcoin is actually going to be broken? On Enigma. We're going to launch this thing. When something's important enough, you do it, even when the odds are stacked against you.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [21:00]

We're going to spend some time with ShoreShot explaining what treasury wallets actually are. Then we'll talk about what the launch looks like for Enigma.

Ryan (ShoreShot) [21:29]

Really what they are is an EVM smart contract. Bittensor added an EVM compatibility layer in late 2024. A smart contract is a program that runs on the EVM, written in Solidity. Smart contracts allow us to build programmable money, automated agreements, and transparent governance systems where the rules are mathematically enforced rather than enforced by human trust.

Ryan (ShoreShot) [22:10]

Our goal for the treasury wallet is to safely manage and distribute ecosystem assets -- specifically TAO and subnet alpha -- and to stake without giving a single individual the keys to the vault. The problem it solves: if a central admin holds the treasury keys, they can be hacked, go rogue, or rug. The contract ensures funds only move when a strict, transparent voting process has concluded.

Ryan (ShoreShot) [22:50]

We have guardrails specific to our use case. One is the validator whitelist -- we need to control the list of validators allowed to vote on alpha transfers, as not all validators are running Enigma challenges. If a new validator comes online and starts running challenge code so they can prove they validated a solution, they get added to that list.

Ryan (ShoreShot) [23:30]

We also need to limit the amount of alpha that gets sent in terms of amount and time, because that lowers risk. And we have a cancellable process so we can ensure challenge winners are awarded appropriately -- if there's a screw-up at the 11th hour, even if alpha is already being sent in batches, we can cancel the remaining batches.

Ryan (ShoreShot) [24:20]

We required some ecosystem features to be present for things to work. EVM voting power was added on March 19th -- it allows association of EVM wallets to Bittensor hotkeys to query staking power, since the EVM ecosystem and EVM wallets are really separate from the Bittensor ecosystem. And neuron registration was already merged to main -- I just got confirmation from Sam that it is getting deployed today.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [25:15]

Dude, that is news to my ears. Do we know what time it's deploying today? This afternoon? OK, that's great.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [26:00]

So here's the launch plan. Soft launch: the Treasury Wallet Challenge. We're going to deploy a treasury wallet, fund it with around $5,000 in SN63 alpha, and the challenge is -- go break it. Exploit the treasury wallet system, drain the funds, take the money. No formal submissions. No validation. Just take them.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [27:30]

This does a few things. It pressure-tests the treasury wallet implementation in production. It creates excitement and attention for Enigma before the full platform launches. And it demonstrates the kind of real-world, high-stakes challenge that Enigma is all about.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [28:45]

Once we're confident the treasury wallet system is solid, we launch the real challenges and all the emission starts flowing into the treasury wallet.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [32:40]

Hard launch will be one to three weeks following soft launch. Soft launch is presumably Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, depending on when the validators ship. In the hard launch, we will include the Hardening Quantum Proof challenge -- peaked circuit challenges with BlueQubit. And Breaking RSA -- I am biting my tongue. I am so excited about our committed collaborator on this one, but they have not officially signed the LOI yet. We've got basically the number one, the best possible option, and they're totally bullish and on board.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [33:30]

Who's BlueQubit and why do they matter? I originally met them when they were one of the first quantum companies I talked to when I entered the quantum industry. Their CEO did his postdoc with John Preskill, who is arguably number one in terms of quantum credibility. They've created a platform for driving publicity around peaked circuits. In Scott Aaronson's Q2B keynote, he specifically called them out by name -- he sees peaked circuits as one of the most important things in quantum because they allow you to confirm that a quantum computer is doing something a classical computer literally cannot.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [35:06]

BlueQubit has mutual interest in making sure that claim holds. So we're going to have increasingly complex versions of these circuits, and we're going to have people try to break them until they can't be broken anymore. And then we'll keep building up prize pools to make it richer and richer.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [35:17]

On to Quantum Compute. There are some awesome things behind the scenes that I'm not going to talk about today because we don't want to steal Enigma's thunder. But IonQ Forte Enterprise is now live on Open Quantum. This is IonQ's most stable system. ShoreShot, are we live now?

Ryan (ShoreShot) [35:53]

Live now, yep. A little bit ago. It might not be accepting jobs because there's certain times of day when it's down, but that's fairly common for all QPUs. It's up there right now.

Omar [36:12]

One of the exciting things about Forte Enterprise is the downtime is substantially lower than most other quantum computers. The original Forte device is usually down for a couple hours every day. Forte Enterprise is down for about half an hour every day.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [36:31]

They've branded it as enterprise -- rack-mountable, high uptime, lower operational cost, more standardized manufacturing. Certainly an upgrade from the other systems online. Up and live on Open Quantum.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [37:00]

Rigetti's Ankaa-3 has officially been retired. It will be replaced with their next generation, Cepheus, which is a 108-qubit system with a similar architecture. We'll plan to have that on Open Quantum shortly. Ankaa-3, we will miss you. You were a good quantum computer.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [37:30]

This was cool. Last Sunday, I get an email from Dr. Keating -- he's a well-respected physicist at UC San Diego. He has a following of about 300,000 subscribers. He's been on the Joe Rogan show, had Neil deGrasse Tyson on his show. He said, hey, this video just hit and we need to post a response. Can we jump on a podcast immediately? So we did, recorded a quick episode. Open Quantum's in there, Quantum Rings is in there. Great exposure to people who are not Bittensor people.

Omar [39:06]

Since the last qBitTensor Labs Live, there have been a number of changes to our marketing and branding. We made some major updates to the website -- dedicated pages for both Enigma and Quantum Compute. On Quantum Compute, there's a button to take you to Open Quantum where you can start running on quantum computers for free, powered by Bittensor. On Enigma, there's a link to sign up for the waitlist.

Omar [40:00]

With the pivot -- Enigma no longer being centered solely around quantum but focusing on deep tech as a whole -- we figured Enigma needed its own platform and its own voice. So we created a dedicated X account, @EnigmaSN63, which is now the one-stop shop for all things Enigma.

Omar [40:45]

We're really leaning into the narrative behind Enigma. A lot of our content before was clips rehashing qBitTensor Labs Live. While we're continuing those, there was a lot being missed. With this account, we're spelling it out -- what is Enigma, why is it important, how does it relate to outside news like Google papers and IonQ developments, and how are we building these systems.

Omar [41:30]

There's been a big focus on consistency. With the qBitTensor Labs account, we targeted three to five posts a week. With Enigma, especially in this pre-launch period, we're posting daily, five days a week. We've also been working with community members to improve our messaging -- getting direct feedback on how we should be shaping the narrative.

Omar [42:30]

We've also been exploring multimedia content. We put out a long-form X article outlining everything about Enigma. We've done threads that are more digestible. Bob put out a TikTok-style YouTube Short about Enigma that was well-received. We're mixing up how we get our messaging across.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [44:02]

If you like the content, engage with it. We're driving future posts by watching engagement on historic posts. The article got a certain amount of engagement. The video got a certain amount. We were thinking about doing a video this week but down-prioritized it because engagement was lower. So if you like what you see, give it a bump, a comment, a repost -- that's going to drive what we do.

Omar [44:44]

We really love to see the reposts and the additional commentary. There's no better way to prove legitimacy in Bittensor than having someone else advocate for you. When you go out with your personal accounts and say "qBitTensor Labs, those are the guys to watch" -- that gives us a huge boost in credibility.

Omar [45:22]

We also did a slight rebrand on the Open Quantum X account, which is now the Quantum Compute X account. New logo -- if you're a quantum lover, you'll notice it looks like a quantum chandelier. The hope is more consistency across brands. It should now be very obvious: this is the quantum subnet on Bittensor, SN48.

Omar [46:20]

The plan going forward: qBitTensor Labs hosts the live sessions every other week, covers major Bittensor news, and amplifies major milestones for both subnets. In the short term, we'll be reposting from subnet accounts. Long term, we'll pivot to one to two posts per week. Quantum Compute will post one to two times per week for major updates. Enigma will post daily to build hype.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [49:03]

The rollout has been in phases. Creating the sub-brands, transitioning content into the right channels with heavy cross-promotion, and then settling into the long-term model. We're still in that middle phase.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [49:51]

I love the split because different people want different things. If we hadn't done this, qBitTensor Labs would be cannibalizing one subnet's attention to drive the other. It sounds simple now that it's here, but it's a lot more than just furniture-moving to make this happen.

Omar [50:21]

That was a big factor in the decision. The message was getting muddled. And we were noticing tension within the community -- people interested in SN63 and people interested in SN48 were pulling in different directions. We made a push to split things on our end, and the community actually created a second Telegram: one for Enigma, one for Open Quantum. Each community gets their own voice and channel.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [51:33]

The other thing we've wanted to do is start the podcast tour. If you go on one podcast without a clean split between these two things, you have to talk about both, which creates a muddled message. With this split, we booked time with Ventura for a session dedicated to SN63. We'll also join Revenue Search for a session dedicated to SN48. Each appearance focuses entirely on one subnet.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [53:00]

Omar, thanks. It was great having you on the podcast. Let us know if you enjoyed the marketing perspective and we'll bring more of it.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [53:15]

Community Q&A. "How many challenges do you expect SN63 to be running simultaneously? Is there a limit? Also, when launch?" Soon. We will initially launch with the mock challenge while we host the off-chain treasury wallet challenge. Then we'll launch the two parallel challenges. We've made a commitment to our Breaking RSA collaborator to follow up with subsequent challenges -- the initial one being a classical factorization challenge, followed by a quantum version.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [54:30]

We also have at least three additional challenges in the roadmap. There is no technical limitation on the number of live challenges. The limitation is having enough prize pool -- since we market prizes in USD and TAO and alpha fluctuate, we need headroom. And from a marketing perspective, we need to figure out the right number. Does more help, or does it dilute the message? We'll figure that out as we go.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [55:30]

From MG: "How does the new emission thesis distinguish itself from other challenge-based subnets?" We should be the most trusted -- you know us. We're here every couple of weeks talking to you. We've shared who we are. We're doing this through treasury wallets, which makes us uniquely secure. We're bringing outside companies with us on each challenge. And the challenges we're running are the ones that are going to break society. If anything is going to get major news coverage from Wired, the Wall Street Journal, mainstream media -- it's these types of challenges.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [56:30]

We don't think this is just going to be another challenge subnet. We think this is going to bring so many eyeballs to Bittensor that it's not just going to impact our alpha price -- it's going to impact TAO price. But I'm a little biased.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [57:00]

"Love seeing jobs queue up on Open Quantum. Does this mean revenue is increasing?" One could infer that safely. "Would love to know about adoption and revenue growth." I don't want to say anything on this one. I'm trying not to take attention away from Enigma today. You should read something into the fact that we're going on a podcast named Revenue Search with SN48 as the focus.

Omar [01:00:51]

We were looking at it yesterday -- there are at least eight other subnets doing winner-take-all prize pools. I don't know if they're using different mechanisms than us, but there hasn't been a push for other subnets to implement treasury wallets, which is a little confusing.

Ryan (ShoreShot) [01:01:10]

For the protection of Bittensor itself and the legitimacy of subnets, I hope other subnets will be forced to move toward a contract. It makes the ecosystem better for all of us. We don't want to hear about someone rugging or a hacker taking money. It's really bad news for all of us, and we want Bittensor to succeed.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [01:01:41]

ShoreShot, you know they're going to be coming to you for support getting onboarded. Normally you guys only see us on qBitTensor Labs Live, but usually ShoreShot's the "what the hell" guy and I'm the "it's all cool" guy. Little role reversal today.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [01:02:10]

Community sentiment -- website's sick, new slogan, love the content. Thanks for the kudos. We appreciate all your help getting us there.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [01:03:15]

When I first got to know Bittensor, it was on Discord and Discord has a vibe. But I was really blown away with some of the in-person interactions I've had recently. There's an outstanding group of people at OTF, at ecosystem organizations, at other subnet operators. I wish the digital vibe of Bittensor was more reflective of the talent sitting around this ecosystem. It really is quite a thing.

Bob Wold (BeyondNISQ) [01:03:45]

And that's it for us today. We were a little over time, so sorry about that. We'll try to keep it closer to an hour in the future. Sorry for being a little salty today, but we're believers in radical transparency. We're thrilled to have you with us. Give us a shout-out on the socials, and we will talk again soon. Thank you, everybody.