qBitTensor Labs Live — July 23, 2026
BlueQubit CTO Hayk joins the show as Enigma's prize pools climb to $15,000 with milestone four unsolved on Breaking RSA and difficulty three on Hardening Quantum Proof. New rules require every submission to be open source, a mainnet gas bug briefly freezes the treasury wallets, Open Quantum Edge moves into the data center at the metal, a qBraid partnership puts Open Quantum in front of 30,000 users, two Bittensor subnets fall to the Sapphire Sleet hackers, Breaking RSA heads to DEF CON's Quantum Village, and a Chinese preprint cuts the logical qubits needed to break ECC to 835.
The July 23rd broadcast handed the spotlight to a guest: Hayk, CTO of BlueQubit -- the team that generates every peaked circuit behind Enigma's Hardening Quantum Proof challenge. Around that conversation: prize pools climbing to $15,000 as Breaking RSA milestone four and Hardening Quantum Proof difficulty three hold out, new open-source rules for submissions, a mainnet bug that briefly froze the treasury wallets, Open Quantum Edge hardware racked in a QPU data center, a qBraid partnership putting Open Quantum in front of 30,000 users, two subnet hacks that rattled the ecosystem, DEF CON on the horizon, and a Chinese preprint that cuts the qubit count needed to break ECC nearly in half.
Enigma: Prize Pools Climb to $15,000
- The early milestones on both challenges fell in roughly a week, each paying out a $10,000 prize pool to the winner.
- Breaking RSA milestone four (a 500-bit key) and Hardening Quantum Proof difficulty three have now gone a couple of weeks unsolved. Prizes were bumped to $12,500 last week and $15,000 this week, with more upward pressure to come if they keep holding.
- As ShorShot framed it: the era where you could "drive an AI for a few hours and kinda get what you need" is over. These are real challenges now, and the prizes will reflect that.
New Rule: Open Source or It Doesn't Count
Recent RSA winners had been hiding their innovations inside binaries. The rules have been updated: real, publicly available binaries (factorization libraries, quantum simulators -- anything you can pip install or license) may be included, but anything you changed or invented must ship as open source. The whole point of Enigma is letting the next miner stand on the shoulders of giants. The challenge itself stays decentralized, but enforcement doesn't rely on the validators alone: if a validator passes a submission that broke the rules, the treasury wallets give the team the opportunity to stop the payment.
Hayk of BlueQubit -- Peaked Circuits from the Source
- Hayk's path: competitive programmer, computer scientist, then over the "steep barrier to entry" into quantum with the help of a friend doing a PhD in quantum physics -- the same friend he co-founded BlueQubit with around four years ago, betting on software and algorithms while everyone else built hardware.
- Peaked circuits started with Scott Aaronson's Q2B keynote in December 2024 -- the same conference where Bob and Hayk first met. "This should be pretty easy to build" turned out to be wrong, and BlueQubit iterated all the way to circuits nobody knows how to solve classically.
- BlueQubit generates and calibrates all of Enigma's peaked circuits through an enterprise API stack, and runs Peaked Portal, a public leaderboard playground where anyone can test themselves against some of the best in the world.
- Difficulty three: no existing public tool can solve it, and BlueQubit itself has no general solution. Smart people Hayk personally pointed at the challenge spent whole weekends on it and texted him complaints. Difficulty four is already in development -- "at least as hard, but realistically more hard."
- The endgame borrows from the OG RSA challenge of the 2000s: the world built its conviction that RSA is hard not through mathematical proof but by leaving prize money unclaimed for years. A peaked-circuit milestone with a million dollars on it that nobody can crack would be, in Hayk's words, "actual quantum supremacy that you can't dispute."
Treasury Wallet Glitch -- Found, Patched, Confirmed
A recent mainnet release broke gas estimation on a UID lookup call exposed to contracts -- creating a payout proposal suddenly cost half a TAO in gas, freezing treasury operations. ShorShot steered the Church of Rao developers toward the offending commit, the patch is confirmed live on mainnet, and the next rewards should flow through the treasury wallets without a hitch. In the meantime the owner-funded prize wallet -- deliberately kept outside the treasury system -- meant the latest challenge winner still got paid on time.
The Eye of Sauron
Const posted about Enigma at 3:40 AM team time -- ambiguous enough to read as "this is interesting" or "this smells off." The community jumped to the subnet's defense while the team slept, and the exchange got picked up and publicized to a broader audience. Takeaways: any attention is good attention, it put the subnet on the radar of bigger players who now know it's legitimate, and it exposed a gap -- the team needs to advocate beyond its immediate community.
SN48: Open Quantum Edge
The team is moving from consuming QPUs solely through vendors' proprietary clouds to also being the layer between the quantum computer and the cloud -- working with everyone from the dilution refrigerator companies to the control systems firing pulses into the qubits to the third parties calibrating them. An Open Quantum box is already racked in the first client's facility, running the software control that puts the machine on the cloud. As ShorShot put it, nothing in the industry glues these systems together today -- that's the gap Open Quantum Edge fills.
qBraid Partnership -- 30,000 Users
qBraid -- a well-known platform in the quantum hackathon scene -- has added native Open Quantum support: an OAuth handshake links your accounts, and qBraid users execute jobs into Open Quantum through Subnet 48 without leaving the qBraid interface. qBraid just announced passing 30,000 users, and the news drew coverage from both The Quantum Insider and the Quantum Computing Report. Alongside the launch, the Open Quantum site got upgrades: new registrations now get $50 in free quantum compute by default, and a getting-started workflow walks every new user through executing their first circuit, with in-browser notebooks so nothing needs to be installed locally. Weekly active users and job executions: both up and to the right.
Two Subnets Hacked
SN15 (Oro) and SN102 (ConnitoAI) were hacked within 24 hours of each other, with a visible dump in the charts. Oro's postmortem points to Sapphire Sleet, the Korean hacking group identified in a Microsoft report: a trusted friend's Telegram account was hijacked, a fake meeting invite installed malware, a keylogger sat on an employee's computer for months, and the owner keys walked out the door. The team's own posture: treasury wallets require multi-step proposals that validators can cancel at any time (with signals on every state change), and owner keys stay on air-gapped systems. ShorShot's summary -- "don't keep keys on the internet" -- and the real enemy is complacency.
DEF CON and WISER
Terra Quantum's Taylor Hartley will mention the Breaking RSA challenge in her quantum workshop at DEF CON's Quantum Village, and talks are underway with the organizers to get the Enigma challenges sponsored as part of the big hackathon, with Open Quantum offered as a resource for the hackers. DEF CON gathers tens of thousands of leading hackers and cybersecurity experts -- exactly the outside talent Enigma wants in Bittensor. Separately, Bob spoke at WISER's three-week quantum-and-AI summer camp, putting Open Quantum in front of a hundred-plus students and industry professionals -- presenting right after Tom Finke, the man the internet once decided was secretly running qBitTensor Labs.
ECC: 835 Logical Qubits
A Chinese preprint improves on Shor's algorithm for breaking ECC, cutting Google's headline-grabbing estimate of 1,400 logical qubits down to 835 -- in a matter of months. The catch: the savings are paid for in circuit depth, with heavy use of expensive Toffoli gates (though experts noted fewer Toffolis than expected). Bob's take: exciting, but the jury's still out -- if the ideas in the paper work, why hasn't anyone used them to take the top spot in the public ecdsa.fail challenge? It's also a reminder that the DARPA chart should show what quantum computers can do as boxes, not vertical lines, because error rates dictate how many gate operations you actually get.
Community & Q&A
- Web submissions without crypto: the path is set. Stripe's terms prohibit entry fees for cash-prize contests, so the fee gets reframed as what it actually is -- compute. You'll link your Open Quantum account and spend compute credits to cover the cost of validating your solution. ShorShot's estimate: the next few weeks.
- Quantum computers mining SN63 by end of year? Maybe. The published record for factoring on a physical quantum computer is not a 21-bit number -- it's the number 21. The hard part is proving, in a fully decentralized way with no human reviewer, that a QPU genuinely ran Shor's. A deeper-dive session on the roadmap is coming.
- Will submission data feed products? Already happening in spirit: BlueQubit uses each broken circuit (and the approach that broke it) to calibrate the next generation, and Quantum Rings watches submissions for novel simulation techniques -- a licensing conversation could come around peaked circuit levels three and four.
- Sentiment ran hot: a fan-made GIF of Bob dancing with a quantum computer (team favorite), Quantum Tangerine declaring quantum "might have the strongest cult in the entire ecosystem," and Bob's closing thought that TAO has shown incredible strength holding the 200 line. Change is fast and a little disorganized -- but comfort isn't the objective, innovation is.
Hello and welcome again to qBitTensor Labs Live. It's a pleasure to have you as always. Today is July twenty-third. let's get right into it. So, as always, the wall of legalese. what this basically says is that what we're talking about today is ideas, not promises. we're not giving any investment or legal advice. So if we say anything that sounds like either of those, it's not. and as always,
You know, we'll keep doing these as long as you guys keep using the information that we share for good and not for weaponization. And if you're still here, you agree to do all of the things that we just talked about, and we will continue on. Okay, so the agenda should look pretty pretty familiar to everybody. We're gonna spend a bit of time on 63. Today we're probably spending most of the time, I would say, the lion's share of the time, on 63 Enigma. We have a a guest presenter with us today.
That we'll introduce in a second. then we'll spend some time on subnet 48, the quantum subnet. And then we'll go through both, you know, a little bit of quantum and a little bit of Bittensor news and events, and we'll do the community review as always. So without further ado, Subnet 63, Enigma. Okay, so the first thing on this is you know, for those of you guys who have been watching it, you know, we've
We launched a couple milestones with two different challenges, the hardening quantum proof challenge and the breaking RSA challenge. And when we launched the initial versions, we sort of said, hey, we're kind of expecting that we're gonna see people crack some of these pretty quick. And we launched them and we did. And so the initial ones started at a $10,000 prize pool, and the $10,000 prize pool went right to the winner of those.
Now we've gotten into some harder challenges. And so while most of the challenges were sort of solved within, you know, call it roughly a week. We've now gone a couple weeks without seeing either the current RSA milestone solved or the current hardening quantum proof milestone. Now, we still don't think these are out of the range of possible, and we'll talk about like more of that as we go. But apparently they're pretty freaking hard. So
we had bumped the prizes up to twelve thousand five hundred last week and then this week we bumped them up to fifteen thousand. so yeah, if if they continue to go unsolved, we'll continue to put some upward pressure on those prize pools. But, you know, seriously, these are solvable. So yeah, we'll look forward to seeing what you guys can do.
I I think we've really just left the easy kind of realm of like, you know, you could just drive an AI for a few hours and kinda get what you need. It's you know, now now it's a real challenge. So
Totally. Yeah. And actually that'll be something that will be fun to talk with our guest, Hayk from BlueQubit the kind of collaborator on the hardening quantum proof challenge, to just get some of his perspectives once we bring him on to talk about what people might need to do or, you know, how hard it really is to solve the current level. But yeah, but that I mean but that's what we're here for. We're not here for people to just like grab something and do some minor iterating on it or, you know, making it work using
RAM instead of disk or GPU instead of CPU. You know, we're looking for people to really innovate. And so the prizes are gonna start to reflect that more and more.
All right. one of the updates on this is that there have been a couple rule updates based on some of the submissions that we saw. you can always look at the rules on Enigma at you know, it's linked right off of the website. It's linked off of the README in the the Git GitHub repo. but basically the most recent winners of RSA have actually been using this, you know, obviously intentional and kind of innovative way of sort of like hiding what they're doing.
So the whole aim of this is that every solution should be open sourced. the spirit of why we do that is so that the next people can stand on the shoulders of giants, they can choose to innovate based on what the last solution did, or they can choose to take a totally different approach. but if your solution submits binaries, then we can't do that. And so we don't entirely exclude binaries from being
included in your submissions. If it's a real, you know, binary that you're using, like some factorization libraries, some quantum simulators, you can include binaries that are actual real binaries out there that are available to everybody. But anything you change, anything, any innovation that you have, anything that people can't just pip install or get a license for or whatever, that needs to be included as open source. yeah, essentially the reason is because
anything else than that the you know just works against the core tenets of why we built this challenge. so anyway, the rules have been updated. now the interesting thing about this is that we still want this to be very decentralized. These rules exist so that if you break them, we can sort of see that treasury wallets do give us the ability to sort of say, okay, well a validator passed it, but somebody cheated. So, you know, we c we have the ability for a couple of days to you know, stop payment if people break the rules. But
We know that, you know, once the rules are posted, you guys will be good with them. Okay, so without further ado, I am going to bring our guest, Hayk from BlueQubit on. Welcome, Hayk. Hayk is the CTO of BlueQubit I don't know, Hayk, I don't know if you know this, but you were actually, I think, the first human in like the quantum industry that I talked to after we launched our company. I just I showed up at like Q2B in maybe it was twenty twenty four.
And I saw your guys' booth and I was like, Hey, these guys are doing large simulation. I should talk to them. and it's so cool that we're, you know, still working together years later. Welcome.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I didn't know that actually. That's good to know. and yeah, I'm pretty excited for this.
Yeah. And so one well, one of the things I always like about Hayk is no matter what, he's kind of gonna like tell you the truth. You know what I mean? So like there's a lot of people that will kind of like coddle you a little bit and like, you know, stroke your ego, let you be like totally wrong. When I say stupid things to Hayk, he'll really quickly be like, I don't understand, man. You know, and call you out on it. So
So Hayk, come tell us some truth about this. give us a little bit about BlueQubit a little bit about your history and the challenge that we're collaborating on.
Yeah, sure. So I can start with maybe a quick background on me. I started as a computer scientist. I used to do a lot of competitive programming in high school and in college, even in college when doing computer science, I always like heard about quantum computers, but I never really knew what it is. I it was really hard for me to kind of understand.
what's going on beyond the hype. and it was really not until after I sat down and read a bunch of stuff and like went through the actual the I call it like this a steep barrier to entry to quantum computing that I could s kinda start to understand and appreciate what's what it actually is and what you can do with quantum computers and all that.
And I had a friend who was doing PhD in quantum physics, so he knew all that already. And I would always ping him and ask him about these things, and he would help me a lot in this journey of me kind of going from computer science, classical computing to quantum computing, and I was very lucky to basically have him
kind of share some of my ideas and we had this aligned vision for quantum computing and we ended up founding a company together, and that's how BlueQubit was born around four years ago. And we basically started BlueQubit to focus on the software and algorithms part of quantum computing world. And at the time there were a lot of companies building
Quantum computers or doing like very low-level stuff, building controlling infrastructure or hardware to again tune qubits and all this all the other hardware components that go into building quantum computers, but there weren't really that many companies focusing on the software part, which made sense because
You know, to focus on software, you first need to figure out the hardware and you need to have quantum computers first. Like I remember whenever we I would tell anyone, hey, I have this startup doing quantum computing software, everyone would ask me, like, what do you mean? Like what where do you run that? Like what do you do we even have quantum computers? Don't we aren't we gonna have that in like ten years? And I'm like, No, actually we do have quantum computers. You can actually connect and run something on our platform today.
And people always be surprised. And obviously, always the first question is what can I do with it? Right? What what can I run on a quantum computer? And that's that's when you start thinking, okay, how should I tell them where where should I begin that it's actually not that easy, and there's this long road ahead to f building basically finding useful applications that can run on quantum computers today. So
yeah, that's how we started BlueQubit and yeah, the journey in the quantum computing world's been pretty pretty fun so far.
Yeah, so has that I mean, real quick before I have you go into more about you know, what BlueQubit does, has that changed? Like is that still the question when you meet somebody new and you're like, I'm in quantum computing? Like do you feel like people like the general public has changed their understanding much?
I think so. It changed, but not for the right reasons, I think. I think people just there's just way too much hype now. And people are like, yeah, quantum computers, of course. So what what what are you guys doing? Like weather forecasting or I don't know, like and they would say some stuff, I'm like no, actually that's that's totally off. And but yeah, the good thing is that when we started again.
Pretty much everything you could do on a quantum computer could be replicated with a laptop. And there wasn't anything like super complicated that could be done on a quantum computer, but that has changed and there is a few algorithms out there that actually now quantum computers can run and solve, but regular computers can't. And one of those examples is peaked circuits, and that's I guess what we are here to talk about. The
Hardening Quantum Proof Challenge.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So great segue. So I mean, I think actually probably a lot of the people that are watching do know what peaked circuits are because they've sort of been like a core part of what we've been doing in this ecosystem for a long time. But why don't you give a little bit of background, you know, specifically in like why BlueQubit in peaked circuits? Because you guys I like out of all the companies in quantum, your guys' name is sort of the most synonymous with peaked circuits.
Yeah, it's a great question. it all started like pretty like randomly. I remember I think it was twenty twenty-four at December and we were at Q2B, which is one of the largest conferences in quantum computing, and I saw the keynote speech by Scott Aaronson, who basically
they just released their paper on peaked circuits and he was introducing the whole concept and I was looking at it and I was thinking this should be pretty easy to build. Like I don't know why more people aren't doing this. Turned out it's not that easy and most of the ideas we had initially weren't really that hard or that original. But I don't know, there there was this kind of this I I would even call it like this blind
belief, faith I had that there is something here that can be done. We can do something very interesting in this area. And we put more energy and effort into it and we started coming up with the harder and harder peaked circuits that quantum computers could solve, but classical computers would take longer and longer and eventually we got to some circuits that are we don't know how to solve with the classical computers.
Yeah, that's super cool. I actually I remember that that presentation too from Scott Aaronson in twenty twenty four. Well actually I was that was the so that was actually that was the conference when I met you. Yeah. We like we had only totally. Yeah, yeah. We we had we had formed our company like I mean the official company formation we've been working on the tech for a little while before that, but we formed the company like I think it was like November twenty sixth, and then that show was like
Were you there? Twenty twenty four scrap. Is that? wow. I mean we met in so many conferences. Yeah.
December twelfth or something like that. You know, it was like super close to each other. hey, one thing we should do, we will include I'll include a link to that on YouTube because that was all recorded and streamed, the presentation you're referring to. And so so you guys, though, have also, you know, and I think people are familiar with what we're doing on Enigma, but we'll ask some deeper questions on that in a bit. But BlueQubit has been doing some of their own challenges.
you know, for the last year, year and a half, on on this just through your own web portal and through like the Yale hackathon and stuff like that. You wanna share a little bit of background on that?
Yes, we call them hackathons. we did have one so our our hackathons are usually like take one or two days and we de we do them with universities. it's just a great way for us to kind of tell the world about the stuff that we are building at BlueQubit while also catering to different interests of students with
computer science and physics backgrounds who want to understand and learn more in quantum computing. but we did have one challenge, which was like a hackathon that would never end, that was always open, around peaked circuits. similar to Enigma and this challenge. But the style was a little bit different, the format was a little bit different, but
Yeah, the the premise was pretty much the same. We had a bunch of peaked circuits and we had a public leaderboard where people could submit solutions. I think there was more emphasis. One one difference it had from this challenge was that we had a public leaderboard of everyone who would solve things and you could see exactly how you rank against other people.
And we also have we still have a version of that called Peaked Portal. It's not really a challenge, there's really no prizes there, it's more like a playground. I actually encourage everyone to try it out. It's on our website. If you go to Hackathons, it's right on the top called Peaked Portal. And yeah, it's just a great way to get introduced to this concept and try your strength from
Starting from like simple challenges, going all the way to pretty hard ones. And we have like pretty strong people there on the leaderboard as well. So you can really see how you can compare against some of the best in the world.
Totally. And I know you're you're probably going to respect the you know, personal information of the people on the leaderboard, but you know, people do post their names, so you could go Google some of those people and try to get an impression of who they are. so hey, maybe transitioning a little bit. so w the role that BlueQubit plays in Enigma is essentially they generate all of the peaked circuits. They decide how to calibrate the parameters to generate those circuits for the different difficulties.
they do the research on just how hard are these circuits to solve, like how how feasible do we think they are. and then they'll generate them for us and we'll sort of host them through the validators on Enigma. And so, yeah, Hayk, I'd I'd love your impression on what you've seen so far, like the level of innovation you're kind of expecting from a call it like not quantum originally community, and then a little bit of opinion on.
How hard it's gonna be to progress too much further.
Yeah, I've been following obviously the timeline. we had like the difficulty one and I think it took people I don't know, two weeks or more, three two, three weeks to go through it.
Omar, what did it take for level one? I think it might have been about a week or a little less, maybe even, for one.
Yeah, I think it was around a week. So they they solved it rather quickly. and then I believe the same with with peaked two, but they they've been working on difficulty three for couple of weeks now, so
Okay.
Right.
Yeah, that's roughly what we expected, I would say. Yeah, difficulty one was something that it was yeah, really like an introductory introductory level. we knew how to solve it quickly. I think the solutions though were a little bit surprising in a good way because they did shave off sometimes. So if we knew how to solve it easily, and let's say I don't know like
Five hours, I think some people solved it in less. And same with difficulty two, but yeah, I think it took people a bit longer. I think difficulty one had like a very naive solution that could work, but difficulty two, you had to use some of the best tools out there, which seems like is what people did, which is good, because that's another thing I wanted to check. Like, do people really look at what's out there and
search for the best solutions out there and can use that, which happened to be true, which is pretty cool. But yeah, difficulty three is a little bit different and none of the existing tools out there can solve it to the best of our knowledge. We know how to solve some of these circuits in difficulty three, but we also ourselves don't know how to have a general solution that can
solve any circuit from that family. So yeah, I'm pretty excited to see what people come come up with.
Yeah, and you know, I'll I'll share like a behind the scenes insight too. So you know, we were sort of like having our pre-call before qBitTensor Labs Live and I shared that we had just bumped the prize up to fifteen thousand. and Hayk, your immediate reaction was like, well, we better get level four ready because you know, because the like I think the the premise is like for that prize, somebody can probably figure it out, right?
Yeah, I feel like yeah, I feel like there are some people out there. At least when I when I talk to some really smart people, you know, they always say, I don't care about the money, you know, like I'm a scientist, I don't care about prizes. But then you just see in their eyes when you're like, yeah, by the way, there's like fifteen thousand dollars, they're like, What? And like, seems like you little you care a little bit, you know? And
Like the incentive for getting that.
Yeah, I think it definitely matters and I think if you had like, you know, thousand dollars versus million dollars, it's like two totally different environments. And even though I know there is no like solution out there publicly available that can solve all difficulty three, we ourselves don't have like a general solution. But if you put like million dollars on it tomorrow, I think there are like really some some really smart people out there that, you know, would
do the do it day and night and they might come up with stuff that we never thought about. So yeah, it's it's a it's like a great forcing function that you can just tune and yeah it's it's really exciting to to follow the whole thing.
Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. So, yeah, well l I th I think it's I think it's really exciting. I really appreciate all the work that you and the BlueQubit team have done here. And, you know, for for perspective, I guess for everybody else, you know, it's not like just purely some scientists out there working on these things and then emailing them to us, you know. This that like BlueQubit has built like an enterprise stack where, you know, we have like APIs to go interact with them and
pull down circuits and stuff like that. It's really, you know, first class work. So I really appreciate all the work you guys did.
Yeah, it's been great working with you guys.
Yeah. Before we let Hayk go, Omar ShorShot, anything anything you guys wanna add to the conversation?
so I think the one thing that might be worth bringing up is sort of building on Hayk has been saying he's been talking with a lot of people in the quantum industry that are sort of allured by you know, these big prize pools. And I believe you had also mentioned the other day that some of the scientists you've been talking to have actually attempted the challenge and the milestone does still stand. And so it is pretty exciting to say, one, hey, we have some real legitimate heavy hitters.
coming into Bittensor and you know, attempting the challenge, but also they haven't solved it yet. And so this this is clearly a challenging one.
Yeah,
They're just waiting for you to bump it to twenty.
Ha ha ha.
I know, right? That's entirely possible. Yeah, I mean I mean some of these people I personally know and yeah, I was also pretty happy that Enigma and this challenge got to their attention. And yeah, I mean I guess I underrated how difficult difficulty three is really, because at least when I introduced this or I told them about this, I was like, you know
You guys are smart. There's like this easy ten thousand dollars out there. You probably should take a look at it. And then I started getting some texts, like, man, you told us it's easy, it's not easy at all. Like I've been I've been spending like the whole weekend on it and a few more days. Like, I don't think it's that easy. I'm like, oops, okay. I'm sorry. But yeah, it's been again, it's it's one of those things that makes it really, really exciting to follow the whole thing. So and yeah, maybe to tell if
To say a few more words about the different difficulties, there is we are working on difficulty four as well, just in case. you know, the prize goes to $15,000 and higher and people actually do come up with pretty cool solutions. We already have some ideas for difficulty four, which should be at least as hard but realistically more hard than difficulty three. So yeah, I'm pretty stoked to see where things go.
Yeah, and I think one of the I mean one of the things that I'm just really pretty excited about on this is like, you know, I okay, so I feel like obviously you could make something that's just like so complex that you know there's no way you could simulate it. Right. But then you also probably approach a range where it's like it's really actually pretty hard for quantum computers to do it 'cause they have to have like a really high level of accuracy if you make it super deep and, you know, super high fidelity required. And so like
You know, say say the outcome was nobody solved difficulty three and we start bumping the prize up and it's fifty thousand, a hundred thousand and nobody's solved it. Is that like a good result for BlueQubit or is that like a bad result for BlueQubit?
I think that's a great result. I think if that's the case and we really get to million dollars, I think that would be a great proof point that hey, here's like actual quantum supremacy that you can't dispute because it's proven by all this time and all this effort that people put into it.
And there's this challenge that has million dollars on it. And if anyone says that they can solve it, then they should go ahead and solve it. And I think the I don't know if you guys mentioned this in your description of the challenge, but the the whole idea of this increasing difficulty and peaked circuits not being possible to crack with regular computers, we took it from the RSA challenge.
I know you guys also have an RSA challenge, but the one I'm referring to is like the one from 2000s, the OG RSA challenge. And it's really the the way people build conviction that that RSA, the RSA problem is hard to solve. And then humanity went ahead and built all of world's cryptography on top of that. And the way they convinced themselves that this problem is hard.
OG. Yeah, yeah.
Is not really through proving it in a mathematical way, because it was not possible to prove that it's hard, but they really put out a challenge for a few months and then a few years, and then it was broken in the first few iterations, and then at some point they got to a place where nobody could solve it for more than a year. I think in their case, they got to like a hundred thousand dollar challenge like prize, not even million dollars. And at some point they were like, okay.
This is hopeless. Nobody can solve it. I think we're gonna call it. And they just took took away the challenge. And everybody agreed that this problem is basically unsolvable. So if we can get something like that, again, I think it's gonna be hard. It's not gonna be easy to do something like that. I don't think anyone has done anything like that. and I'm pretty convinced that
With quantum computers in general, you can do things like that. And even if it's not peaked circuits, there's other challenges that this should be doable with. And yeah, if we get there, I think that would be amazing.
Dude, that would I mean I that would be a beautiful like bow on the end of this whole thing is when we get to like announce that like quantum supremacy has been achieved, we put our money where our mouth is, nobody can do it. Like that will be amazing.
Yeah, I think that'll be that'll be huge.
Cool. Okay. Well, Hayk I I guess thank you so much for joining. We're gonna let you go and get on with the regularly scheduled program, but it's been a pleasure having you on and it's been great collaborating with you.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
All right. We'll see you next time.
Cheers.
All right. So with that, we'll get right back into our regular updates. Man, that was exciting. I can't, yeah. Beautiful, beautiful. I can't wait for that. Thank you, Hayk. Okay, so next things to talk about. treasury wallets. So I think everybody probably saw on Twitter, if you follow us on Twitter, that with the recent updates to Mainnet, there was a little glitch with the treasury wallets. ShorShot, do you want to talk us through?
A little bit of what that was and how it's been resolved.
Yeah, you know I went to create a proposal to to to start a payout for our our latest challenge winner and noticed the gas cost was really high, like like half a TAO, obscenely high. which, you know, actually triggered me to go and talk to the Church of Rao folks and say, Hey, you know, I think there's a gas price issue with
kind of like y looking up basically the the who who it's a basically a UID lookup call that's exposed to the contracts and the the pr the the price estimation was wrong on it and it turned out it was just a recent commit and one of the mainnet releases and it got through and therefore broke the the estimation cost of this and made it impossible to try to extract
or or make any calls to the contract itself. luckily the Church of Rao folks were able to get on top of that really quick and and be able to help coordinate the the patch for this.
Yeah, sounds good. And and th r remind me, so like I and I sincerely don't remember. Like did did you propose the fix to that? Or did they propose the fix to that?
Yeah, I sort of identified the area and then they were like, What? There's no way this'll this function call costs this much in terms of gas and I you know, I was like I I was like, I think this is the issue, I'm not exactly sure and and luckily one one of the developers was able to jump in there and and and confirm it fairly quickly, so I I won't take credit for that, but I I think I c sort of steered them in the right direction and
got them to look at the right thing so that way we were able to quickly identify it, get it fixed, and then I have confirmed it is fixed on mainnet and and and is no longer a problem. It's a little bit scary that, you know, something like that could get through with sort of the bittensor, subtensor, EVM, Solidity ecosystem getting so big. you know, I think, you know, Bittensor in general is more at risk of of
doing something that's unintentional and creating a bug that could either you know i it's not even on the just on the EVM side, but anywhere else creating a a bug that could slip through and be able to cause havoc. So
Yeah. That's I I mean, that's actually a great point. Like, I mean, if you think about the tr Treasury wallets are essentially just like a smart contract. Like they lock the funds and they have some rules around how we distribute them. A small bug, you know, at a fairly distantly related place results in us being unable to distribute funds. And you think about like some of the like com you know, some of the like kind of coolish features, but like complex features like you know, conviction and stuff like that, I would worry that
you know, there's opportunity for those things to kind of go awry too, which is kind of wild. I love this note. The deployment of that change and dynamic tempo wasn't sufficiently discussed and thus we are where we are. That sounds like something I would hear at like a big enterprise, you know, like we have like, you know, like a team one team complaining about the other team. It's nice to see that decentralized technology isn't free from, you know, large team politics.
Yeah. But yeah, I l I I love it. And I mean it's hard. When you move fast you break things. That's kind of the nature of it. I think, you know, okay, if I were to have like my magic wand and I could wave it, I would probably create like robust governance and, you know, structured testing periods, you know, where we could work around stuff like this. But, you know, I'm I guess I'm willing to take some of the breaking for some of the fast pace too. one of the really cool things about this,
though was so a prize had been won. We couldn't issue the reward through the Treasury wallet. But the cool thing was that we still had that owner funded prize wallet, which was totally outside of Treasury wallets. so we don't I mean we're not really aiming to use that. We're aiming to use the Treasury wallet so that all of this stuff is like totally on chain. You can see the validators approving it, everything, etc. but I was pretty happy that we still have that wallet. So it gave us the flexibility to
you know, hold up our end of the bargain when those contracts break.
Yeah, it was nice to still be able to yeah, to g to give the the miner his rewards. because yeah, I mean people are spending money experimenting, you know, not just doing things on the w on the workbench locally on their own machine, but you know, renting compute to be able to to try to solve some of these challenges and it really helps get to the next level. And then, you know, th there were I guess the past couple mainnet releases there were also some
legacy code that was broken and and behavior that was changed in terms of the you know how th how multiple things were done on Bittensor and and we were able to get around those as well, but it did cause a little bit of disruption when, you know, backwards compatibility isn't considered and there's hard cutovers, it really affects the whole community. And I did see a lot of chatter on Discord on other channels related to this type of frustration. So
Yeah, you know, actually, that's right. I d I had kind of like forgotten about that already, but I guess that big release did break a bunch of backwards compatibility stuff, right? And they sort of like hotfixed a a number of things like in the days that followed that release.
Well, I I think a lot of it r relies on the fact that people are using you know, people who have certain older versions of bittensor SDKs, one sh should probably keep them up to date as much as possible to avoid breaking changes if that's how the ecosystem is going to operate or the developer community needs to be more focused on how do we, you know, create new features and and harden things better.
without breaking things that are already out there in the ecosystem. So yeah.
Yeah. Totally. Cool. Okay. so yeah, th thanks for helping get that helping us get through that though. we're back up and running, everything's good. Next rewards should go through treasury wallets without a hitch. Perfect. All right. also next up on Enigma, we did get some attention from Const. Any attention is appreciated. so yeah, Const actually posted a message like
Yep.
3 30, 340 AM our time. we weren't on watching it. So I was really kind of excited to see that after Const published this you know, message, which I think could be interpreted as sort of like, this is interesting, or could be posted as like, hmm, this smells off. And so immediately, you know, the community started to jump in, largely while we were still asleep.
And came to our defense, which was pretty awesome. thank you guys all for that. the other really cool thing about this was, you know, it got a lot of the interaction, I guess, you know, when Const shows up, it's gonna get attention. And so the response to this and the reaction from our community here and especially JBRings kind of got picked up and publicized to a broader audience too. And so I guess the gist of this is that like any publicity is good publicity. Like, I mean, even if
Even if the eye of Sauron lands upon your subnet and is you know, and the and and you know thinks you might be the enemy or something like that for a second, still any attention is good attention. and the other cool thing to sort of like know is this put us on the radar for other bigger people who sort of know that we're legitimate.
It also identified a little bit of a gap, which is we sort of think that we're pretty loud, like pretty noisy about all the stuff that we're doing. Like especially about things like treasury contracts, where you know, I mean we were down for kind of the greater part of, you know, what was it, four to six months waiting for treasury wallets. and and and we just sort of thought like that was the wishes of the powers that be, but then you sort of realize that maybe the powers that be are not a single, you know, voice or a single awareness.
And so it sort of highlights that there's still a little bit of a gap, and we need to focus on like closing that and making sure that we're advocating beyond just our immediate community. And so those are the updates for Enigma for today. we'll jump into 48, and I'm looking at the clock, noticing that we had so much fun talking with Hayk that we got to move a little fast. So we'll move a little fast. So subnet 48 quantum compute. We talked last time we were on qBitTensor Labs Live about this idea of
Open Quantum Edge. Basically getting into the data center where the QPUs are located and putting them on the cloud. okay, yeah, that background image is obviously an AI generated background image, which I'm going to hit on in a second. but the really, you know, what this actually is, is it's this movement from a world where QPUs are put online. There's some
proprietary technology generally that like these companies have put together to expose that out to the internet. They put it on their cloud and then we either consume through their cloud or through Subnet 48 into Open Quantum and we make we make that compute time available. And one of the things that ShorShot and team have been working on is this really cool ability to get into the data center at the metal
and actually start to become that layer that works between the quantum computer and the cloud. So Open Quantum itself becomes like the cloud API for the QPU. ShorShot, Omar, before I move on, does that kind of that does that kind of hit it all right? Did I miss anything big?
Cool. And so
Yep. That's that's a pretty good explanation. Yep.
Now, behind the scenes, there's a ton of work because I mean, we're we're working with everybody from like the dilution refrigerator companies to know the status of the refrigerators to the controllers that are sending pulses into the qubits, to the, you know, third parties that are calibrating the qubits to make sure that we have a representation of the entire thing. and well like our generative AI would kind of like make the expectations of what a quantum computer looks like look like something like this. The reality is that like in real life
They look something like this. so you have sort of like the on the far right, you have these control systems with all these wires that are going into like individually controlled qubits down in this dilution refrigerator, which sort of looks golden in the view that we're looking at right there. you know, I was one of the one of the things I was really surprised about with this quantum computer was like they just had like an open house when I took this photo. This was months ago.
and like you know, people were just like walking around with glasses of wine, like talking and there's like a quantum computer, like guys are wrenching on it, you know. Like you sort of like expect that it'll be in like a hyper secure facility with layers of like Yeah. and so yeah, so this is sort of what that system looks like today. And then, you know, well we had the
Yeah.
Cool little Open Quantum glowing image on a box. That's actually what our box actually looks like in that facility. And so now running on this device is sort of all of the software control to make that quantum computer totally available on the cloud. we'll be excited to keep you guys posted as we officially launch the system. but yeah, very very exciting stuff and ShorShot, yeah.
Kudos to your you and your team for all the hard work done on this. I think like between the research of like figuring out all the different pieces, which are mostly like quasi documented, integrating them all in, building out all of the like plumbing through the cloud. I mean, it's it's a it's a pretty big undertaking.
Yeah, i in and you know, maybe it surprised me a little bit that everything is so disconnected that, you know, you have to it it it's kinda nice to be the glue between all of these things and I think we'll really hopefully we could be really attractive to other QPU providers as well, because there's nothing really there out in the industry to kinda kinda connect everything together and and kind of integr be the integration point for all these systems.
Yeah. Yeah. And what and the other interesting thing, I mean, this is and this is not at all like a dig on the existing players out there, when I say this, but like all of these like these technologies are so advanced. Like, I mean, how how these little controller boxes like send pulses and how this dilution refrigerator gets down to temperature. Like like the the science and engineering behind the specialties of these is so significant that I think like
The enterprise grade software really isn't a consideration of theirs. You know, and so like things like,
N nor nor should it be, but someone needs to come in there and and fill that gap and I think we fit perfectly into that space. So
N yeah, totally, totally, totally. Yeah. So yeah, very very cool stuff. super excited to kind of see that progress. next up, we did launch in the same I guess in the last couple weeks here. Omar, did we do this two weeks ago? Was this just last week? Time is like time means nothing anymore. It's yeah, nonsense. It moves at illogical rates. But
Yes, I believe it was two weeks ago, so
Yeah, we launched a partnership with qBraid. qBraid is like a pretty well known player. The they basically any hackathon that happens in the quantum field, they're generally like there as the platform that people use. They'll do like hosted notebooks to let you you know, run simulations. They do have a layer that lets you run on quantum computers. and one of the things that they've done is they've added native Open Quantum support.
And so the experience is that you can in your existing qBraid account do a quick little process to link to your Open Quantum account. You click the button, it goes and it links into it uses like an OAuth handshake to link to your Open Quantum account. You authorize qBraid to use your credits, and then qBraid users can in the qBraid user interface without leaving it again, execute jobs into Open Quantum through Subnet 48.
They have access to free quantum compute, cheap quantum compute. so very cool. I think they advertise that they just what what did they say, Omar? How many users did they just surpass?
They just announced that they hit thirty thousand users, I believe, which is exciting now that we have Open Quantum in front of thirty thousand users, and then in exchange they get to tap into the power of Bittensor and access the, you know, free and subsidized compute that we offer. So
Perfect. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, quite quite the beautiful thing. The other cool thing to note about that is it was big enough news to draw coverage from trade media. so we got coverage both from Quantum Insider, who's sort of like the biggest, I would say the biggest trade media for quantum and also from the Quantum Computing Report, who's I would say a close number two, probably kind of neck and neck. you know, good good coverage from both of them. it was real one of the really interesting things was
you know, there's there's like so much focus on workforce development in quantum right now that I think it was a fairly easy, easy coverage to get. also, you know, not the only news that these guys have covered in terms of like workforce development. And so I think the time is really cool.
man, using coffee to clear like a a frog in your throat. it's a really cool I mean it's a really cool time to be in the space where we can just make quantum computing accessible to everybody as a part of that strategy. The other cool bit, I guess it's been a while since we've shown one of these. So I don't even know if you guys saw that I put this in here, but I grabbed some screen grabs from the KPIs of
weekly active users and job executions. And the cool thing is that they're both like up and to the right. And yeah, you always want your charts to be up and to the right. so yeah, really cool kind of continued traction with this. the other thing that we did, which in a way was quite opportunistic with the qBraid launch, but in another way was just an important thing to do, is we had some website updates. So
First, when you used to sign up for an Open Quantum account, you would have a second step of like opting into getting free credits to run through Subnet 48. We made that just a default part of the registration now. So immediately upon registering, you have access to your first essentially fifty dollars in quantum compute. One of the really important parts of that is that with the qBraid handshake, it would have been quite confusing if you set up an account and then
couldn't actually run anything on it. And so that sort of like makes that user experience just like very seamless. The other thing we did is we put a cool getting started workflow. So immediately upon signing up, we'll now basically walk you through executing your first circuit. That also includes having the ability to run notebooks kind of right within the browser so that you can see how the Python SDKs work without needing to go and install a bunch of stuff locally. And so yeah now
All new users just immediately get provisioned and immediately get walked through running quantum circuits. Once you run your first quantum circuit, it's pretty hard not to run your second. And so yeah, we're actually hoping we'll continue to see a fast, you know, an increasing and accelerating rate of job execution and user growth as we continue on, which is, yeah, pretty amazing. So that's it for subnet forty eight. we got ten minutes left. I think we're actually gonna nail it on time.
today. but Omar, I'm gonna lean on you a little bit for news and events. Take us through what's going on with fifteen and one two.
Totally. So this was sort of the talk of the town in the Bittensor ecosystem last week, but Subnet 15 Oro and Subnet 102 ConnitoAI were both hacked, which is a pretty upsetting thing to see, especially when two major subnets who you know are well known in the ecosystem and well trusted are hacked and taken advantage of. And then if you look in the the top right, there's a a large dump in the charts and and that obviously affects all of the holders.
And so it's a pretty scary thing to see as a subnet owner that you could be next. but essentially what happened is two of both subnets were hacked within 24 hours of each other. After a fair amount of research, Oro published a pretty lengthy sort of expose saying that they investigated it, that the behavior they had seen aligned very closely with a report from Microsoft that claim sort of points to this group of Korean hackers called Sapphire Sleet.
And basically what they did is they hacked some a trusted friend's Telegram account, use that to send a meeting to someone within the Oro team. That Oro person then accepted their their meeting invite, which was a fake malicious meeting invite. And when that happened, a bunch of malware was installed onto their computer. And so this happened over the course of a couple months. They they had reported this happened back in the end of May. And over those months they
hackers essentially had a key logger on this employee's computer and were tracking everything they were typing and were eventually able to steal their owner key information, which was then used to take control of the wallets. And the ConnitoAI team, Subnet 102, believes that they were victim to the the same exploit here. And so
So honest question. Did you say they were running Windows?
I did not say that. I so Microsoft Microsoft has done a study and they had reported that. I don't know if they were running Windows.
Well, I think you said Microsoft. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Yeah. I was just like who runs Windows anymore? Okay, like half the half the world's gonna hate me now all of a sudden. so here, on this, these aren't the same teams, are they? Fifteen and one two? Like there are two different teams that got hacked.
N not that we're aware of, so both of the owners of each subnet are doxed and they're both have ties, I believe, to OTF, but as far as we know, they are separate teams, and so where that crossover would have occurred is unclear to us at this time.
I wonder if but but they both sort of said it was the same exploit essentially, or a similar exploit.
Given the the the time at which the sort of incidents had occurred, I I think they have evidence to believe that it was the same group and the same sort of exploit. But details are unclear on that still.
Interesting. Interesting. I wonder if it's like I wonder if it's like a shared employee or something like that. Because otherwise, like why would it be you know, like what are the chances that you would do it at exactly the same time, you know? Yeah, it's weird. so maybe ShorShot I'll I'll hit you up on this. Is this gonna happen to us? I mean, are we are we susceptible to something like this or is this something that
Mm-hmm.
Our standard operating procedures kind of keep us safe from
ShorShot's looking.
Sorry, what was that question?
no worries, ShorShot's working is what it is. No my my bad my bad I totally didn't notice that yeah I was I was asking these guys got hacked with this vulnerability, this key logger. you know, are we susceptible to something like this or do our operating procedures protect us? Thoughts?
Yeah, I got distracted by a phone call, so
Yeah, I mean when it comes to the Treasury wallet, for example, you know, the Treasury admin can make a proposal. The validators have to vote yes for that proposal. the proposal could be cancelled at any time by a validator. So when there's anything that and we also have signals when proposals get created and voted on and change state. So in terms of I think protection against a
major hack we're definitely I think have a leg up against you know basically I I guess you could say Wild West key management policies. I mean if you're you know keeping owner keys and and and and every other key that's important offline and and signing transactions offline, bringing them online after s signing then
Yeah,
I don't think people will have a problem. It's just I think laziness that it comes down to.
Yeah. Or yeah, comp complacency almost maybe is like a yeah. Well, so the okay, so and and you did hit on like the tre treasury wallets, that's a great point. and so like the five hundred and what is it, five fifty in in change at this point, in alpha is by its very nature sort of protected from stuff like this.
Complacency, it probably is a better way to put it, yeah.
What about owner keys? what's you know, without going into too much detail, I guess, so as to exploit expose avenues for exploits. just what's a super high level of, you know, what we do there?
I mean, don't keep keys on the internet. You know, you always have an air gap system to store private keys.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Cool. Awesome. Well, I yeah, I hate to see stuff like this. it always sucks when you see this. and I'm always surprised by like how often this has happened. Cause I mean there's these two guys, but I feel like, you know, every every couple months you're sort of hearing about somebody getting exploited. and so yeah, d definitely everybody keep your keep your keys safe. Omar, tell us about DEF CON
Yeah, so we had alluded to this in the last live stream and wanted to shed some more light on it. But our friend Taylor Hartley from Terra Quantum is going to be attending DEF CON. And she had sent us a a brief email saying, Hey, you know, I'm gonna mention the breaking RSA challenge during my quantum workshop that I'm giving at DEF CON. Do you guys have any interest in in participating? And so as it stands right now, we are in talks with the organizers of DEF CON and the the quantum track, which is called the
Quantum Village, and we're looking to get the Enigma challenges potentially sponsored as like part of their big hackathon. So that would be super exciting to see. There's also avenues for Open Quantum to be offered as a resource for the hackers for their other hackathon challenges. So there's a lot of sort of exciting things in the pipeline, but at the very least, we will be mentioned during Taylor's quantum workshop.
And so for those of that don't know, DEF CON is this massive hacker conference. They gather tens of thousands of sort of leading hackers and cybersecurity experts and you know everyone in this cybersecurity industry. And in the last couple of years, they have been shifting more to focus on quantum and how quantum impacts cybersecurity, which is a major topic of discussion with qBitTensor Labs and Enigma. And so it'll be super exciting to have our challenges.
broadcast in front of this huge audience and sort of in alignment with our commitment to bringing on outside talent into Bittensor. So we're hoping this could attract some new participants in the challenge. So
Yeah, totally. And I tend to think of like, you know, wanting to attract like, you know, quantum people, but actually attracting hackers is equally interesting to me. as long as they're, you know, well, fingers crossed they hack it the you know, the right way, not the wrong way. yeah, super super cool. Also, this event's in like two weeks, right? So I mean it'll be crazy if we do pull together much more than a mention from Taylor. Anything's upside, so appreciate that.
Yeah.
and then this event, unfortunately, is supposed to be fairly like no photos, no social media. So if w to the extent that we are represented there, that one will probably be pretty quiet on the internet, huh?
Yeah.
But I suppose being there in real life is worth it, even if the internet doesn't know about it. All right, so WISER. Yeah. actually didn't even look at the slide, but I presented at WISER. Omar, tell us about what WISER is.
Yeah, so WISER, I believe, stands for the Washington Institute of Scientific and Educational Research. And they had reached out to us a number of months ago saying, hey, we're doing the summer camp for students and industry professionals looking to improve their quantum expertise. And so I believe they just wrapped up this three week quantum camp, quantum and AI camp, and Bob was invited to be a speaker. They were looking for ways for us to get involved, and we said we'd be happy to
sort of give a talk on how you can become quantum ready today. And so Bob was able to spread the good word about Open Quantum to hundred plus potential users, quantum enthusiasts, which is exciting. Bob, I don't know you have any other insights from the actual event.
I'm gonna call out two things. one of so you see, like there I am in the middle. You see the guy right to the left of me? Remember when we were still loud? Well, you actually I'm not sure you were here when this was happening. So when we first announced the quantum subnets, people were like, you know, doing their internet sleuthing and like internet stalking and trying to figure out who we were. And the leading theory was that we were Tom Finke, who's actually the guy on the left of me there.
So Tom Finke actually is is a friend. He's got a startup based out of based in California, ex BlackRock. He he was actually presenting right before me. And I joined and it was super nice actually. I joined the call and he was like, Bob's here. Is Bob presenting next? And they said a bunch of good things about quantum rings and open quantum. he does actually run a lot of his quantum workloads through Open Quantum for his startup. So super cool.
So believe it or not, we do still get emails to the support emails addressing us as Tom, CEO of qBitTensor Labs. So the the information is still circulating, even though I I feel like we've done a good job of debunking it.
Yeah, that well, you know, that's fine. I but like I've never thought about this, but like there's so much like automated crap email that you get when you start a company. Like companies should actually like put fake data out there and that way you'll immediately spot when something's like total BS if they get
Yeah, it it's funny 'cause you just had a quote on the Quantum Rings website. That was it. It wasn't like it i it was like a misinterpretation, misreading of someone reading the website wrong or some AI w reading the website wrong and then it just getting passed along like a game of telephone.
Well, that's gonna happen, man. So I've got I'm not I'm not gonna say anything about who what company or what human this is. But you know, like the AI companies, one of the big things that they need is like data, right, to train their stuff. And so there are a lot of companies out there that source data. And what's really interesting is people aren't talking about it, but people are using AI to generate the data that's training AI. Like, that is a very real thing that is happening. And so like I, you know.
People are you know, people I think like this infinite increase in AI is what's gonna happen. I think there's some chance that that's like plateaus because AI starts becoming like an echo chamber of AI generated data. Like every piece of content going out now is AI generated. Every website going out now is AI generated, you know? So yeah, super interesting. next up, ECC Shor's. this we were we were just talking about this. Omar, what is this what is this paper?
Yes. So this was, I believe, this week. Project 11 as far as we know, were the first ones to pick this up. They're pretty on top of picking up their quantum news. But there is a Chinese preprint out now that basically improved on Shor's algorithm for breaking ECC. So a couple months ago, Google published this big groundbreaking paper that said, Hey, you can effectively break Bitcoin with 1,400 logical qubits. And that sent everyone into a frenzy.
we saw challenges like the ecdsa.fail challenge where people were trying to improve on upon the algorithm, but it was essentially saying, hey, this is too dangerous to release. You know, someone could actually break ECC in the near future with this. And so that was for 1,400. This week it we find out eight hundred thirty five logical qubits are all you need. And so we've effectively halved the the number of logical qubits you need to run Shor's algorithm.
Which is a huge improvement in just a couple months. It is worth noting that all of these innovations do come at the expense of the circuit depth. So there's sort of two parameters here where you can increase the number of qubits or you can increase the number of gate operations. And both of those are challenges that quantum computer developers are trying to overcome. And so while we need far less qubits to run this algorithm,
It's not like you can go out with an eight hundred thirty-five qubit computer today and and run Shor's algorithm. But it is a step in the right direction and it shows just the rate at which things are innovating and improving. Well, another thing to note on the the gate problem is well, they did introduce a ton of what are called Toffoli gates. So these are like three qubit gate operations and they're very expensive, and so that's sort of the benchmark for measuring circuit complexity.
Yeah.
There were several experts that were commenting on this saying, Hey, they used way less Toffolis than I would have thought they would have needed. And so that's pretty cool as there are legitimate improvements both in qubits and circuit complexity that are sort of pushing us more towards cryptographic relevance a lot faster than people maybe would have expected.
Yeah, and I would say like in my mind, jury's still out on this one. I mean it might be really cool. In fact, maybe something it's an opportunity. I'm not gonna do it. You guys can go do it if you want to. would be if this if the ideas in this paper work, why didn't they just go take the top spot in that public challenge? Or why hasn't anybody else done it? Right? Yeah. So like I sort of like I mean, you know.
It's great question.
One of the one of the challenges Hayk was hitting on is like there is a lot of like hype and some of that hype is like really good and positive and some of that hype is actually like misleading and dangerous. And you know, seeing seeing this paper, I'm excited, but I'm very skeptical. and it also is making me realize that, you know, on the DARPA chart that I like to show, I need to stop representing
what quantum computers can do as vertical lines and start representing them as like boxes, you know, because there's like the error rates will basically dictate how many gate operations you can do. And that might be a more descriptive view, although much harder to represent visually.
Cool. yeah, community and Q and A. Omar, I'm just gonna let you take it 'cause we are over time.
For sure.
Yeah, so we had a couple Yeah. So this might be a great Ryan question. we had some questions come in on Telegram. and a l people are wondering when when is sort of the non crypto submission option gonna be available?
It is.
Yep. I mean I think we have a path. I think we have a path to that. It's really like probably a question of like when I stop dumping other things in front of that item on ShorShot's team's backlog. but yeah, Ryan, I don't mean to interject. You can answer that if you want.
Yeah, I'm ho we're hoping to have it in the next few weeks. We recognize it's it's, you know, very valuable to bring in other outside folks without having them deal with some of the complexities of Bittensor, I guess. So yeah, i i it's on the roadmap, it's hopefully gonna be really soon. yeah, that's all I have right now.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we have we've not forgotten, but it is a more challenging problem than you'd maybe expect, so
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, like at its core, it conflicts with the Stripe terms of service, which is why like so we actually have the initial implementation all done. It was actually done when we launched. Stripe just rejected us because they looked at our website and realized that we were in breach of their terms because the core terms say that you can't like accept payment as a entry fee for a contest that has a cash, a monetary prize. And basically once we we sort of didn't know that, to be honest. I I sort of overlooked it and just assumed we could just register a Stripe account. and then we started looking at alternative service providers. They all had similar terms, at least all of the legit ones that had a good user experience that, you know, sincere users would trust putting their credit card into. and so the way that we're going with that is to essentially
reframe the language on that quite a bit. So instead of paying a fee to enter a contest, you are bringing the compute, like you are bringing the compute credits to cover the cost of validating your solution. And you'll be able to do that either through the transfer of alpha, which we have today, which people are doing successfully, or you'll be able to do that through an integration with Open Quantum and use your Open Quantum credits for submission into into the challenge instead.
One of the other questions was can we expect to have quantum computers mining sixty three by the end of the year?
What else we got on here?
Hmm, we should have a deep dive on why this is exciting and why it's hard. we have so the more okay, so I'll I'll just give we should do a deeper dive session on this. But the challenge is factorization. Right now the RSA challenge is up at like 500 bit. That's what we're aiming for. Four eighty has been solved.
Biggest number factored by a physical quantum computer that's been published is not a 21-bit number, it's the number 21, right? like that sounds crazy. That is actually the state of how a quantum computer is. So the challenge is if you say factorize the number 21, I know the answer immediately, you know, off the top of my head, right? Like you don't even need a computer to come up with that.
And so being able to like indiscriminately say in a totally decentralized way that a quantum computer solved this and it came up with the right answer in a way that's not like some dumb disguised, you know, I I found them classically and encoded them into a quantum circuit, or I had a quantum circuit that just tried all values, you know, like in a way where you know that that's Shor's is hard to do it in a decentralized way without a human reviewer in the loop.
the code would not be that complicated if we didn't exist in an ecosystem where everybody was trying to exploit you. but in a way where you have to have like a totally decentralized validation, it proves challenging. so we have some theories on how we want to solve this. They get a little bit complicated. and so maybe we should spend a little bit of time kind of talking about that as like a forward looking roadmap thing. maybe the next qBitTensor Labs Live would be a good time for that.
Can we have it by the end of the year? Maybe. Maybe. Yeah. And you know, for sure, if we pivoted away from breaking RSA on a quantum computer and we introduced a different quantum challenge, then for sure, right? there are there are other things that we could do that wouldn't have the same problem.
But what else we got?
Cool. for the sake of time, we'll do one final question because I think we've touched on some of these earlier in the the live stream. But are there any plans to eventually use the submission data to develop products and services alongside the challenge partners?
You know, I would say yes. I mean like so if like say for example, one of the things Quantum Rings does is we run a simulator. So when a submission comes through, we definitely take a quick peek at it and look at if there's something like novel that we don't already have in the product offering and you know should potentially incorporate into the product offering.
And you know, when we do like if we do discover something like that, which we kind of think maybe would happen around the like level four, like level three, level four on peaked circuits, then you know, we might w we might find ourselves in like a licensing situation with qBitTensor Labs. so and then like I say, well BlueQubit is not using the IP that people are building to break the circuits.
They're certainly using the fact that the circuit has been broken to define the next generation of the circuit. And to some extent, they'll p they use the approach that was taken also, to sort of figure out which lever to pull in the next generations of the circuits to make them so that that approach won't work for the next one. And so, like I would say that there is already value that's coming off of this, but it's not yet in the place where people's products are being like developed as, you know.
incorporating any of the IP into it. Yeah. All right. And then let's hit sentiment. And we must be getting really close. but yeah, this is one more slide after this one. So yeah, hit it, Omar. What are your favorite items?
Yeah, I think I would have to point to the bottom right corner, which is a very fun, fun gif of Bob dancing with a quantum computer. it was animated in the real version, but we we just took a a screen clip, but I I appreciated that. I think the the joke there was that that was one of the two RSA 500 submissions we've seen thus far, and unfortunately does not pass, but it does it does win team favorite perhaps.
Okay.
Was it animated in the real version? I gotta go find a version of it.
Nice. Wait a minute, wait, wait, wait. What did they submit? They submitted the GIF? No, okay.
I think for the
No, no. It was it was that was the joke. that that was one of the two submissions. I I don't believe it was actually a submission, but
Nice. That would be like I mean, you know, somebody would be real baller to burn a you know b burn a tenth of a TAO to to to drop a meme. Cool.
Certainly. regardless of that, I think it's mostly just hype, which is fantastic to see. we did see a a longtime follower who has maybe moved on to other projects, but Quantum Tangerine, now Affinity, was talking about how quantum might have the strongest cult in the entire ecosystem, which very exciting to see. You know, we've we're thrilled to have the community we do, and we appreciate all the support.
I'm trying to think. There was also some concerns, not about us, but sort of just distressed about the the ecosystem. Change is happening very rapidly. And the quote was Bittensor is honestly kind of a mess right now. Everything feels so disorganized. And probably that is a byproduct of just the rate at which things are moving. But we have seen well, it maybe is a little disorganized and things tend to break. They are moving in the right direction, which is exciting.
Mm.
Yeah, yeah, if I were maybe to just take a minute on that one, I think it would be totally normal for people to feel uncomfortable with a rate of change that I mean, things are changing at a breakneck pace. And that should make people uncomfortable. Like I don't think comfort is the objective though. I think innovation is the objective. And if there's like one thing that guarantees not innovation, it's staying exactly the same. And so, yeah, while it might make you a little bit nauseous when things move fast.
I've found the change to be refreshing. A couple things broke and they patched them. I do I I I would advocate for a little bit more rigorous process, but one of the one of the best ways to to find out if something is a good idea or not is to try it. And to try it with your eyes wide open where you're willing to sort of like say, okay, I got that wrong and we're gonna try something different.
I mean you could have governance processes that end up with like massive amounts of debate. And you could just I mean, that's kind of what like Bitcoin looks like these days, right? nothing ever changes, everybody just sits and debates things and you don't try the next thing. we might be on the wrong side of the spectrum there where we're moving a little bit too fast, but I would rather be moving too fast and testing and having humility and changing back when things don't work right. and I've been, you know, really quite proud of
what Bittensor has done recently. I wish they didn't break those gas fees, but I'll take broken gas fees for, you know, two weeks in exchange for price-based emission models any day of the week. so yeah, I totally understand how you're feeling on that one. And I would say keep moving fast. let's find a way to run fast in a world that is very fast paced.
you know, that the AI ecosystem is moving incredibly fast. Bittensor is so innovative in that it has like this huge edge. It was the first mover really with decentralized AI. And I think if we can if we can keep running and seize the opportunity, this ecosystem should really be on fire. Also, you know, I'm not a crypto guy, but have you got like it does it feel like two hundred is like some sort of like
Like the community won't let it go below two hundred TAO. Like I feel like the whole rest of the crypto ecosystem has almost been like more, you know, at least in the last couple of months, has almost been like more volatile than TAO. I mean, I don't know. Maybe that's the d maybe that's mathematically incorrect. But I feel like I feel like TAO has shown like incredible strength, you know, in the current times.
Yeah, if we if we get through this into the next cycle, maybe you know, who knows where TAO will go. Not investment advice. All right. Whatever. It's time. we're we're we're we're we're clearly losing momentum. Thank you everybody for joining us today. thanks for staying with us on this journey. We'll look forward to talking to you guys again soon. See ya.