qBitTensor Labs Live — June 4, 2026
Enigma launch day. Breaking RSA challenge goes live with Terra Quantum's Senior Global Head of Security Taylor Hartley as the first external guest. ecdsa.fail challenge validates the model, prize pools at $400K, AQT quantum volume milestone, School of Mines capstone progress, and Quantum.Tech World preview.
Launch day. After months of building treasury wallets, wrangling validators, and lining up collaborators, Enigma went live on June 4th with the Breaking RSA challenge as its inaugural competition. The episode also marked a first for qBitTensor Labs Live -- an outside guest. Taylor Hartley, Terra Quantum's Senior Global Head of Security and former NSA cryptanalyst, joined the stream to talk quantum threats, the Google paper, and why the world needs a public benchmark for cryptographic resilience.
Enigma Is Live
Subnet 63 launched with the Breaking RSA challenge active and challenge pages visible on the portal. The public repo was going out within hours of the stream. Bob recapped the Enigma model: industry collaborators post challenges, the world competes, solutions are published at every milestone, and difficulty escalates. Prize pools are funded entirely by miner emission accumulating in treasury wallets -- the only subnet on Bittensor using them.
Breaking RSA Challenge -- First Milestone
- RSA-348 bit public keys, randomly generated each attempt
- 4-hour wall time on an RTX Pro 6000, no network access
- $10,000 starting prize -- designed to be achievable with classical methods
- The team has profiled their own best-in-class solution and expects the first milestone to fall quickly
- Subsequent milestones will not be announced until the current one is broken
- Prizes will scale up as milestones become harder to crack
- Quantum and quantum simulation challenges are planned for late summer/early fall, with deeper Terra Quantum collaboration on design and verification
Taylor Hartley -- First External Guest
Taylor brought an unusual background to the table: high school dropout turned Navy cryptanalyst, four years at NSA, airborne signals intelligence on EP-3 Orions, then a master's degree and a pivot to quantum security. She's been focused on post-quantum cryptography for about five years and joined Terra Quantum just over a year ago.
Key points from her segment:
- Terra Quantum's stack spans post-quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, and quantum random number generation -- covering the full attack surface, not just PQC migration
- On the Google paper: Terra Quantum is releasing a paper called "Quantum's Hard Takeoff" but still aligns with NIST's 2030 timeline. Taylor noted Google's paper conveniently positions them to drive cloud migration. Until NIST says otherwise, 2030 is the working date
- On Q-Day: Her biggest worry is that we won't know when a cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) exists until critical systems are actually broken. The threat is real enough to warrant preparation now
- On NIST: Standards bodies carry enormous weight and are cautious by design. NIST can't afford to be wrong, and they can't afford to alienate industries that need migration timelines they can actually meet
ecdsa.fail Challenge -- External Validation
Omar highlighted the Eigen Labs ecdsa.fail challenge, launched the same week in response to the Google paper. Google had deemed their ECC circuit too dangerous to publish; independent researchers took that as a dare. Within 48 hours, submissions were 20.4% ahead of Google's classified benchmark -- all without financial incentives.
The comparison to Enigma was obvious: same thesis (open benchmarking of cryptographic resilience), but centralized and unfunded. Add Bittensor's incentive mechanisms and decentralized infrastructure, and the potential scales dramatically.
Hardening Quantum Proof
The BlueQubit challenge is staged and will go live approximately two weeks after the RSA launch. The staggered rollout is deliberate -- spend market attention on Breaking RSA first, then pivot to Hardening Quantum Proof with a second launch moment.
Prize Pool Status
- ~$400K accumulated despite significant TAO price headwinds
- On track for ~$1M by August at current emission rates
- Founding collaborators (Terra Quantum, BlueQubit) are not required to stake alpha; future collaborators will be asked to stake an amount equal to their largest milestone prize
SN48: Quantum Compute
- AQT quantum volume milestone: Second-largest quantum volume published worldwide, largest in Europe. AQT's Ibex Q1 is available on Open Quantum -- $50 in free compute to try it, half price through SN48
- School of Mines capstone (week 2 of 4): Four CS students building a predictive runtime model for quantum circuits. They've assembled a comprehensive circuit dataset, extracted features from QASM files, benchmarked circuits on simulators, and produced a preliminary model. Early runtime prediction accuracy was high (~95%) but likely overfit on a small dataset; memory prediction was around 50%. The pipeline is working and the team has two weeks to refine it
- Spark credit donation concept: Bob floated the idea of letting DTAO holders donate unused Spark credits to university quantum clubs and research teams -- expanding Open Quantum's user base while putting idle credits to productive use
Quantum.Tech World -- Boston
Omar previewed the upcoming Quantum.Tech World conference in Boston:
- Speaker lineup includes John Martinis (Nobel laureate), Peter Shor, Paul Dabbar (Deputy Secretary of Commerce), and Bob Wold
- Major enterprise attendees: McKinsey, Moderna, Rolls-Royce, Wells Fargo, and apparently the Dallas Cowboys
- Quantum Rings / Open Quantum sponsoring lanyards -- every attendee wearing the brand
- Boston as a quantum hub: Harvard, MIT, Quera HQ, QBlox all nearby
- The conference consolidated worldwide shows onto a single venue, expected to be one of the strongest corporate-facing quantum events
Community Sentiment
Overwhelmingly positive. The community has been patient through repeated delays and showed up for launch day. qBitTensor Labs is getting mentioned in the Subnet Summer Telegram -- broader Bittensor community awareness is growing. Bob closed with thanks to the team, the DTAO investors, and the community supporters who've stuck with the project through a long road.
Hello everyone and welcome to qBitTensor Labs Live. Today is June 4th, and it's a super exciting time to be doing the live stream today. We've got a really cool lineup for everybody. It's June 4th. Cool, cool news. This is actually my 22nd anniversary of the day I met my wife on the river in Arizona. So that's actually totally crazy. I better remember to buy flowers tonight.
Let's dive right into it. As always, guys, the usual disclaimer, these are all ideas, not promises. And so we're happy to have you here with us thinking about these things early. Don't take anything we say as a promise or a guarantee. Anything that we say is not investment or legal advice in any way.
We really appreciate everything you guys do with the content of qBitTensor Labs Live. As long as we continue to use it for good and not weaponization, we'll keep doing it. And if you're still here, then you agree. So let's continue on. Today we're gonna focus mostly in on Subnet 63 Enigma. We're gonna spend the lion's share of time talking about that because we've got big stuff happening there today.
We would be remiss to not spend a tiny bit of time on Subnet 48. We've got a couple of things that are sort of time sensitive, will probably be old news by the next time we do qBitTensor Labs Live. So there are a couple things that we will talk about there, but we'll save a lot of the big stuff for the next live. We'll talk a little bit about upcoming events, and then as always, we'll spend just a little bit of time with the community.
And so yeah, we'll dive right into it. Subnet 63 Enigma is launching. Takeoff seems to be going all right. So yeah, I think you guys have been waiting for it for a while. Subnet 63 Enigma
is live. If you go and you look at the web portal you'll see the challenges starting to come online throughout the day and the public repo should be going out in the next couple hours. And so just to recap what Enigma is, the pace of innovation is really hard to keep up with. Things are moving super fast and we see just like crazy things happening in the ecosystem like Google talking about this crazy work that they've done to show that the things that protect Bitcoin are actually gonna be broken by quantum fairly soon. Or you've got crazy things happening like AI becoming powerful enough to just hack systems. And as this pace of innovation increases, it's really hard to know what's real and what's hype and if you're vulnerable and when this is gonna become a real problem for you. And Enigma really focuses on changing this. In short, we're incentivizing the most innovative people, researchers, hackers, any of the brightest minds in the industry to compete with each other and to show the world exactly how far they can get with some of these things that we know to be true, but we just don't know how to separate fact from fiction. And how it works is collaborators in industry work together with qBitTensor Labs to post a challenge. The whole world competes.
As they're competing, the solutions are being published so the whole world can see how they did it. And every time they achieve a milestone, the difficulty increases so we can see exactly how far people can get. And the results are published for everybody to see. You can go to qbittensorlabs.com and click on the Enigma site and see exactly what the results are.
And so the aim is really less hype, more data. Like let's see what we can actually do in real life with some of the brightest minds in the world. And one of the questions we have been getting is, why Bittensor? And the big thing here is it's kind of what this ecosystem is designed for. It brings together innovators from all walks of life, it creates incentive mechanisms, it has validators out there with decentralized compute just waiting to validate these problems.
And so part of it is kind of the design, but the other part of it is the community. It's the hackers, the people that -- it's the underbelly of Bittensor, right? The part that people might look at and say is the bad part. It's the people trying to find exploits, the people trying to break the rules. And so yeah, we consider Bittensor to be the right place with the right people. And with these major innovations, they sort of require massive prizes. And so what we're really doing here is having the validators constantly feed all of the miner emission into treasury wallets so that it can be accumulated and rewarded when these major milestones are broken, it goes out to the miners. And all of the control of those funds is decentralized using smart contracts built into Bittensor. So your money's safe and people can't just run off with it.
And today there's over $400,000 despite the crazy downward price pressure across crypto markets, which Bittensor has not been immune to. But we've accumulated more than $400,000. That's essentially up for grabs today.
And we are the only subnet on all of Bittensor that is protected by treasury wallets. And we'll keep saying that until more people join because we think treasury wallets and smart contracts are just a really important part of building a trustless environment where you know that you don't have to trust us because your data is protected by a smart contract. And the cool thing about this is that every winner feeds the beast.
Every time a milestone is won, it has to be open sourced, and that open source solution becomes the basis that the next innovators can build their solution on. They don't have to. They can totally throw it away and start from scratch. But we always believe that standing on the shoulders of giants is one of the best ways to make progress. And so that requirement that every solution is published, every time there's a winner, is key to feeding the beast.
And the coolest part about this, in my opinion, is that these are backed by experts. Every challenge that we put out is backed with a corporate collaborator. And in the case of Breaking RSA, that corporate collaborator is Terra Quantum. And cool news, we actually have the head of security for Terra Quantum, Taylor Hartley, who will be joining us in just a couple minutes, and she'll be on the pod for a bit to talk through things.
And then we'll also be launching another challenge called Hardening Quantum Proof with BlueQubit, who is one of the leaders in that area. And we'd love to have those guys on in a follow-up episode. And so before bringing Taylor on, I'll just give you a real quick recap of what those challenges are. Okay, Breaking RSA is the big challenge that's releasing today. This is a super cool challenge.
Fundamentally, we know that quantum computers are going to break RSA when they reach a sufficient scale and a sufficient level of accuracy. The only question is, how soon will that be? And so under the hood, RSA is built on this assumption that if you take two prime numbers and you multiply them by each other, that's super easy. Anyone can do that, a calculator can do that, doesn't matter how big the number is. But to go from that product, that semi-prime product, back to those factors is actually absurdly computationally complex. It's exponentially hard. And so the bit size that you use, how big those prime numbers are, drives the computational complexity. And so when we talk about everything being protected by RSA-2048, that means 2048-bit numbers. The key is a 2048-bit number.
Now the cool thing is our challenge will provide RSA keys, real RSA keys of just very small bit sizes, increasing, ever increasing, until eventually we get to the size that protects things today. Now in today's challenge, people will be using classic methodologies for this, and so we don't expect that to break RSA. In fact, I would be nervous -- we should stop banking online if we thought that was true. The first phase of the challenge is to see just how innovative people can go with modern compute in this cool architecture. And the initial prize for the initial milestone will be $10,000.
The longer those go unbroken, the more we're going to increase those milestone prices. And this challenge is for all intents and purposes live now. We will be following up with another challenge, and this is with a company called BlueQubit. This challenge is not launching today, it will launch in about a week so that we can spend market attention focused on Breaking RSA first, and then we'll follow up and spend some attention on this.
The Hardening Quantum Proof challenge with BlueQubit is really simple. Those same quantum computers that threaten to break RSA, we kind of need to know that those work. And you could have a scammer out there saying they have a quantum computer and they're just running a simulator. So how do you know what you have is a real functioning quantum computer? Well, peaked circuits are this leading methodology where it's believed to be so computationally complex to solve them that a classical simulator can't, and it's believed to be sufficiently hard to reverse engineer them that we don't think they can just be inspected to find the answer. And so if that's true, then they serve as this really cool way to feed a program to a quantum computer that only it should be able to solve, and you can verify that it is actually a solid quantum computer and that it's a real quantum computer. In this case, we will have increasingly complex peaked circuits that will be generated.
And we're gonna be challenging people to find a way to solve them. Because if you can fake it, if you can reverse engineer it, if you can inspect the circuit, if you can simplify the circuit, or if you can simulate the circuit in a novel way to achieve it, then we'll have to either increase the complexity on the peaked circuits to make them a viable technology for this, or we'll have to throw away the approach.
And so the initial prize for this will also launch at $10,000. And we will be increasing those prizes over time as we reach challenges that can't be solved. Today this challenge is staged, but it will be going live in about a week. And so, okay, without further ado, I am going to invite Taylor Hartley onto the stage and we'll have Taylor spend some time with us. So Taylor, welcome.
Hi. Hey everybody.
And so Taylor, you've got a really interesting background beyond just the work that you do at Terra Quantum. Do you wanna take a little bit of uncomfortable time just shamelessly promoting your own background so people understand just who they're talking with?
Sure, absolutely. And I love sharing it and especially if it resonates with anyone. So I'll go even deeper today. I'm originally from Alabama. Had a rough start to life, a high school dropout. I have a GED, right? And that led me to join the US Navy when I was like 19 years old. I had always had a knack for computers. I think I hacked my first program, Accelerated Reader, in like fifth grade.
So the Navy offered me a job. Basically, it was just like a top secret job with a whole bunch of cool places I could go. It didn't tell me what I'd be doing at all. And I was like, that's the one for me. So I did that for eight years. By trade, I was a cryptanalyst. If you want to look it up, I was specifically a CTR. I primarily focused on wireless signals, collecting and unencrypting them.
I worked for NSA for four years and then I wanted a cooler job. So I went airborne and I was on a spy plane called an EP-3 Orion. Kind of deployed everywhere and did that job all over the world. A bit burnt out after eight years. Traveled through Asia for a bit, came back to the States in 2020, moved back to Colorado, got my master's degree -- GED to master's.
I started focusing on securing things instead of unsecuring things, specifically in telecom. I focused on emerging tech and emerging threats. I've been focusing on this quantum threat and post-quantum cryptography for about four or five years now. And I've been with Terra Quantum for just over a year.
Awesome. That's a super cool background. In fact, one of the other smartest people that I know has an incredibly similar story to that, but I won't dox them on that backstory. They can dox themselves at some point if they want to. But yeah, it's really cool to see when talent like that gets identified and sort of sucked into the defense sector before they have the chance to fall into corporate jobs.
Cool. So tell me a little bit about Terra Quantum and what Terra Quantum does and sort of in the context of that, maybe why this challenge is of interest.
Of course, so Terra Quantum or TQ, kind of shorthand. We are a Swiss company out of St. Gallen, and we are primarily quantum software. So we don't build quantum computers. We do some chip design, but primarily we are building software that you can run on either classical or quantum computers. So we have a large pillar dedicated to quantum AI and quantum ML.
Kind of started as quantum algorithms and how I could run quantum algorithms on classical computers to solve problems, create optimization, et cetera. We also have a health tech pillar. Just think of all these algorithms when you look at chemistry and pharmaceuticals and the curing of diseases. A lot of times these are just algorithms we're trying to solve. And so using quantum mechanisms to do that is very promising.
And then my sector, which is quantum security. And so I do a mixture of helping companies migrate to post-quantum cryptography, offering services and tools, but we also offer things that are quantum security itself, like quantum key distribution and quantum random number generators. So of course, I have a big interest in when Q-Day is set to arrive, so I can inform my customers and all the CISOs of the world to keep everybody safe.
I think over the last few months it's gained a lot of traction. I know the Google paper really woke up a lot of people. I know it went after Bitcoin explicitly, which I did feel was odd considering credit card processing and banking in general is just as vulnerable and maybe not more centrally managed, but still a lot of bits and pieces there. And this is something that everybody everywhere is going to have to do.
Well and it's fun that your day job is teaching people how to secure their quantum systems. And then the side gig here is that you're working with a bunch of Bittensor people to help break the systems. I'm overstating that with hyperbole, I suppose. The aim is really to shine the light on these things. But yeah, what a fun position to be in.
No, that is called vertical integration, Bob. This is how we do it in the business world. No, I'm just kidding. So this is my biggest worry, right? Especially someone who has served, I've done this harvest now and decrypt later attack. I know what type of threats linger out there. I've been there. And my biggest worry is that we won't know when there is this cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer, the CRQC.
One day we're just gonna wake up and Satoshi's coins are moving around. And that's gonna be our one indicator that, crap, someone's got one somewhere. And so -- and plus these are smaller challenges. I'm not going to place any bets on when Q-Day is going to arrive based off this. I think it's based off of where all the quantum computing companies are, where their supply chains are, where this convergence of all of that goes, and that's going to create this Q-Day arrival. But it's good for us to be prepared and to get everybody interested. I mean, cryptography, honestly, it's been a little boring. We've been using RSA and ECC for 30 years. We just trust it. We don't touch it. It's not the cool thing to do even in cybersecurity. I guess AI really is still. So I'm trying to get people activated and interested.
Yeah. So real quick, does Terra Quantum have a position on the Google paper? Do you guys have an official position? Do you think it's on point? Do you think it's overly hyped? Is there anything you can share there? And also you can say no, but this is my opinion also.
We are releasing a paper probably in the next week or so called Quantum's Hard Takeoff. And I still give the 2030 date because I like to align with NIST and compliance standards. So I'm not gonna just run with Google because that's what they said. I also think that it's a bit -- it's a way for them to convince everyone to move to the Google Cloud, right? If they have something the year before everyone's required to move. That's pretty smart marketing, in my opinion.
So until NIST says otherwise, we'll probably align with the 2030 date, but that doesn't mean we're not keeping an eye on every single factor that we think is going into Q-Day arriving even sooner.
Yeah. Now how closely do you interact with NIST? I know you're kind of in the area. Is that something that you end up doing very often?
I used to in my previous position a lot more. I did a lot of regulatory work and I worked with NIST and CISA. I did a presidential advisory board called NSTAC all around PQC. But I've kind of stepped back and went back into creating products and software.
Totally. Yeah. Well, I actually historically have really not interacted with them at all. But I went to a pre-standardization workshop at NIST a couple of weeks ago. One of the things I was really surprised about was just how cautious they are. Like they don't wanna ever be wrong. As a standards body, you don't want to say something and be wrong. And so as information is coming out there and we start to see all these hype things, they're sort of in this very nervous position of like, it sounds like the industry is thinking this is gonna happen, but if we say that and we're NIST and we're wrong, then it discredits us as an organization.
Yeah, I think it's so much more than that. It's NIST, it's for the US, but realistically, the entire world looks to NIST for standards and regulations. Everyone does. And so it's a bit heavier of a burden than they're paid to -- when their roles on paper state. And so once we're talking global standards and how we're communicating across countries, there's a lot of weight and it's pretty heavy there. So big responsibility for them. I understand being cautious. They don't want to recommend anything prematurely. And they kind of can't piss off industry at the same time. Just if they tell telecom they have to migrate in two years, telecom's gonna say, I don't have the time, the money, the energy, I can't do that. And there's gonna be a big fuss.
Yeah. Say, we should pivot maybe the conversation to a couple things that are of interest. I'd love to just maybe pick your brain on it. And Omar, the ecdsa.fail challenge? You should pull that up on a web browser and maybe I'll have you just screen share when you get it up. I think Enigma is a crazy perfect thing for this moment in time. We're at this place where people are putting out all kinds of hype on these types of things. And we happen to have this reward mechanism that has been put together by the good people at Bittensor, largely designed for other types of innovation. And I feel like this is just perfect. Also, we're not the only ones doing this. Have you seen this ECDSA? And maybe Omar, you can give us some context and we can dive into just a little bit of conversation on the other challenges happening.
Totally. So this was a challenge that came out earlier this week, I believe, in response to the Google paper. The big thing with the Google paper is they had deemed it too dangerous to release. And so they published a zero knowledge proof that proved, hey, we were able to provide proper resource estimates that ECC elliptic curve encryption can be broken with only, I think, 1,400 logical qubits. But we're not gonna publish the circuit. And what happened is a bunch of independent researchers sort of took this as a challenge and started looking to see, hey, can I recreate this circuit that they didn't want to publish? And so earlier this week, a team called Eigen Labs put out this challenge saying, you deserve to know when your public keys are broken. And so we wanna put this challenge in the hands of the people and see if you can recreate this Google circuit. And so using the Google benchmark, they've actually received such powerful submissions that they are 20.4% ahead of Google's classified circuit. So they've actually surpassed it. And that happened all in a matter of 48 hours. And so it was amazing to see sort of the community support from just people around the quantum and cryptography spaces come to participate in a challenge like this.
Yeah, that's super cool. Taylor, love to pick your brain on that. Had you heard about this and what do you think?
Yeah, so I think this is super cool. And this is what I'm saying, like we need some more creativity in this space. I think they use 14,000 qubits, but they do it over a period of 10 days. And we've been treating Q-Day as so Boolean of like, all right, it arrives and then that's it. Whereas while it's improving, then yeah, maybe it takes a little bit longer, but instead of these millions of years, instead of okay, it's instantaneous or instead of four hours, now we're doing things over a period of 10 days or maybe a couple of months. A lot of time this data is vulnerable for years. If it's exposed, it's gonna cause damage. It's something that should remain confidential for 10, 20 years. So if I can break it in even just a few years, I think that's important to know, especially when it comes to national security secrets.
I'm glad to see something EC, right? Because I do think that's what will be broken before RSA, even probably in situations like this. Yeah. So super cool to see. I'm glad we're kind of challenging Google a bit and confirming these things, but again, just drumming up interest and getting people engaged is imperative.
Yeah, totally. And so when I look at this -- Omar, tell me if I'm right or wrong on this. Today this is similar, kind of similar to what we're building with Enigma, except centralized. I assume this is just like a web app that they are running, or is this decentralized from a technology stack, not from a contributors perspective?
Yeah, from a technology stack it does appear to be centralized. Eigen Labs is sort of putting it out. But I think the messaging behind it is very similar to Enigma where it's anyone can participate, and everyone should participate using the tools that are available to the public.
Cool. And so they've seen pretty great participation in this. Do they have any incentive mechanisms or is it just bragging rights?
Not that I'm aware of. I think this is mostly just for the love of the game. And so there's a lot of people out there that want to see this barrier be broken and they don't need financial compensation for it.
But think about what happens when there is money on the line. And so that's why we at Enigma are so excited is this very similar message at a very fortuitous time. And so look at the progress that has been made in such a short time without any real incentive. And so when we put tens of thousands of dollars on the line, think about how far we'll go.
Yeah, totally. Okay, now I'm gonna steal back from you because I'm noticing on that chart it shows kind of this like it's plateaued. Like, okay, they've only been running for a couple days, but it's plateaued. And that should be expected to be the nature of things. And so maybe that takes us into an important detail about what we're doing, which is that we fully expect that the challenge that we're launching today -- the first milestone will be broken. We put a milestone that we know will be broken because we've broken it ourselves. We didn't want to put out something that was unattainable in the first days. And we've profiled our own kind of best-in-class solution, but it still has this exponential trajectory. And you only have -- you can only run on an RTX 6000 for four hours with this challenge. And so there will be a cap. We're expecting that the first milestone will be broken.
We're expecting that maybe the second and third milestones will be broken. But using classical methodologies, unless we start tuning the parameters on the challenge to make things that are incrementally harder, where people can do just very small performance adjustments, it will very quickly come to a place where people can no longer break it. That is the point of RSA.
In fact, okay. I actually love the fake news, Omar. So this is great. Thank you.
We used some ChatGPT for the image. The rest was all done by hand.
All right. By hand. But I don't know -- it says "if anything goes wrong, we're ready." I don't know how we're gonna be ready if things go wrong. We fully don't expect anything to show up on TAO News saying that Bittensor miners broke RSA-2048. That is not the goal of this challenge at all. So the first milestone that we launched, it will be randomly generated -- a different randomly generated thing every time you do it -- RSA-348 bit public keys. You have four hours on an RTX Pro 6,000 to achieve this, and the starting point of the prize, which we know you can achieve, is $10,000. In the event that this is a lot harder than we expect, that prize will start to go up, but we fully expect innovators like we've seen in Bittensor to take that prize relatively quickly.
Once that comes out, we will announce the next milestone, but we're not announcing it today. And while the intention is to launch the next milestone with the same starting point -- four hour wall time, $10,000 prize -- we may calibrate that a little bit depending on what we see from the first milestone. But the cool thing is that this roadmap doesn't stop with just brute forcing this. The real aim of this is to find out what quantum can do. And so this summer or this fall, we will be releasing two follow-up challenges, which we've already been talking to some of the really smart people at Terra Quantum about. One of them will be around quantum simulation and one of them will be around quantum computers. When we do launch those challenges, we fully expect -- in fact, we know, unless we're really slow to launch them and quantum computers advance way faster than we're expecting --
these should actually be on smaller numbers than what you can do classically. Like simulating a quantum computer is super complex. So even if your algorithm's super advanced, that's hard. And quantum computers themselves are trying to overcome a lot of these noise issues to create more logical qubits. And so just the number of bits that you could actually calculate are still relatively low. But we want you to see what it is, and we want you to see the trajectory so you know when these things are coming.
Sound right guys, did I miss anything?
No, it's great. And yeah, I mean, a new device could come online in the next six months as well and be hosted by Open Quantum where we could get it even higher and higher. So I'd like to see how this progresses over time.
Sounds great.
Totally. Yeah. So the market's at like 50 logical qubits today. I know Atom has said it, but they didn't make a big deal about it, but they're shipping a system with 50 logical qubits. Quantinuum did make a big deal about it. They're shipping a system with 50 logical qubits. IonQ's roadmap is bonkers starting next year. So we'll see if they can deliver on that roadmap. And Omar, we just saw yesterday some very cryptic kind of clickbait advertising from Quera with some sort of big announcement that they're gonna be making -- June, was it?
Yeah, I believe it's June 21st. So in a couple of weeks they're gonna unveil their grand roadmap for the next five years. But I believe they had been on record saying 2030 is the year of Q-Day. So I expect they'll have some pretty exciting updates for us.
And I will say -- I'm not gonna say who because they were speaking after a couple drinks, and I'm not sure if this is supposed to be said out loud -- but I do get the impression that they are ahead of their roadmap in a non-trivial way. So I'll be super excited to see what that public roadmap update shows in a couple weeks here.
Yeah. Well we definitely see the funds are flowing to all these big companies. They have all the financial support to do all this R&D that they needed and they haven't had over the past few decades. So I expect to see some monumental breakthroughs in the next few years. Easy.
A hundred percent. Great point. Yeah, especially like not only, but including all of the DARPA funding that all of these big companies have sort of gained access to lately. Cool. Okay. Well with that, we'll say thank you, Taylor. It has been actually really wonderful. You've been our first outside guest on this and your contributions made this episode magical. So thank you so much for being here and we look forward to working on this challenge with you.
Yeah, thanks so much, you guys. I'm super excited. Show me something cool. All right.
Yeah. Thank you, Taylor.
All right, so continuing on, other details. Prize pools are growing. Like we say, despite headwinds, it sort of seems like somehow every time we launch something major, something weird and existential is happening in the Bittensor ecosystem.
So yeah, I don't know if I have the up-to-date number, but TAO price was down approaching $200, which is quite on sale. But despite that, our prize pools have remained right around $400,000, both because emission has been building, but also our own subnets have been appreciating as excitement grows in this area.
And so yeah, we are still looking to be on track to get those prize pools up to around $1 million by August. So we'll see how that progresses despite the crazy fluctuations in TAO price. And if you want to see what those prizes are, I took this screenshot last night or might have been early this morning. So it may actually be down right below $400K now. But if you go to qbittensorlabs.com, you can check out what the prize pool is at any given moment. You can also go in there now, and the challenge pages are all up. You can see what the challenges are. There's quite a bit of detail documented around what these challenges are. You can see the prizes associated with the next milestone. You can see what the next milestone is, and how many submissions have gone in now.
When I took the screenshot, it was not open yet. And so the button is disabled. But I'll show you really quick something from our mock solution, which is what we use to test, which is that status had changed to in review. So, Ryan, real quick to put you on the spot, what is the workflow of a challenge? Like where does it start? Where does it end? What does in review mean?
Yeah, so really what a miner would do is either go through our website to make a submission, which we don't have live today, but that is coming very shortly, or spin up their own miner itself. And there's a miner CLI that allows you to kind of prepare that solution itself. There's a fee to pay as well as being able to upload the --
My Bluetooth is freaking out. I apologize about that.
No worries. I was afraid it was Riverside and the live was gonna crash like it did the last time.
Yeah. There always has to be some kind of disruption or interruption throughout our podcast, but I think I'm okay now. So you could use the CLI to pay for the fee and then create the upload and then run the miner. And then that submission gets sent to all the validators. The validators then go and run these challenges based upon the expected code. And then once all the validators agree that this is an accepted solution, the status will go into in review. At that point, each validator actually has instructions to go and check and validate that that is actually true and that those validators were able to run the solutions appropriately.
What comes next after that is the proposal to the treasury contract and the voting period allowing the funds to be released to the winning miner.
Perfect. Yeah. And actually to sort of comment on that, but not to go into the nitty-gritties because it gets pretty technical, there is also a page to explore the contract and the proposals on the contract so you can actually see, fully transparent, how everything's working on-chain. And so just to repeat what Ryan had said there, whether you're a researcher or a hacker and whether you're using our website and we spin up a miner for you, or whether you directly spin up a miner, you can participate by submitting your challenges to those validators. Once validators agree that your solution is a winner, they create the proposal with the treasury wallet. Actually, so I guess we create the proposal once they've done it with the treasury wallet. They all vote on the proposal to confirm if they agree or not, and then the funds are issued as a part of that.
Yeah, the design around decentralization -- but it's not automatic. There's a little bit of uncomfortableness, I think, with validators and automatically transferring funds. There's a manual step in there of them actually going and validating the solution ran appropriately and being able to vote and participate in the process.
Yeah. Excellent. Beautiful stuff, man. I can't wait to see it in action. Go win some prizes, guys. Okay, so yeah, like we said, there has been a small change. I do want to highlight that there has been a small change from what we said last time we did this. We had been talking about providing six hours of wall time on these challenges, and we were gonna have a slightly harder number to hit in that time frame. We reduced it a tiny bit to put a little bit less burden on the validators. We have -- we're not totally sure, but it looks like some of the validators are under a little bit of financial pressure to find more efficient ways to validate things. And so we just wanted to reduce the burden a little bit. And so we reduced that down to a four-hour wall time. So the next big stage is we are in the step now where we need to finish all of the launch that's happening today.
We'll start co-marketing this with Terra Quantum so that we can bring it not just to Bittensor, but also out to the broader community. We do anticipate a little bit of time continuing to harden subnet code. We always tend to release new subnets and then find that there's a period where people try to exploit in the ways that you weren't expecting or just come across common bugs. So there'll be a little hardening period and we'll start preparing the next milestones as you guys start knocking down the existing milestones. Next week, actually -- this is June 18th. So Omar, June 18th. Is that two weeks from now? Yeah, I guess that is. Is that when we're launching Hardening Quantum Proof?
I believe so. That is two Thursdays from now.
I guess I'm not sure. We had talked about announcing it on the next live stream, but could be in flux.
We may be off by one week. We may do it a little bit sooner than that. We may do it on that date. Yeah, we'll have to coordinate the marketing activities. But the key thing here is launching is a good opportunity to go to the market and tell them something.
And so instead of launching all of these things at the exact same time, we decided to stagger it so that we could spend a lot of our time getting mind share around the launch and the RSA challenge. And then we'll have another opportunity to go out with a big launch in a couple weeks following with BlueQubit. So excited to do that. And then yeah, whether in the late summer or early fall, we will have follow-up releases that release the quantum and quantum simulation version of the Breaking RSA challenge.
And then in the longer term, there are a lot of additional challenges just waiting to get attention. And so that's it for Enigma for today. We're super excited about it. If you have been with us on this journey for a really long time, we're thrilled to be launching with you guys today. Let's see if we can start to drum up some attention, pull participants into the ecosystem and make this thing a real success.
Okay, now we do have to talk about the other subnet, but we spent 41 minutes on Enigma today. So we're gonna make this a light edition, and I'm mostly gonna put a few spoilers around things that we'll be talking about soon. Then we'll talk about events happening and sentiment, which Omar I'll probably just have you take the majority of those. So the first thing that we do have to say, because it is timely -- news expires -- is one of our partners, AQT, reached out to make sure that we were aware of this really cool news. They had achieved a quantum volume -- I think the second largest quantum volume published. Is that right, Omar?
Yeah, they have the second largest quantum volume and the largest quantum volume in all of Europe.
Nice. So yeah, quantum volume for those who don't know, it's essentially a benchmark to see how good your quantum computer is. A lot of times people publish numbers like the number of qubits, and it's like, well, that really doesn't matter because it's like how are your qubits compared to everybody else's qubits? And so what quantum volume aims to do is to basically not just exercise the number of qubits, but also kind of the depth that you can go with a circuit, and so it's that volume, that's where the name comes from. And so this is not to say that AQT has the most qubits out of any system in the world, but that the quantum volume, when you multiply the qubits times the operations, that it's able to achieve are incredibly impressive. And so we wanted to call those guys out. They are a big friend of ours in the ecosystem. If you want to run on AQT's Ibex One it is available on Open Quantum. You can use your $50 in free compute to go try it out. And then if you want to keep playing after that, half price if you want to do it through Subnet 48 Quantum Compute and all of that revenue, the proceeds from all that revenue comes back into the subnet. The other thing that's timely -- because man, this is a short capstone -- is the School of Mines project. Omar, do you want to just talk to what's going on there?
Totally. Yeah. So if you'll notice, we are on week two out of four of this capstone project, and the team has already made pretty remarkable progress. Sort of just to recap, what we're doing here is we've partnered with the Colorado School of Mines, which is just down the road from us, and they've given us a team of four computer science students to work on a sort of consulting project. And so what they're doing for us is they are working to build a predictive model that can analyze a circuit in QASM format and predict the runtime. And what that's going to enable us to do is put simulators and potentially additional quantum computers on Open Quantum. And so we're excited to see this sort of expand the scope of what's possible. And so within the last two weeks, they've made pretty remarkable strides on collecting the data. That's been a big sort of step for making sure this project is successful, and so they've analyzed quantum circuits from all over the internet. They've generated some quantum circuits to create this really comprehensive data set of quantum circuits that you might submit. And so that way the model can be trained as effectively as possible. And so right now in that step they're sort of trying to make sure to tailor the data set to fit the resource constraints. We only have -- we don't have the access to 10 billion parameters to train. We only have a couple of weeks. And so reducing this data set so that it's resource efficient while also fully comprehensive. They've also done a fair amount of work on the feature extraction. So analyzing these QASM files and pulling out how many gates are there, how much entanglement is there, what other special features do we need to be looking for? Because not all gates are created equally, and so determining how that'll impact the runtime. They've also made some pretty impressive strides with the circuit benchmarking. So actually running the circuits on a simulator and collecting the time and memory constraints there, which will then eventually be used to train the predictive model, which will determine which hardware we need to allocate for a given circuit. And then they have made some strides on the model training. So I've seen some preliminary results. They actually produced a pretty high runtime estimator. It was -- what, like 95% Bob?
Well, I don't think I believed. I think it was overfit with the small data set.
There may be some overfitting there. And the memory was also 50%. But the fact that we have a model trained, we can see sort of the pipeline -- is very exciting. And so we're thrilled to see where they take this over the next two weeks.
Yeah, not that I should ideate on a live stream or anything like that, but actually like this is not a terrible Bittensor challenge. Right? Because actually once you have all the work that they've done around generating the circuits, around feature extraction -- though that could be a place to innovate -- and all of the circuit benchmarking, it actually becomes a really cool problem that a lot of the Bittensor people would be really good at. So maybe there's a there there. Have an Enigma challenge where it generates the AI model used to do cost estimation for 48. That could be pretty slick. All right. Done ideating. Keep going.
Yeah, well I was also gonna jump into the ideating. I did just say, hey, we don't have access to pipelines that can train 10 billion parameter models, but they do that on Bittensor all the time. So some food for thought down the road once our School of Mines students have finished their side of the project and set the groundwork.
Yeah. And it's been just really cool to watch because these are like for the most part CS kids. And so their first week out of the four weeks was like figuring out what quantum was and figuring out what the simulator was. And now they have this entire team of people using all of the quantum jargon and they're talking about the frameworks and they sound like they're quantum engineers, which is crazy. All right. Well, without spending much more time on this because we're almost out of time, I'm gonna drop a bunch of teasers on 48 and then let's talk events because there's some other critical stuff to talk about there. I'm just gonna put a couple teasers out there that there's some exciting things going on in the next couple weeks here. So yeah, you guys will have to tune in later. And if you guys don't know what Quantum Compute is, go check out other prior episodes of qBitTensor Labs Live or just go check it out. We basically are the only cryptocurrency that's only mineable by running a real quantum computer. And the side effect of that is that we can create free compute and cheap compute and generate revenue for compute through Subnet 48.
Okay, events. Omar, take it.
Yeah. So we have a pretty big conference coming up, which we are excited to tell you guys about. So it is Quantum.Tech World. This is going to be occurring in June over in Boston, and it's gonna bring together leaders from all over the quantum industry. And so if you'll remember we were at the APS March meeting, very similar. We're extra excited about this conference for a number of reasons, particularly the speaker lineup. You'll see some notable names. Like -- we need you to hit the button, Bob. Thank you. John Martinis, a recent Nobel laureate. Peter Shor, you may have heard his name around. His algorithm I guess has really caught the news recently. So it'd be exciting to see what his thoughts are. Paul Dabbar, who is the Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Commerce. And then also another name you may have heard, he's sort of pretty big in the quantum industry, but Bob Wold, founder of qBitTensor Labs. So yeah, we're excited to see a talk from him. Hopefully he has some exciting announcements for us there.
Who that?
Also worth noting, some of the bigwigs usually get together at conferences like this. And so John Martinis and Bob Wold -- some magic was made at APS last March, and so we'll see what happens this month. It's also worth noting that Boston is a bit of a quantum hub. So this marker is Encore Boston Harbor, which is where the conference will be taking place, which is just down the road from Harvard University and MIT. And also the Quera headquarters. And then if you keep going down the road, I believe QBlox's headquarters is also located in Boston. So a lot of prominent names. And the thing we're really excited about with this conference is there's going to be some massive companies in attendance. And companies you maybe wouldn't expect, but large enterprises that maybe have quantum teams that are kept a little secret. And so McKinsey, Moderna, Rolls-Royce, Wells Fargo, a lot of major companies that could really stand to gain from the benefits that quantum has to offer. Also worth noting on the list of attendees we were given was someone from the Dallas Cowboys. So not sure what their interest in quantum is, but we're excited to see what that will be.
Man, I'm sure that's just like a motivational speaker or something like that. Either that or the Cowboys are really getting desperate to win. Let's see what quantum can do for us. Well now all Dallas Cowboy fans are cursing my name. All right, sorry guys.
Other thing exciting to note is that Quantum Rings and by extension Open Quantum will be sponsoring the lanyards for the event. And so every attendee will be wearing a lanyard with the Quantum Rings and Open Quantum logo. And so we're hoping to see a huge uptick in awareness and hopefully also users of Open Quantum, which by extension means more attention to Bittensor.
Totally. Yeah. In fact, I think the number is still that like 90+ percent of the jobs that go through Open Quantum end up getting run by Bittensor, which is pretty awesome. Okay. Awesome. That was super cool. I will say before I have you jump into community and Q&A, I have done Quantum Tech in the past and it is unlike other quantum shows because it is very much corporate centric.
So like each of these shows they have a different audience. APS was largely like academics, researchers, students. Q2B historically had been kind of a little bit more corporate collision with quantum. But this last year we saw that fall off quite a bit. Quantum Tech actually consolidated their worldwide shows onto this one venue. And so assuming geopolitics don't create any funny business, jet fuel availability creates any funny business, I do expect this to be one of the better quantum shows in the world to get in front of those types of users. So we'll see where that goes.
We have some questions mostly around the RSA challenge and the Terra Quantum collaboration and so happy to take a stab at these.
Take the lead, Omar, or take it or I can jump on it if you want.
Fair enough. Okay. So the first question was what specific role is Terra Quantum going to play in terms of guidance on the milestones and the challenge? And so really asking what does this collaboration look like? And as it stands right now, they are largely marketing partners. They're helping us get the word out because we had spent most of the time building out the classical challenge on its own. They are planning to have a much heavier hand in terms of guidance on the quantum challenge. And so we're excited to consult with them and tap into their expertise there.
Yeah. And so there are four or five people who are on our private repo. So basically, before the code goes into the public repo, we have a staging repo where we do a lot of the building. We've got them in on that repo. The code for the classical challenge, not very complex. Generate two random numbers that are primes, make sure that they're not too far away from each other, not too close to each other, and multiply them by each other. So really simple. It will get a lot more dicey on the design of the quantum challenges, especially in terms of how to verify in as close to an automatic way as possible that the solutions are not just classical solutions disguised as quantum solutions. And so there will be a lot of strong collaboration on the build out of that.
In terms of operating these challenges, with the first rollout, we don't care how you do it. As long as you do it locally with no network access, on the RTX, and you do it in that time horizon, you can win. It will be very quantifiably quantifiable. It will be discretely verifiable. When it comes to verifying the quantum solutions, that actually will require most likely real quantum insight. And so there will be much deeper collaborations, not just on the design, but on the operation of the subsequent phases of this.
Totally. And then the other question from Bess was what is the initial prize pool allocation for the first milestones? And how are these prize pools going to scale as things pick up?
Yeah, so I'll maybe hit that. We're launching everything at $10,000. The idea is -- the idea for the initial is we know that it will be solvable very quickly. And so I'm sort of waiting for my messenger to just be like, somebody beat it already. So we don't wanna create massive pools and create a lot of sell pressure for things that we know are achievable.
But as these milestones hang out without being solved, we basically look at this as a capitalism situation where supply and demand need to meet at the right price. And so the longer a challenge goes being unsolved, the more pressure there's gonna be to push those prizes higher. Because yeah, if you have a $10,000 prize for RSA-2048, no one's even gonna try. If you have a million dollar prize for it, people will probably try. And so you have to sort of find -- you have to turn the knob and find the way that the incentives match the challenge. And so everything will launch at $10,000, but we'll sort of turn the knob up if we find that people have reached a level that is becoming increasingly difficult.
Yeah. The next question was on the concept of collaborator staking, which is something we had talked about. And so just to clarify -- we had put out some messaging a while ago saying that all of our corporate collaborators, whatever they want the largest milestone to be, we're gonna ask them to stake that amount into Subnet 63. For Terra Quantum and BlueQubit, as founding collaborators, we're not requiring them to do that. So Terra Quantum, unless they want to, will not be purchasing any 63 alpha. But as we look for future collaborators, we are gonna ask them to have some skin in the game. And so it's not gonna be total to the total amount given away, but the largest milestone, which should incentivize them to put more in if they want their challenge to get more attention.
That's right. And just to clarify on that, I think we have been saying all along -- or if we haven't, my bad -- but it's always been the plan that the founding partners would not be doing that. Essentially it's like, hello, I'm Bob. I'm running a quantum crypto company. Will you buy my alpha token? I mean, that would be a pretty hard way to start off the conversation. But once we actually launch these challenges and people can see what they are and they can see how legitimate they are, we're anticipating that the follow-up collaborators should have no real problem with that. The other key thing is that those funds are not planned to be used for the rewards. The rewards are funded by miner emission accumulating in the treasury wallets. That purely is to pay to play. It's to put some skin in the game. They get to take that money out when their challenges close or when their challenges wind down. So that is just a way for them to participate in the upside of the network.
Bringing their name into the ecosystem should create alpha appreciation. So they should be able to see the upside of it. And if somebody comes with a bogus challenge, then they obviously wouldn't be willing to stake because they would see the opposite reaction. So it just aligns incentives and has some positive tokenomics potentially -- not financial advice.
So we actually did have one more question in there, which was asking about Spark credits. I think a lot of our loyal DTAO investors are receiving their Spark credit yields every month and they're thinking, well, what am I gonna do with this?
Yeah. Okay, beautiful. Love that. So I'm gonna say something that I've been thinking about and I have not bounced this off of ShorShot's team yet. So feel free to tell me this is the world's worst idea before we go. But yeah, so essentially DTAO investors who hold a lot of alpha, they can go to the Open Quantum website, they can link their wallet, and then every month they actually earn essentially the equivalent of almost like a dividend. It's this percentage of their holdings that comes to them in the form of Spark credits that they could use on quantum compute. But the intersection of people who are DTAO holders and who are needing to use a quantum computer -- pretty small today. Hoping it grows a little bit, but it's pretty small today. And so what do those guys do with those credits before they expire? So one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about, in fact, we even filled out a grant application for a really small local grant on this, was around the idea of partnering up with universities, whether that's in the form of the chairs of the computer science department, or whether that's with quantum clubs.
And basically providing them with pools of free credits that they could distribute amongst their teams. I know ShorShot had proactively built organization support into the system that's pretty far along, where people can pool their credits and see each other's jobs and stuff like that. And so one of the things I was thinking about was if somebody's not gonna use their credits, would it be a good idea to just let them donate them to a club, or a university or something like that?
Seems like a reasonable thing and it would be good to a great cause. Because not only furthering quantum research, but also having people adopt Open Quantum early on in their career path and being able to rely on Open Quantum to run their quantum jobs.
Yeah, there would be probably a little bit of additional work on our end because one, you'd have to have the transferring mechanism. Presumably we'd need to have some way for organizations to put themselves out there and be like, hi, I'm the Harvard Quantum Club. Could I have some credits? So it's not just an automatic feature that's super easily available, but I think that could be a really good way for people to find something to do with their credits.
Also, crazy unrelated to Enigma. And it's a good thing we had Omar on point during the Q&A because I would have just jumped right over it and we wouldn't have had that conversation at all. We're at one hour two though, so we gotta hurry. So let's jump into sentiment. Take us fast, Omar.
Certainly. So we're getting to a bit of a weird spot with sentiment where we try and include some positive sentiment, some negative sentiment, and we really can't find any negative sentiment. And so I'm really stretching like all right, I need one orange box in the slides. But the reality is the overwhelming consensus is that everyone's very excited, maybe a little impatient, very excited for what is to come and as of today, the wait is finally over. And so there was a comment a couple weeks ago about all of the long term holders deserving a yacht trip once everything launched. And book your tickets, gentlemen. Not financial advice. But yeah, for the most part, I think people are very excited. They're very excited about the Terra Quantum announcement two weeks ago, and it sounds like they are very excited about having Taylor on the show today. And so yeah, overwhelming consensus is that things are going very well. And it's gotten to the point where we're actually getting talked about and hyped up in the Subnet Summer Telegram. So this is like the broader Bittensor community. And so we're starting to make some waves, which is very exciting.
Yeah, now the only thing we really kind of messed up on the timing because if we hadn't launched we could have been in like Paris. Instead we're launching subnets in Colorado, man. Well, anyway, this is great. Yeah, I totally appreciate it. Omar, thanks for taking us home pretty quick there. Sorry we didn't give as much time to the sentiment as we usually do, but we don't wanna blow much past the hour.
Again to everybody who's been with us on the journey, thank you very much. Ryan, to you and your team who have been carrying this thing on your shoulders, thank you very much for that. The whole team deserves praises and accolades for the hard work that they've done on this thing. Let's get out there, finish this launch and bring this thing home. And to all of our outside viewers, our DTAO investors, our potential participants, even the quantum people that have started to make it into this podcast -- we thank you for being on this journey with us and we really look forward to continuing on this thing together. All right, let's sign off. Thanks everyone.