qBitTensor Labs Live — May 21, 2026
Terra Quantum confirmed as the Breaking RSA partner, Treasury Wallet Challenge results, Enigma launch timeline, credit card payments for SN48, and ecosystem commentary. Also the first QBTLL Live(ish) -- a Riverside glitch meant this one was recorded and posted after the fact.
Due to a Riverside glitch, this was technically the first qBitTensor Labs Live(ish) -- the stream never actually went live, so the team recorded and posted it after the fact.
Bob recapped Enigma's challenge model, Omar introduced Terra Quantum as the confirmed Breaking RSA partner, and the team covered Treasury Wallet Challenge results, the launch timeline, validator status, and prize pool numbers. On the SN48 side: credit card payments, Rigetti's Cepheus replacing Ankaa-3, and a Colorado School of Mines student project. The session wrapped with ecosystem commentary and community sentiment.
Terra Quantum Partnership
Omar introduced Terra Quantum as the collaborator for the Breaking RSA challenge. They're a Swiss-headquartered quantum tech company with a full security stack spanning post-quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, and quantum random number generation. Their global head of security has expressed interest in joining a future episode.
Treasury Wallet Challenge Results
The Treasury Wallet Challenge ran in two phases:
- Phase 1: $5K in static alpha -- one minor defect identified and rewarded, no critical vulnerabilities
- Phase 2: $5K with active transactions -- no exploits found
The team considers the treasury wallet implementation production-ready.
Prize Pool Status
- ~$375K total across test and production wallets ($85K in production treasury from validator emissions, ~$290K from owner-contributed emission)
- ~$1.4M burned during the months validators were not running challenge code
- On track for ~$1M by August at current emission rates
Enigma Launch Timeline
- May 22: Mock challenge branch goes public; outgoing wallet transaction testing begins
- May 28: Real challenges (Hardening Quantum Proof + Breaking RSA) released in public repo with detailed challenge pages
- June 4: Challenges go live
Validator Status
ShoreShot walked through the current validator landscape. RT21 and Rizzo are running, Yuma has child-keyed off the qBitTensor Labs validator, and Capricious Sage was the first external validator to run treasury wallets. Several validators remain MIA or weight-copying.
SN48: Credit Card Payments and Cepheus
- Credit card payments launching. Users can pay full price for centralized/private compute or half price through the Bittensor network. Proceeds from compute handled by SN48 come back through alpha buybacks.
- Cepheus launched -- Rigetti's 108-qubit superconducting QPU replacing the retired Ankaa-3
- Colorado School of Mines: Four CS students building a predictive runtime model for quantum circuits over a five-week engagement, enabling simulator pricing and faster QPU onboarding
Events
- NIST pre-standardization workshop on balancing standards rigor with quantum industry pace
- Boulder Startup Week panel -- Q&A heavy on "when will quantum break Bitcoin?" Bob was recognized as the qBitTensor Labs founder by attendees from the crypto community.
Bittensor Ecosystem Commentary
Bob shared concerns about growing ecosystem complexity. TaoFlow 2 caught the team off guard -- fewer than a quarter of top subnets now receive emission. Conviction's spec has changed multiple times. The throughline: complexity is where exploits breed, but the pendulum will swing back.
Community Sentiment
Broader Bittensor sentiment has been rocky, tracking TAO price swings. Sentiment toward qBitTensor Labs remains strong -- the community has been patient through repeated delays and continues to show up.
A big thank you to the team and to the supporters who've stuck with us. It's been a hard road, but we now have what many would argue are two of the strongest subnets on Bittensor -- adding real value to the world. And none of it would be possible without this ecosystem.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to qBitTensor Labs Live. Today is May 21st, and we're excited to have you guys, as always. Thanks for joining us. So as always, the usual disclaimers, these are all ideas, not promises. We're not giving any investment or legal advice, even if we accidentally give any investment or legal advice. That's not what that is.
Don't weaponize any of this or use it against us. You guys have been doing a great job of using the material from qBitTensor Labs Live for good and not for evil. And so we appreciate that. And by participating in this meeting, you agreed all the above. And with that, we'll roll. All right, so today's agenda, we're probably going to go a little bit long. I got a little bit thick with the content, if I'm being totally honest.
So yeah, we're going to cover Subnet 63. We'll take a little bit of time there. We're going to start by recapping what Subnet 63 actually is. And then we will go into some of the updates on it, give you some really specific details on exactly where we are and what's going to be happening over the next couple of days here. Then we'll go into Subnet 48. Same story there. We'll give the high level of, again, what it is. And then we'll go through some of the specific updates on it. And then the rest of it, I think, is actually pretty short content. But we'll hit a couple of events that we were participating in recently, a little bit of the happenings in the Bittensor community. And then we'll go to community sentiment. And we'll go from there. So without further ado, in trying to cram way too much material into our one-hour podcast, let's talk about Enigma.
For anybody that missed it, we did have an episode of the Ventura podcast where we focused entirely on Enigma. Again, as a part of our new branding strategy, we're trying to give Enigma airtime or quantum compute airtime when we're out collaborating with people as opposed to trying to blend both of those in. And so this Ventura podcast was totally focused on Enigma. If you missed the episode, you can go check it out. I'm also going to grab some of the highlights of it.
to fill anybody in on what Enigma is just in case there's any new people joining us today. And so Enigma, how it works is we work with collaborators from industry to post challenges. These challenges are like really important problems where technology is on the course to disrupt them. And we sort of want to see out in the open how the community can do disrupting them.
The whole world competes. We have access to really brilliant hackers through the Bittensor ecosystem. And then we work with our collaborators and our own self to get access to researchers. So we can bring in like academics, researchers and hackers all together to try to crack these problems. When they win, the solutions are published. So people can see exactly how they did it, they can build on those solutions. And every time that a milestone is met, the next milestone is more difficult than the last. And so, you know, one of the key parts on this is that we are talking hackers and researchers, not just, you know, Bittensor miners. And the cool thing is that, you know, we really do believe that this will create a virtuous cycle where the larger the prizes get, the better the talent it will attract and the better the talent it attracts, the better the solutions, the more news coverage, which will bring in more investors, which will drive alpha price appreciation, which will drive emission appreciation, which will make larger prizes, which will bring in better talent. You know how that works. And live today, we have an initial challenge that's really focused on breaking the mechanism that we use to distribute those prizes. We'll give some updates on that in the second half of the Enigma updates. But that challenge has essentially served its purpose. And we're going to get ready to wind that down and make room for the real challenges.
And the real challenges that are coming are breaking RSA, which we've talked quite a bit about, but we'll share a little bit more detail on that. We'll share a little bit more detail on that in a minute. And then the other challenge is hardening quantum proof. And so those two are both really important. Breaking RSA, there's a lot of speculation around when Q-Day is going to come and disrupt RSA, when quantum computers will be able to break RSA encryption.
We want to put the challenges out in the open so the whole world can see exactly how far people can get. And on hardening quantum proof, that works with one of the leaders in the industry working on a solution to be able to benchmark quantum computers so that we can have a better idea of how the computers are coming along in a very factual, measurable, unhackable way. And we're going to be helping them harden that solution by challenging hackers to break it. And so we've talked about hardening quantum proof in the past.
We're doing that in collaboration with a company called BlueQubit. They're a really exciting startup in the quantum space. I think like six months ago or so, they raised like a $10 million seed round. They're doing exciting stuff, kind of trying to become one of the key operating system type players in quantum. But this project that they've been working on in collaboration with people like Scott Aaronson to try to formalize peaked circuits as quantum benchmarks is really exciting and we're thrilled to be working with them on that. The other challenge is the breaking RSA challenge. And that I'm excited to say we're doing that in collaboration with a really cool company called Terra Quantum. If you haven't heard of Terra Quantum before you're missing out, you definitely need to Google them. They are a really exciting company, worldwide footprint, really focused in on the space. And in fact, Omar, why don't you take us through just a little bit about what Terra Quantum is? Here, just stop. I'm going to skip all animations on this slide so that you don't have to wait for them.
Totally. So Terra Quantum is a pretty large quantum company known for a number of things, but we're most excited to work with them for their quantum security expertise. We have a number of connections locally there, which I'll get into in a moment, but a brief overview, they're a Swiss headquartered quantum tech company. And so they work in quantum software and algorithms and then of course, post quantum security solutions. And so as an advocate for post quantum security solutions. They are big into preparing for Q-Day today. And if you look around the quantum ecosystem, you'll see they do a lot of talks and attend a lot of conferences to discuss the importance of, you know, making sure that we are quantum ready when we reach fault tolerant quantum computers. And yeah, and so they have a number of product offerings, specializing in post-quantum cryptography. So they offer consulting services for enterprises to help switch from RSA and ECC to post-quantum cryptographic solutions. They also offer solutions for quantum key distribution. So that is sending messages using actual quantum. And so that's a whole new level of security beyond PQC. And they also specialize in quantum random number generation. And so the idea there is all of our random keys right now are only pseudo random. They're based off of something physical. And so by switching to a quantum random number generator, it removes the possibility that attackers could predict your key ahead of time before it's generated. And so by addressing really all of these attack vectors, they have a pretty comprehensive stack to help you become quantum ready. And so, yeah.
Yeah, and what I'm most excited about, you just hit on it, but most of the time you run into a quantum security company. They're just sort of like an IT company that's peddling PQC, right? They're just taking standards and they're actually a classical computing company, helping companies migrate into PQC. But by these guys playing in PQC and QKD and RNG, they're sort of covering the full spectrum and you have true quantum geeks working here, which is great.
Totally. Yeah. And the reason they're so excited about this challenge is the same reason that we're super excited about this. And we've been harping on this on socials for weeks now is that quantum is coming, whether we're ready for it or not. And so it's a lot better to be ready for it than to let it catch you off guard and suddenly your Bitcoin wallet is empty. And so they wanted to really drive the message that they support this challenge as sort of a benchmark for quantum and cryptographic resilience, the same messaging we've been putting out is if we have an active spotlight on what is possible with today's technology, then we can one drive a better message to enterprises who are maybe on the fence. And two, it gives us a better understanding of what our timeline is before Q-Day happens. And so we have a local connection. We know their global head of security. We see them at a lot of quantum events. So getting to interface with their quantum security team regularly is a big reason why we're very excited to be moving forward. The mentioned global head of security has expressed interest in actually coming on the podcast and sort of talking about quantum cryptography and more about the partnership and what Terra Quantum is up to these days. Make sure to stay tuned. We could have some exciting content for you guys coming.
Yeah, sweet. Well, thanks for the overview, Omar. And yeah, we're super excited to be working with Terra Quantum. We really couldn't ask for a better collaborator in this space. The other cool thing about Enigma, getting back to kind of what that subnet is, it uses these big prize pools. So where most traditional subnets will sort of pay out every time emission comes in, we gather up the emission and we give out larger prizes when larger milestones are hit.
And we are the only subnet in Bittensor protected by treasury wallets. That's the Bittensor native solution that uses smart contracts in order to make sure that you're working with legit people controlling those funds. So where, again, most traditional subnets kind of work where you get something from the miner, the validator sets the weights, and then whatever percentage of that small emission goes based on the weights, we're actually in this world where all of the emission will go into the treasury wallet and then in a separate track, the validators will see how miners did with their solutions and give them a large payout from the treasury wallet. So small payouts often, large payouts from huge pools, which are hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point, we'll go into actually the exact details or I guess yesterday's exact details, because they continue to grow pretty fast on what's in there.
And the cool thing is that at launch, which is imminent, and we'll give you dates in a second, every submission pays a fee in Subnet Alpha. So they need to buy Alpha or put a credit card number into the qBitTensor Labs website, in which case we will buy Alpha on their behalf to pay the fees to play. Once the pools are full, we will start burning any excess emission. So there's positive tokenomics there.
And all submissions that come in are open sourced and we get the right to commercially license those if applicable. And if we do commercially license those, all proceeds from the licenses will go to buybacks on the alpha. And so all that's kind of to recap what Enigma is, but really most of you guys who are here are looking for the bleeding edge of what is the state of the subnet. And so let's jump into it. The treasury wallets are in --
The Treasury Wallet Challenge is in pretty good shape. We started with phase one where we put $5,000 in. It was unbroken. There was one defect that was discovered there. It was basically that a bad actor could sort of force chaos on the network by voting when they weren't allowed to vote. It was not actually a real security vulnerability, but would cause a little bit of a mess for us. And so we did actually issue an award to the user who reported that. Ryan, I don't know if you want to jump in and share any more detail on that. I probably explained that like a dumb CEO explains anything technical.
Yeah, I mean it was just a small exploit that could potentially affect voting. I don't think in a negative way because it's still weight calculated, but yeah, there's a couple small things that one user pointed out and then a few other users after that pointed out as well. So thank you for the feedback -- it helps us harden our system and provide value to the subnet.
Cool, yeah, awesome. And so that moved us into phase two where we sort of said, hey, know, this money sitting here stationary in the wallet, you know, maybe that only exposes a certain amount of attack vectors. Maybe some of the attack vectors will happen when we're transferring funds. And so we moved into this second phase where we put an additional $5,000 into that wallet and started doing small transactions. And we've done a number of transactions now, you know, announcing to the community that we'd be doing them. And that second sort of attack vector of catching the transaction while it's in motion also seems not to have exposed any vulnerabilities. And so that challenge at this point is essentially closing soon. We'll essentially have all the funds out of that and then we'll wind down that challenge. It served its purpose. You know, we looked at this as having a significant upside if there was a vulnerability that was discovered.
But we also looked at this as having a substantial upside if there was no vulnerability discovered. And so at this point, we sort of got the best of both worlds. We identified some bugs, paid a little bit of reward money for that, and now we feel very solid about what we have.
All right, so the state of the subnet prize pools. So in that test treasury wallet, there's like 500 USD left because we've been slowly transferring it all so hackers could try to catch us on the transfer. We also have the 85,000 that has accumulated now in the production treasury wallet. So this is the money, this is the new money that has arrived just since validators started running the code, which was a little bit of a challenge to bring them with us on that.
On top of that, we still have the original approximately 290,000 that is in our prize pools from owner emission that we had contributed in the down period, which puts us at about $375,000 in total prize pools today. Now, keep in mind, that's like we're showing you numbers in US dollars, but really this is in our subnet's alpha, in Tao, and so there's like layers of volatility, and so it goes up and down quite a bit. But that puts us on a really good track to --
be right around a million dollars even without a lot of appreciation by August, which is actually quite a strong prize for the quantum industry. Now, the downside that we don't talk about too often is that while the validators were burning our emission for the last, since November, I guess, we estimate that about 1.4 million in prize pools ended up burned, which is actually a great thing if you were holding 63 because all that money, all that alpha can't be sold. But it really would have been nice if we were sitting at, what would that be, $1.7 million in prize pools today instead of 375. But we're on the right track now. The whole ecosystem is aligned, and so we're in really good shape. Which brings us to the state of the validators. So obviously --
We're all in. We do run a validator, so we've been running our code since even before it was public. The cool news is RT21, who has the most stake weight out of any of these other validators on the subnet, did make the leap and looked at the EVM contracts, which is a somewhat risky thing for a validator to work with. Set everything up and is running it -- huge shout out to those guys for that. As of today, I think as of yesterday, Ryan, is that right -- Rizzo is running? Yeah, I'm seeing a nod.
Yep, Rizzo is up and running and we actually have a proposal out to add them to the validator whitelist because they are running the code. RT21 is just about to vote on it. They'll be updated in the system and ready to go.
Awesome. Yeah. And by the way, just hearing you say like those like, you know, three sentences about the process should sort of like plant in people's mind just how much more complicated the world is with treasury wallets, because, you know, every time there's a new validator, they need to get voted in to become, you know, a voter on this contract. And every time we want to issue funds, there needs to be voting and there's gas fees and, you know, all of this stuff. And so it has added substantial complexity for the validators to participate. And so, we really have a lot of gratitude for the ones that are leading the charge there.
So another approach that people have taken is Yuma actually decided to child key off of our validator. And so what that basically means is that our stake weight goes up by whatever their stake weight is, and they don't have to run the code yet. We imagine that that's temporary while they're sort of getting acquainted with the contracts and decide to run it. And then essentially all the others are either MIA, MIA like we haven't had a legit response from them yet, or they're just weight copying. But the cool news is that even just with RT21, but especially with Rizzo, and especially with the added weight of Yuma, the net net is that we have more than enough stake weight to run the subnet successfully. And so, yeah, we wish everybody would participate and that everybody, and we think eventually they will, once it's been sufficiently de-risked, but --
We're really grateful for those that have and we've got everything we need to launch the subnet at this point, which is excellent. And I do want to give a huge shout out to Capricious Sage, Captain. I don't know, does anybody like, I grew up watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the nineties and like, I swear, like they had these repeat ads and there was always this like funny one where somebody has this like big problem.
and they're all stressed out about it. And then Captain Crunch shows up and they eat some Captain Crunch and then like they get through whatever the problem is. And then the punchline was always you and the captain make it happen. ShoreShot, you and the captain make it happen, man. We got ShoreShot and Capricious Sage pulling this one across the finish line. Huge shout out to Capricious Sage for, you know, really, I think, you know, taking a solid risk for the team, being the first one to run treasury wallets. So --
Huge shout out. Thank you for getting us across the finish line.
All right, the state of the subnets, the development status. So you're basically going to see there's no blockers anymore. There's no to-dos anymore. But we do still have some things that are staged and not live. And so we're going to take you through what those look like. As the whole world wonders, are we going to launch 63 right now, or are we going to delay another week? So let's talk exactly about that. So the state of the subnet is we are rolling it out.
Effective immediately the rollout will take a little bit of time though because of a lot of the complexities that you picked up on in these conversations. And so today the public branch with all the validator code, all the miner functionality and what we're calling a mock challenge will be made public. The mock challenge serves the purpose of allowing us to have test miners running solutions that the validators are validating, which triggers them to do a Yuma, which triggers a transaction, which then gets voted on.
Once we have made those things go all the way through the pipeline and we've tested it end to end, we will be following up with the launch of the full challenges. Now, the way that these contracts work, there is a fixed number of days that exist for voting periods to happen. And so there is actually baked into the contract a delay in how long it takes for us to test that. And so what you're going to see happen is on May 22nd, tomorrow, we're going to start running outgoing wallet transactions.
Mock challenges will have been solved. The validators will then be able to see that they validated that that solution was solved. We'll be able to issue a transaction to distribute a small amount of prize pool money and they will be able to vote on it. On the 28th, the real challenges, so it's gonna take, it's unfortunately gonna take that much time for the contract to test it.
So on May 28th, we will then be releasing the real challenges in the public repository. So this is both the peaked circuit challenge and the breaking RSA challenge. We'll also be releasing the web pages that fully describe the details of those challenges instead of just the high level strategy of those challenges. And validators will then have a couple of days to start running that code. And then on June 4th, we will flip the switch and the challenges will go live. And at that point, real people will be competing. And make no mistake about it, I do fully expect that people will win the first milestones on those very quickly. Like I don't know how many of the miners are sort of like sitting here waiting and watching, but with the public code going available May 28th and with it flipping live on June 4th, it will not surprise me if one or both of our challenges have a solution to the very first milestone.
in the very first day or two. And if that happens, that's not going to be a bad thing. That's going to be a good thing because it just shows how scrappy and innovative and fast paced the Bittensor ecosystem really is. And so we'll have follow-up milestones waiting in the wings to launch. So be ready. It was coming quick. And yeah, if anybody hasn't been following the journey and they want to, hit us up at EnigmaSN63 on Twitter.
That's sort of the most active place. Omar and team have been posting there on the regular, man. I don't know. I feel like you guys have been doing multiple a day.
But yeah, follow us and come for the journey. OK, so now jumping into quantum compute. And I noticed that we are at 10:25. I have a note that says the stream isn't working. So that sucks. But we're going to keep rolling because we're halfway through and this will all be available to turn into a YouTube anyway. And we'll just post it out that way momentarily.
But we'll spend about 15 minutes on the quantum compute subnet and then we'll spend rest of the time on the other items. So quantum compute Subnet 48, we were on Revenue Search recently talking about just quantum computing in general and the subnet and then we even got kind of sucked into a lot of the greater Bittensor items. One of the interesting things is that there was apparently a lot of feedback that people wanted to hear more about Bittensor, which is really exciting to me because I sort of have this philosophy that in order to make things good, you have to talk about them sort of safely and publicly. Otherwise, if everybody just bites their tongue and stays silent, then systems can fall apart and become pretty bad. And so, yeah, we'll see about potentially doing a follow-up with the Revenue Search team.
But the subnet is pretty exciting. The only subnet that can only be mined with a quantum computer, which in and of itself, in my opinion, makes it super exciting. But what's even more exciting about it is what it does for the quantum industry, because it's not like we're just wasting time running quantum computers to get cryptocurrency. We're doing real work for real users to earn that emission. And so I want to take you guys through this concept, like I hope everybody's heard of OpenRouter, super cool company. They're essentially a single pane of glass API that sits on top of all of the leading, you know, AI models. And if you haven't been following us on this journey, you definitely need to look up Open Quantum, which does the same thing. It's a unified API for quantum hardware. And OpenRouter currently raising capital at like a $1.4 billion valuation.
It basically just sits on top of Anthropic and OpenAI and Grok and Google. It also sits on top of Chutes, which is this decentralized AI inference on Bittensor. Well, Open Quantum is essentially the exact same paradigm. It sits on top of guys like AWS and QBraid and others to sell their compute in a very centralized way. Or you can run Subnet 48 and get some of that time at like a discount or even free. But the cool thing is that like 90% of the traffic today is going through Subnet 48. So most of the users that are coming to Open Quantum are opting to just go with Subnet 48, the Bittensor supported way of doing it, which is decentralized quantum compute on Bittensor. And so like early momentum, we have thousands of users, tens of thousands of executions.
Our customer acquisition cost is essentially that $50 of free compute that we're giving away. We also give away a referral bonus to people that bring other users into the ecosystem. But we've primarily seen all of this growth just through simple SEO, and word of mouth spreading. We really have not invested a lot in spreading the word about Open Quantum. And what's really cool about this is that we're sort of in this first phase of it where we were using Subnet 48's miner emission to fund compute in order to cover this customer acquisition cost and bring people in with the temptation of free quantum compute. And that's been really exciting and it's been great for us. But we're now in this mode of switching from that land grab and getting into actual revenue. And so, you know, ShoreShot. I don't know if it actually went out today or if it's about to go out, but --
We are launching the ability today to give users the ability to put in their credit card number and buy time on SN48. So users can choose to either pay full price to do things through a centralized way with all of their data private, or they can pay half price, half retail, and run it through the Bittensor ecosystem.
And any of the revenue that is generated, all the proceeds from the revenue generated on buying credits that are used on 48 actually go right back to buying alpha.
And so the near-term roadmap is that this idea of driving sales on-chain, automated marketing, subscription bundles, all of the kind of stuff that you would expect from a normal SaaS company. We also will be bringing on additional miners. We'll be adding framework support for Penny Lane and Cirq. We will be working on monetizing the data assets that we build. But the really cool thing is getting to this alpha repurchase with the portion of the proceeds for the on-chain executions.
We also do have a liquidity strategy that we plan to put into place, which will allow for us to, we don't want to share too much about what that is, but essentially using things like Astrid Vault, NOTC and DATs, and potentially even crowdsourced funding via smart contracts to create liquidity options to avoid all of that miner emission needing to go back into the pool, which would negatively impact our TaoFlow and potentially our subnet price.
And this part of it is what drives this part of it. And what's new on 48 is that we're doing it. So yeah, you can go in today and the messaging will have changed from just being focused on like free compute and then paying retail after that to free compute. And then when you run out of that, you can put in your credit card and buy half-priced compute, which we think is actually going to be louder for the market because free is kind of, you know --
Yeah, we really wanted to focus on some of the user experience that we currently provide and want to make sure that we catch errors, whether they're user-based and people are writing bad syntax when it comes to OpenQASM or when it comes to like the QPUs we're writing on and there are certain limitations in terms of certain QPUs support some --
sus to a lot of people, but half priced just feels like a good deal. And again, we will provide the first $50 free with miner emission, but then users can buy those credits and either pay full price to route through a centralized mechanism or half price to run through quantum compute. So yeah, we're super excited about it. On top of that stuff, Ryan has also been --
gates and commands and some other QPUs don't. And we want to get that information to the user not only as quickly as possible, but also as verbose as possible in order for them to actually go and self-serve and solve their problems. Yeah, just really, I think we have a lot of improvements that are coming today in the release and as well as stuff coming up in the near future.
continuing to actually add more and more user value by making it easier and easier to run on quantum computers. And Ryan, why don't you talk us through some of those changes.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, any errors we can't catch actually upfront, you know, also we're going to make sure to decipher and decode and have a useful message to the user. When things like that fail and, you know, say if like, if there's permanent errors, then, you know, we don't need to retry and we could get that error back to the user quicker. And then transient errors, you know, make sure that we retry it, like a validator can't talk to a miner, things like that. So, yeah.
Yeah, nothing worse than like getting in line and waiting for your job to run and then have it crash once it gets there.
Oh yeah, yeah, that should be launching today. Yeah, Rigetti retired their Ankaa-3 platform and then there's kind of been a gap since then. So we're looking to fill that gap and get that stuff online.
Awesome.
And then I guess you launched Cepheus.
Yeah, that's awesome. It's gonna be great to have another superconducting system up in 108 qubits. I mean, that's epic. So super cool. And then, you know, the last thing maybe, you know, and actually I'm gonna spring this on Omar, even though he's probably not expecting to present on this one, but we talked about a project that we did with MIT a number of months ago. So it was in February where we had a bunch of MIT kids and other kids from the local universities --
Hopefully, hopefully the recording is gonna work. Yeah, yeah.
working on a project for us where they would try to use machine learning to basically predict what was needed for -- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're good, we're good. Yeah, we're good. Yeah, sorry, someone's just telling me that we're not live, but we're recording and going after the fact. So hopefully, otherwise we're talking to ourselves.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, this project was essentially to use machine learning to be able to predict some things about how a simulation was going to work. Omar, tell us about the follow up with Mines.
Yeah. So I believe we have actually mentioned this project in past qBitTensor Labs Lives, but this seemed like a great time to sort of give everyone a reminder that it's happening. We met with the team. We have a team of four very bright, Colorado School of Mines students, majoring in computer science who are going to be working with us over the next five weeks. And so they're going to be picking up a lot of what the MIT hackathon sought out to do. And so they're going to be working on a predictive model that will help us determine the runtime of quantum circuits ahead of time. And that's going to be huge for Open Quantum because it means we can add hosted simulators. And so in addition to being able to put live QPUs, you can also run quantum simulators and you don't need to pay for those upfront or worry about installing them onto your machine. You can run it all through the Open Quantum Cloud. And so we're excited to see that unroll over the next five weeks and we'll hopefully have some exciting updates as we get some more work back from them.
Yeah, best case scenario, we could add simulation to Open Quantum with this. Worst case scenario, we get to work with some smart kids who teach us how not to do it, I suppose.
Totally. I mean, regardless, it'll be a great jumping off point and push us further to the finish line on this feature. And it will actually also open up the door for a lot of QPUs. All the quantum computers on Open Quantum right now are priced in terms of shots. And many of them out on the market are priced by runtime. And so if we can predict that runtime, then we can start onboarding several more quantum computers. And so we could very, very quickly expand the scope of what we're able to offer.
Totally, totally. You know, by the way, it's totally just occurring to me right now how hilarious it is that our live stream doesn't work the day that we're telling everybody the dates on this. You know, I never tell anybody dates. Like the internet gods are trying to protect us from divulging too much information. Yeah. Go back, go back. Change it in post-production. No, just kidding.
Of course.
They're looking out for us. Yeah, we can put in whatever date we want. Fix it in post.
Just kidding. All right. Anyway, if you want to learn more about Open Quantum, follow us at QuantumSN48 on Twitter. We also have the website here. You can scan the QR code if you want to learn more. We'll jump in real quick to some recent events that we've attended. Then we're going to get into a little bit about changes in the Bittensor ecosystem. And we're going to wrap up with sentiment. I think we'll do it right on time, despite me pork barreling in tons of content today.
So events, we're excited to take part in, it's actually a NIST pre-standardization workshop. One of the things I got to learn is that these standards bodies really don't like to be wrong. They don't wanna do anything too early because they sort of see the work that they put out as needing to be forever work. Once you put a standard out, it's like then it is the standard forever. And so a big conversation in this room was actually basically like, can you accelerate an industry that's moving at a breakneck pace and like provide something that allows them to interoperate with each other without like committing to standards that will only be valid for the next six months and will make you look like you were short sighted when it becomes invalid right after. And so trying to sort of like add some agility into the standardization process, which I thought was super cool. There were lots of exciting people in the room, people from, you know, IBM, people from Google, people from Quantinuum, you know, all the kind of major players, along with, you know, obviously a huge number of people from standards organizations, both NIST and, you know, a number of UK organizations.
Also, it was Boulder Startup Week since the last time we did this. Also, Taylor from Terra Quantum also had a session. She had a far more interesting session, actually, at Boulder Startup Week. But I was on a panel for Boulder Startup Week. One of the really interesting things about this was this panel was not like a quantum computing panel. This was like one of those softball panels, like, you know --
quantum ecosystem, what exists, how do we take advantage of it, stuff like that. Once we got into the Q&A, all the questions in the room were like, when are quantum computers going to break my Bitcoin? And so it was a blast to be able to incorporate material from Quantum Rings and incorporate material from qBitTensor Labs and basically own that conversation. The other thing that was quite crazy about Startup Week, and it wasn't this session specifically, but a number of other sessions I was in is I started getting called out as the guy behind qBitTensor Labs, which is really weird because normally I'm very accustomed to being recognized for being the guy behind Quantum Rings. And so we had a number of like blockchain and crypto related people who were like, you're doing the quantum subnets, right? And it's like, what, what in the world? You know, and so I guess the really interesting thing about that is we're making waves, you know, and it's not just with the QBitties on Telegram, you know, it's --
we're making waves kind of around the whole crypto ecosystem. So yeah, we'll keep working on it and we're excited to have you on that journey with us. All right, so getting into Bittensor. I did say some things, I guess, in our last qBitTensor Labs Live that were a little bit more spicy than I usually get. I do want to touch just a little bit on those things because we've continued to see progression kind of with the pendulum continuing to swing in that direction.
And last time we talked, I sort of asked the question of are we too busy building walls when we should be building rockets? Like we have so much talent in the Bittensor ecosystem, like the subnet owners who are innovating to build these things and operate these things, the miners who are like moving at a breakneck pace and kind of delivering on the objectives that are coded up by the owners, the validators working to put all of this compute behind it to make sure that the whole thing works.
It is such a cool ecosystem and there are so many cool things that are happening. There are also bad actors in the ecosystem. I think that's always gonna happen when you have huge incentives. But are we too busy building walls when we should be building rockets and really trying to help the innovators survive and thrive and really turn Bittensor into a big thing? And we talked about, you know, TaoFlow and treasury wallets and conviction, all sort of being things where it's like, we're designing it for a good reason. But then it also has these negative side effects of creating additional ways for bad actors to actually try to come in in a creative way and get extra power in the ecosystem and extra access to emission in the ecosystem. And since that time, TaoFlow 2 also came out, which was very much a surprise to me. I don't know how many people sort of knew.
That was coming. I had conviction on my radar, but I was caught off guard with TaoFlow 2, if I'm totally honest. And then looking at it, it's like this very confusing thing where if you try to figure out where things are getting included and excluded, it ends up looking quite strange. But ignoring how the math on it actually works, the truth is that now that it's live, less than 20% of top subnets are getting any emission at all.
Like the best subnets that investors are putting their money on, saying that they're the good projects, less than 25% of those subnets are getting emission. And when you look at the subnets that are getting emission, like my response is kind of like, who are these companies? Like who, like unknown, unknown, unknown, like, know, like, there's, I think we're having, I think we might be having the opposite effect of what we wanted. Now, I hate to complain because Subnet 63 Enigma is on the short list of people making emission. And so I should maybe be happy and bite my tongue. But even when we are benefiting, I hate to see something that sort of is boomeranging and causing, I think, the exact opposite impact of what we would want it to do. And I think that if we can get more input on these things before we deploy them, I think we could --
help make these things better, more voices, more better. And conviction, it's really unclear to me how this is gonna impact everything. I think that this does have, don't get me wrong, I think this has a lot of potential to prevent subnet operators from just randomly leaving, so I think it will provide potentially really good protections. I also think that it's adding more complexity. It's also adding more ways for people potentially to use social engineering to actually harm the investors by building trust. Because other people, I can convince other people to stake for me because I need my money for operational reasons. There are all these other kind of unexpected social side effects that I think this could have. The other big challenge that I have with it is I actually talk to people on my team about conviction and then like, 10 minutes into the conversation, I realized that we're totally on different pages about what it is, because we've communicated out how conviction is gonna work a number of different times, but it's always been different, which in a way is very positive, because it means that we're hearing and learning and iterating, but it also means that if you're a little bit behind and you're taking what the leadership said last week for granted, you might actually be totally backwards from how it's gonna work.
And so yeah, I think this is, it's adding a lot of complexity. It's a lot to track. The amount of time that, you know, subnet owners and investors are needing to like take and spend on like how these features are gonna work and how that's gonna impact them, I think is a little bit burdensome, but I've got good hopes that, you know, hopefully the design purposes are achieved. In general though, it is my rule that complexity is the breeding ground for exploits.
As we design things, we design them for a good reason, but when we add that complexity, there are bad actors out there looking to exploit that complexity. And I fully expect that both with takeovers through lack of conviction or through social engineering to get other people to convict on behalf of owners. There's also some weird things that I don't totally follow yet where once you reach a certain conviction level, then it triggers and then you become eligible for takeover.
There's sort of these strange things with it. I think complexity is not a good thing. And so, you know, I did say last time too that Bittensor has so much potential and I still believe that. And I mean, you're gonna have a hard time. The sentiment is getting a little bit ugly in Bittensor, if I'm being totally honest. But nothing's gonna change my opinion that Bittensor has immense potential, like decentralized innovation, decentralized intelligence. Like if you can build this in a fair and truly decentralized way and not a centralized ecosystem disguised in a decentralized chain, I think this could be unstoppable and the world needs it right now. But I do continue to think that Bittensor's biggest risk, our biggest risk as Bittensor is Bittensor. It is ourselves.
And one thing I would say is like, if you are like me and you're sort of, you know, an extreme bull on Bittensor and also like, kind of like bearish on like what's happening right now, it always helps me to remember that like in everything I've experienced in life, it kind of works like a pendulum, right? And right now the pendulum is swinging very hard towards like adding complexity, springing things on people, like limited governance, right? But --
the pendulums always swing. And so I think when you see the sentiment of key opinion leaders out there, you know, highlighting both the upside potential and the downside potential of these things, you know, that's really gonna help the inertia get from swinging in one direction to swinging back the other direction.
Okay, Omar, community and Q&A. You want to take it?
Sure thing. Yeah, so we got a little light on questions this week and that's probably, this is our only question. I think, you know, most of the questions are when launch and we've shed some light on that one.
Is this our only question? Cool.
Well, if the livestream went out, they'd be happy with that.
Everyone's still asking when launch, but by the time you get to this point, you should know. And so the one question is, how are we going to attract community with the narration surrounding 63 and 48, especially because a lot of the quantum news you see is very quantum techie. And so to the average investor who wants exposure to this exciting technology isn't necessarily sure what to think of a lot of the news that comes out. I think Enigma is positioned really well to solve that problem with frequent milestones, which we try and break down pretty consistently through all of our marketing. You get a very clear spotlight on what is the quantum threat and where are we vulnerable? And so with the RSA challenge, for example, RSA is pretty standard to conceptualize -- it's encryption. And with every milestone, we get closer to breaking encryption.
Peaked circuits, maybe a little more quantum science focused. But the point is, that's going to be our ticket to proving quantumness with a quantum device. And every time we make a breakthrough there, investors can see, hey, another step was just taken towards proving or disproving these claims. And so our hope is that through consistent marketing and breaking the challenges down into digestible and understandable steps that anyone can be involved instead of just the guys with the quantum PhDs.
Totally, yeah, love it. Love that perspective. I'd also add the perspective that like, you know, you don't need to know how quantum computers work. You just need to know that people are willing to pay gobs and gobs of money to be running on them. And we can get you exposure to that on 48. And if you're interested in the hype around breaking Bitcoin, breaking RSA, you know, 63 is going to give you exposure to all of that trend.
Yeah. And then on the 48 side, I think also with our frequent adding of like quantum computers, you can see that every time we add a new one, something big changes. And so, you know, qubit size, for example, we had Rigetti's 84 qubit Ankaa-3. Suddenly we're taking it down and replacing it with 108 qubit Cepheus. And so, you know, you get a pretty good insight as to how quickly the industry is growing just by following along with both of our projects.
Totally. All right, so what about Bittensor sentiment?
Yeah, so as Bob alluded to a couple of minutes ago, Bittensor sentiment has been a little rocky and we generally see that sentiment swing in accordance with price. And if you look at TAO price over the last week, things have been a little shaky. And so there's been a lot of big, big upticks and sort of, you know, claims that maybe we're not as decentralized as we thought or the discourse is sort of discouraged and there's been a lot of toxicity and people attacking each other. And I think a lot of that is associated with downward price. If your portfolios are struggling, then you're not going to feel too great coming into conversations. And also with that, we've seen some subnets leaving and we don't want to speculate on why that is. The point is everyone seems to be struggling. I think the upside on that is that there's been a lot of conversations. Many of them have been pretty ugly, but most of them have concluded with people coming to a sort of an agreement that, hey, you know, the onus is on us to make or break this community. And regardless of your perspectives, everybody here, you know, wants the best for Bittensor and sees the huge value proposition. And so instead of trying to attack each other and turning it, I think it was referred to as a social PVP game is like, look, we should be banding together and really making this community. And so --
bringing back the conversation that has made the community so special and remembering that, hey, price is going to swing. That doesn't mean everything's all for naught. And the screenshot of the price in the top left was taken a couple of days ago, but we're already seeing TAO prices starting to come back. And so above all, Bittensor if one thing is resilient. And so that's pretty exciting for the outlook despite the struggles we've had.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Cool. OK, and then subnet sentiment looks a little bit better than --
Yeah, so on the flip side, sentiment for us has been fantastic. And just in the last hour, this is going to be, I guess, our first QBTL PR, so qBitTensor Labs pre-recorded.
Whoa, look at the marketing buff. Wow, all right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, when we made that announcement, one of our guys put out a message saying, hey guys, for those of you who stayed up in Australia, you should probably go to bed and catch up with us tomorrow. And everybody said, that's cool. You know, we'll catch it tomorrow. And, you know, personally, I'm not sure that was the reaction I was expecting, but just the fact that this has been such a long journey and we've been saying launch soon for, you know, months and months and everybody has been super patient and understanding. And so, you know, thank you to the QBitties out there. But, you know, diving more into the actual sentiment. Let's see, I think there's a lot of hype around sort of the industry collaborations. The crossovers is a pretty bad-ass intersection at the moment, according to JB. And yeah, that's the hope is getting involved with the corporate collaborators has the potential to open up a lot of doors and, you know --
On the comment below that -- this could have the potential to bring some real legitimacy to Bittensor outside of the crypto ecosystem. And so we're hoping to bring as many outside eyes onto this thing as we can.
Luckily they're mainly just speed bumps in the road, not big blockers. Well, I'd say that, but then we waited quite a while for the treasury wallet support. But we did get it in the end and we're rolling now, so --
I love that post from Nova calling out that I swear every time this subnet pumps, TAO in USD drops. I swear we have like the least fortuitous timing ever. Or maybe it just is a testament of like how often there's like big sweeping changes in this ecosystem. But it seems like every time we launch, there's like some completely fundamental change underneath us and yeah.
Totally.
Yeah, we were --
Totally.
Totally. Yeah.
Yeah, we're rolling now. And I think we had a quote in the last live stream is that, you know, things that are worth doing are worth the struggle. And so we'll get there and you can, know, things will be good very, very soon, June 4th. Not financial advice. There was some talk on the treasury wallets. I think people are like, well, is it bullish if it gets hacked or is it bullish if it doesn't get hacked? And the answer is yes.
Yes.
We would be excited either way. Either we find breaking exploits that harden the challenges or we prove that it very likely can't be broken. And in this case, we proved it can't be broken.
So obviously it's best for us if it wasn't broken, like there was a big part of me that was hoping that somebody was going to break it anyway.
Right. We'd like to keep our money.
Totally.
And you skipped over the marketing, man. You got some love.
I was making my way down the columns. We'll get there. There has been a fair amount of hype around marketing, which is great to see. I appreciate the support. Our team has been working very hard on publishing, I think, daily content on Enigma and consistent content between 48 and qBitTensor Labs as well. And so seeing the engagement there has been fantastic. And we're hoping to put out some more bangers.
It was really funny. The marketing team was in my office asking for budget to try to do a video. What was the subnet? Oro in their epic marketing video. Nice job, Oro. You guys are also on your game. You're making my team try to raise their bar.
40.
Totally. We've seen a lot of confidence, I guess continued confidence in the team. The quote here is, Bob knows how to run, build, and scale a startup, which is true. You can tell every time the team comes back with a clever, tweaked economics design. And that is true. We put a lot of thought into sort of how Enigma is going to work and how we can bring value to all parties involved. And so we're stoked to see the confidence there.
We've got, it's unreal how undervalued we are and that counts for both subnets. Appreciate it. We like to think so. Not financial advice. Following the last qBitTensor Labs Live, JB had said, you know, I'd be so fed up with Bittensor. You know, we should be extra motivated to be bigger than all the other subnets that are allowed to do whatever they want.
Not financial advice.
And I definitely think that's true. We're definitely very motivated. And as we've mentioned, while there have been struggles with Bittensor, we see the tremendous value that it's already provided us and that it could provide us. And so we're thrilled to be part of the ecosystem despite the roadblocks that we encounter. There were some comments on the 63 logo.
Luckily after I heard that, that's not my primary thought, so I don't, yeah, I'm okay with it.
And I think that we talked about this a couple of weeks ago in the office, but some have likened the Enigma logo to a toilet.
You know, it pisses me off, but they're not wrong. Like once you see that, it's hard not to see it. Like I thought it was so solid, you know, the anvil on fire, like, ah, yeah, you're totally right. That actually does suck.
Yeah, like.
Nice, nice, nice. We should make a version of the logo that has like some brown stinky lines coming off of it or something.
All right, all right. So we're --
Yeah, reminds me of my last Discord message last night. I was trying to help out one of the validators and then they sent me a couple of messages because they're at a different time zone. And then I woke up this morning and I had to apologize. I said, sorry, I had to sleep. They're like sleep. What's that? You shouldn't. Yeah, right. So, be nice to have a --
Yeah, the thought was had. And then --
It wouldn't surprise me if one of the QBitties already did it and they're just circulating that in private channels. So it's not to offend.
It's totally possible. It's totally possible. And then yeah, the rest of it is more positive sentiment. I think actually this last quote by JB sums up sort of what I was saying earlier pretty well. And it was, this group deserves a yacht week in the Mediterranean once this takes off. And the point is you guys have been waiting for so long and price fluctuations and everything and delays and we feel it just as you guys do. And so we appreciate your patience and your optimism through it all.
more than six or seven hour sleep. When it gets towards a launch, you know, it gets, you know, a lot to do.
That's still allowed here.
Gets tight. Well, so yeah, maybe I'll wrap up with saying, well, quick, I'm gonna give a quick shout out to the teams internally. Yeah, Omar and the marketing team, you guys are doing a great job engaging the community, bringing the messages out there. I love everything I see. ShoreShot, you and the engineering teams, both the 63 and the 48 teams are crushing it. I'm always blown away with how heavy you guys are hitting on this stuff, how many changes are getting rolled. I mean, this is like enterprise software and also total decentralized network all kind of running together in some crazy, beautiful dance. And so, yeah, it blows my mind how much you guys are able to deliver. And maybe taking a quick look externally to all the QBitties, we will put this up on YouTube.
as soon as possible. So if you did happen to stay awake, you can still see it. Thank you for being with us. You guys have been great. We have good days and bad days, too. And it's always nice to have you guys out there cheering us on as we go. We are at the finish line, sprinting to try to cross it. And we're so excited. We can't wait to take the next qBitTensor Labs Live from the moon. Not financial advice.
Cool. All right. Thank you, everybody. That is it for today. We will immediately tear this down and put it up and post on Twitter. We'll see you soon.