Startup lets researchers mine blockchain tasks on a quantum computer for the first time
Built with advice and hardware access from D-Wave, the testnet has drawn 13,000 sign-ups and early work from six research teams, but remains an experimental environment rather than a live mainnet.
Built with advice and hardware access from D-Wave, the testnet has drawn 13,000 sign-ups and early work from six research teams, but remains an experimental environment rather than a live mainnet.
Updated Apr 4, 2026, 9:09 a.m. Published Apr 2, 2026, 12:00 p.m.
Make preferred on
Most of the crypto industry spent this week processing Google's paper on how quantum computers could break blockchain encryption. One startup is asking a different question — whether quantum hardware can make blockchains better.
Postquant Labs, which is building the world's shared quantum computer, Quip.Network announced Wednesday the launch of what it calls the first publicly available quantum classical blockchain testnet, where quantum computers and legacy technology work side by side to solve problems.
Quantum computers use the physics of subatomic particles to test many possible solutions simultaneously rather than checking them one by one, which makes them fundamentally different from even the fastest conventional supercomputers, which are just very fast versions of the same step-by-step approach.
The testnet has already attracted 13,000 signups from researchers at MIT, Stanford, and universities around the world, according to the press release shared with CoinDesk. Out of these, six teams have submitted serious computational work so far.
Postquant Labs's attempt to investigate how quantum processors can improve blockchain performance stands in contrast to most blockchain developers who see quantum as a threat.
The threat perception has increased multifold after Google published a paper on Monday which found that breaking bitcoin's cryptographic defenses would require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, roughly a 20-fold reduction from prior estimates
Note, however, that Postquant Labs' testnet is a testing environment, not a live, final product. It's where researchers experiment before anything goes into production.
The testnet has been built in consultation with D-Wave Quantum Inc, a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services.
"From a technical perspective, the hybrid design of the testnet is particularly interesting. Participants can contribute using QPUs, CPUs and GPUs, creating a shared environment to evaluate how different compute models perform side by side," Dr. Trevor Lanting, chief development officer, D-Wave, told CoinDesk.
"This creates an environment to help better understand how quantum approaches compare with classical methods in a blockchain setting, and where they may provide meaningful benefits such as improved energy efficiency or security," he added.
Developers and researchers can earn QUIP tokens by solving complex mathematical problems using quantum machines, GPUs or regular CPUs. QUIP is meant to be a utility token that can be exchanged for computation resources provided by quantum and classical miners on the network.
If quantum computers can actually outperform regular computers on blockchain tasks — solving problems faster, using less energy, and delivering better results — then distributed ledger could become way more useful for real business applications, not just crypto trading.
"Today, annealing quantum computers are starting to show performance advantages on useful optimization applications across logistics, manufacturing, and beyond, often delivering better results, faster, and at lower energy cost than classical-only solutions," said Colton Dillion, CEO and co-founder of Postquant Labs.
"Our goal is to make this quantum advantage accessible across a blockchain network," Dillion added.
As of now, that's a big "if." This testnet needs to prove whether the quantum advantage is real or just marketing.
"Mainnet launch will depend entirely on the performance of testnet, but we are eager to launch as soon as we have proven the capabilities of the network to solve real-world problems, and shown quantum demand and supply both exist on either side of the market," Postquant Labs told CoinDesk.
Do quantum computers exist?
Yes, they do, but not the sci-fi version that breaks Bitcoin and other blockchains or hacks into banks and major financial institutions.
D-Wave's machines are not the quantum computers in Google's paper. They are annealing systems, specialized hardware for optimization problems like route planning and resource allocation.
They cannot run Shor's algorithm, cannot break encryption, and cannot do anything the Google paper describes. They are well-suited for a class of optimization and simulation problems, including the type Quip.Network is testing" would address our concern.
Postquant is using D-Wave's Advantage2 annealing quantum computer through the company's Leap cloud service.
In early internal tests, Postquant says D-Wave's Advantage2 system beat out 80 H100 GPUs and 480 CPU cores on solution quality, time-to-solution, and energy efficiency for these specific optimization problems.
Those results have not been independently verified or published. Until they are, the claim is the company's alone.
What role does D-Wave play?
D-Wave is not a full partner or investor. and has only advised Quip Network on the development of the testnet" and is "providing access to the Advantage2 system and consultation on the development of the testnet."
Importantly, D-Wave has not independently endorsed the overall technical architecture — their involvement is limited to providing hardware access and consultation.
More For You
Most crypto privacy models weaken as blockchain data grows. Encryption-based models like Zcash strengthen. CoinDesk Research maps the five privacy approaches and examines the widening gap.
Why it matters:
As blockchain adoption scales, the metadata available to machine learning models scales with it. Obfuscation-based privacy approaches are structurally degrading as a result. This report provides a comprehensive comparison of all five major crypto privacy architectures and a framework for evaluating which models remain durable as AI capabilities improve.
View Full Report
More For You
Kwasi Kwarteng reflects on current UK market turmoil, fiscal “doom loop,” and his move into bitcoin with Stack BTC.
What to know:
- Kwasi Kwarteng served as UK chancellor for just weeks in September 2022, capping a 14-year political career that included senior Cabinet roles.
- Kwarteng said the mini-budget was “very, very rushed,” and its rollout sent gilt yields sharply higher while exposing the UK’s LDI pension crisis.
- Kwarteng is now involved with...
Read full story
Sign in to highlight and annotate this article
Conversation starters
Daily AI Digest
Get the top 5 AI stories delivered to your inbox every morning.
More about
startupresearch
Approximation Algorithms for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems: A Comprehensive Survey
arXiv:2306.01826v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) is a core NP-hard problem in the field of combinatorial optimization. It aims to plan optimal routes for a fleet of vehicles with uniform capacity, serving a set of customers with specific demands from a single depot, while minimizing the total travel distance. Due to its extensive applications in logistics, distribution, and supply chain management, CVRP has attracted significant research attention. Theoretically, the problem has been proven to be APX-hard, and in general metric spaces, approximate solutions of arbitrary precision cannot be obtained unless P=NP. These inherent complexities highlight the importance of developing approximation algorithms-finding solutions with provable perform
Bayesian Neural Networks: An Introduction and Survey
arXiv:2006.12024v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural Networks (NNs) have provided state-of-the-art results for many challenging machine learning tasks such as detection, regression and classification across the domains of computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing. Despite their success, they are often implemented in a frequentist scheme, meaning they are unable to reason about uncertainty in their predictions. This article introduces Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) and the seminal research regarding their implementation. Different approximate inference methods are compared, and used to highlight where future research can improve on current methods.
Generative models for decision-making under distributional shift
arXiv:2604.04342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many data-driven decision problems are formulated using a nominal distribution estimated from historical data, while performance is ultimately determined by a deployment distribution that may be shifted, context-dependent, partially observed, or stress-induced. This tutorial presents modern generative models, particularly flow- and score-based methods, as mathematical tools for constructing decision-relevant distributions. From an operations research perspective, their primary value lies not in unconstrained sample synthesis but in representing and transforming distributions through transport maps, velocity fields, score fields, and guided stochastic dynamics. We present a unified framework based on pushforward maps, continuity, Fokker-Plan
Knowledge Map
Connected Articles — Knowledge Graph
This article is connected to other articles through shared AI topics and tags.
More in Products
AgenticFlict: A Large-Scale Dataset of Merge Conflicts in AI Coding Agent Pull Requests on GitHub
arXiv:2604.03551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Software Engineering 3.0 marks a paradigm shift in software development, in which AI coding agents are no longer just assistive tools but active contributors. While prior empirical studies have examined productivity gains and acceptance patterns in AI-assisted development, the challenges associated with integrating agent-generated contributions remain less understood. In particular, merge conflicts, a fundamental aspect of collaborative software development, remain underexplored in this context. In this paper, we present AgenticFlict, a large-scale dataset of textual merge conflicts in AI coding agent pull requests (Agentic PRs). The dataset comprises 142K+ Agentic PRs collected from 59K+ repositories, of which 107K+ are successfully processe
Trace-Guided Synthesis of Effectful Test Generators
arXiv:2604.04345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Several recently proposed program logics have incorporated notions of underapproximation into their design, enabling them to reason about reachability rather than safety. In this paper, we explore how similar ideas can be integrated into an expressive type and effect system. We use the resulting underapproximate type specifications to guide the synthesis of test generators that probe the behavior of effectful black-box systems. A key novelty of our type language is its ability to capture underapproximate behaviors of effectful operations using symbolic traces that expose latent data and control dependencies, constraints that must be preserved by the test sequences the generator outputs. We implement this approach in a tool called Clouseau, an
Agentic Code Optimization via Compiler-LLM Cooperation
arXiv:2604.04238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating performant executables from high level languages is critical to software performance across a wide range of domains. Modern compilers perform this task by passing code through a series of well-studied optimizations at progressively lower levels of abstraction, but may miss optimization opportunities that require high-level reasoning about a program's purpose. Recent work has proposed using LLMs to fill this gap. While LLMs can achieve large speedups on some programs, they frequently generate code that is incorrect. In this work, we propose a method to balance the correctness of conventional compiler optimizations with the ``creativity'' of LLM-based code generation: compiler-LLM cooperation. Our approach integrates existing compile
Discussion
Sign in to join the discussion
No comments yet — be the first to share your thoughts!