QMS: the vision, the testnet, the road ahead

Okay, great. Chris, can you hear me okay? Yes, I can hear you, great. Okay, wonderful. Let's kick it off. We've got close to 200 users and members. So I think we'll just get straight into it. The QMS network testnet beta opened yesterday. So Chris, you're the CTO of everything. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself just to kick everything else? Yeah, sure. So I have a background in cryptography. In both quantum and classical cryptography, so I've done both in when I was in academia, spent about 15 years in academia. And then after a while, I moved on to industry to Web3. So I spent about five years working in blockchain companies, working closely with engineers, designing blockchains, producing blockchains, making sure everything worked well. Then I was lucky to come across this unique opportunity where I can actually combine both my quantum background and my classical cryptography background. So it is really a very exciting thing for me to be building this new chain. So it's kind of like a little bit of a meeting of both sides really. Yes, yes, yes, yes we is. Okay, so I guess that kind of begs the question, what does QMS have to do with quantum? Yes, that was the starting point of the reflection around QMS. You know, everyone is talking about quantum computers that are coming and shows out with a little break all the signature schemes. And we have to update everything before QD, before disaster. But that's only kind of seeing one side of the coin. Because quantum computers are sure they can be used by adversaries to break schemes. But what can they be used for by, you know, sort of the good people between quotes? What great stuff can you do? And how can blockchain profit from that? So that's what we were thinking about. And there's some research done into where the quantum computers could mine Bitcoin. And some interesting papers where the answer is no. In theory, yes, they can with Grover's algorithm. But when you actually crunch the numbers, you realize it's not going to work. The best hardware will probably remain classical hardware. Quantum computers won't get there. There's too much overhead to too many issues. It's not, it just doesn't work. I don't want to give you a little lecture now on the Grover's algorithm. But there's a paper actually linked to my white paper, which talks a bit about that. So quantum computers won't be helping there. You know, it won't be the next generation of hardware for Bitcoin, because we had CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, and we won't have quantum computers. So then we were wondering, well, what can we do with quantum computers? How can we have quantum computers profit to a blockchain to actually use their potential? And that's when we came across proof of useful work where the mind is just don't solve hashes for which the quantum computers aren't great. But solve some kind of optimization problems or there are many class of problems they can solve. And then, ta-da, quantum computers are great at doing that. So then we were like, OK, well, maybe we can build a blockchain where the work done by miners is something that quantum computers could be good at. So that was kind of like the starting point of our reflection. OK, so that's kind of, I wanted to ask you more about the definition on useful work. But I feel a little bit like you've already answered that and just gave the whole slew of really well, like a great wealth of information. But quantum computers are still very much a threat. So what is QMS doing about that? Well, yeah, we're doing lots about that too. That's somehow one of the special things about proof of useful work is underlying it is proof of work. And when you dive into the cryptography side, you realize that proof of work is naturally quantum secure. Proof of stake is not. So all the blockchains that are proof of stake, they have huge problems, they have long-world maps ahead of them to update the consensus layer. Because you have signatures in proof of stake. And these signatures will get broken. And the signatures for the post-quantum signatures, the ones which are secure against quantum computers, they are massive, they are huge. And if you want 100,000 validators to sign your block to say that it's valid, you have a problem. You could have multiple gigabytes just for the signatures. So with today's technology, proof of stake does not work. It cannot be made quantum proof. Not to be fast and efficient the way it is now. You could do it really slow and have a block in which you minutes that we know how to do. And no one is happy with that. So if you look at the road maps of these companies, these proof of stake companies, on the road map is always like, let's figure out how to do it. So we don't really know how to make proof of stake completely quantum secure right now. Whereas proof of work, I said, it's naturally quantum secure because there are no signatures. It is hashing. And you know that the hashing is resistant to quantum computers. So what is really missing is for things like Bitcoin is the execution there where they need to just change the signatures on the transactions, which are maybe getting into a bit later. So proof of use of work to come back what we're doing, it is based on proof of work. So it is also naturally secure against quantum computers. So we already have kind of like from the start a secure consensus layer, which is great. We have a finalization layer on top. Which at the beginning will be centralized to kind of start off in an easy way. So we'll have one post quantum signature on it, which then will also get post-com security and the finalization layer. And then the execution layer that will be sort of down the road map, we're starting with an EVM execution there. So we're just taking it from Ethereum. It's Ethereum compatible. It won't have the post-com signatures on day one because we want everything to work. We want bridges to work. We want wallets to work. And quantum computers aren't there yet. So we've decided to favor compatibility with the existing infrastructure over security for what we're going to need in a few years. And over these next couple of years, we're going to be migrating the execution layer to post-com signatures. And that is the sort of the easy part between quotes, which we actually know how to do. OK. The testnet beta opened up yesterday. Yeah. So can you dive in a little bit more onto that? Bit of a milestone. So congratulations. So what's been released so far? Has the reception been? Reception has been great. We've had seen lots of activity in the past 24 hours. I think we had like 500 transactions per minute last time we checked. So all that is very, very exciting. So what we are releasing, we're calling it testing it to beta because it isn't feature complete. We're missing many things to be a proper blockchain. For example, we can't open mining at this point because we don't have difficulty adjustment algorithm. That's something which is important in any proof of work blockchain. When new miners join, you have to increase the difficulty so that you keep the block rate at the constant speed. And there are a few pieces like that, which are missing at this point. So I'm running all the miners ourselves because if you want some kind of demo, the people can actually use. And we wanted to already release it because our strategy is kind of to release things in steps. So instead of being a secret project which works for three years and then releases the final product, our strategy is to release step by step. Each time we have something that the community can use, we push it out there and we let you guys try it out and use it. There are many reasons for doing that. One is we get a very fast feedback loop. Is the product really aligned with what the market wants? And this allows us to sort of change and align much faster with the market than then what happens if you kind of do everything in secret for many years. So pushing it out there, people can test it. If you can get feedback, we can talk to investors, we can talk to clients, we can see what they want, what new features they think are more important. And then we can adapt our roadmap and have the next release and the next release and that's how we're kind of planning it. OK. Yeah. If someone wanted to just get in there and try it out today, where should they start? How can they report bugs and for them to feed their feedback? What's the best way for them to go about that? So to start, we have documentation pages. So you can go on our website and you can look at the docs. And there are also various articles which have been released. So if you just follow us on social media, you'll find links to the articles. There are walkthroughs, nice graphics. So it tells you how to start, how to connect to Wallets, how to use it. We have the first app that has been built on our chain is a DEX. So we're very happy that that could be aligned with the release of TestNet. So you can go and test that out, see how that works, create a pool, trade stuff. So this is TestNet. Nothing has any value. All the tokens have no real monetary value. So there's a forset to get tokens. Yeah, we had a bit of issues with our forset. Apparently someone turned on a bot which was just hammering our forset. And then we'll use a difficulty getting the tokens. So this morning we switched on some anti-bots measures, which forced you to do some work to get the tokens. So yeah, we have a forset, get tokens, try it out. It's an EVM compatible chain. So it should work very similarly to all the other chains that you have. If you've launched a smart contract, another chain, trying to pop it over to our chain, launch it, see if it works. We would love to get feedback. And the best way to get feedback is on Discord. So we have a very active Discord server. We have, I think, more than 10,000 people. So yeah, just join Discord. Tell us how things are going, give us feedback. We'd appreciate all of that. OK. So after beta, so what happens? What's in the roadmap? What are we looking forward to? So the next thing is what's trying to... Really, yes, it's a way of asking, you know, like, what are you working on now? Yeah, right now. So we have the core blockchain team that's working on features of the core blockchain. So we have the finalization there. We're trying to finish that. Difficulty adjustment algorithm, the whole tokenomics. So right now, testnet, our mine is not getting paid. I mean, it's fake tokens anyway, but you don't have the code in place to pay minus for the work. So that's the next thing we're doing. And we have an ecosystem team that's working on the marketplace for the useful work. So that's something I didn't get around to saying before. But you know, where useful work chain, which means that our mine is solved some kind of optimization problems. And the idea underlying that is that we would have clients that actually care about the answers. Because the hash is doing Bitcoin. The only purpose is securing the chain. No one cares about the hash is of the values other than securing the chain. Whereas if at the same time you could do work, so it's a proof of work, you prove that you've done the work, but someone actually cares about your solution you found. That's great. It's a second revenue stream for the miners. So right now in the testnet beta, the miners are just producing random problems themselves. The next stage is to connect it to a marketplace where clients can actually come and propose problems and say, hey, I'd like this you to solve this problem for me. So our first release will be portfolio optimization. So we'll have a user interface where user can select tokens or assets they want to invest in, say, how much they want to invest, what kind of risk they want, give a whole bunch of parameters. And then that will be compiled into a problem which is sent to the miners. And then the miners can pick it off the marketplace, solve the problem, and then give the answer back to the users. So that is nothing place yet. It's one of the things we're working on. And I don't know if it'll be in the next release, probably the one after because that's a bit more tricky. We need to test it carefully. Yeah, we have other things in the pipeline like post-cognom signatures, like a pre-compile to be added to smart contracts. That's probably even further down the pipeline. So we have a very long list of things we'd love to do. And based on the feedback we get, you might swap the order of the things on our to-do list, depending on what people want the most. OK. OK, great. I guess also in terms of, you know, brings us to the next part of what do people want the most is we have heard from the community. We put it out there. And we got a slew of questions back. There were quite a lot. So we've only been able to select a few because we're tied on time. But we will put out content afterwards that answers more of the questions from the community. One of the main themes that came here on these questions was, you know, what are the main things you want to prove with TestNet? And what would be Canada's success with that? Yeah. So, you know, what's nice about being in tech is we're kind of happy, you know, might have what happens. You break our chain, we're happy because we found a bug. Or a chain once perfectly, we're happy because we've just demonstrated we have a great chain. So we can really get positive out of all all sides of this. I mentioned earlier the issue with the first set, which was for us was an interesting thing to learn because there's really no point in hitting our first set with a bot. What you want to do with fake tokens on the TestNet chain? There's really absolutely no point to it. But somehow someone did it. So we always think of people trying to bring your chain down as being, you know, trying to sort of make money. And you have to be really careful on mainnet where there's like lots of real money. But no, people will just do random things on your TestNet. And for us, this is a great learning curve. So, yeah. So that's one thing we learned in the past 24 hours. We also learned that our chain holds up no problem with the load of 500 transactions per minute. Bigs, we did absolutely no load testing before releasing that. So you were like, OK, we have a chain. Let's just release it and let people test it and see what happens. Because this is what TestNet is for. You know, you guys are out there and you're testing our chain. And we had 500 transactions per second. Absolutely no problem. So we're really happy about that. We learned that that part, you know, worked, worked great. So a lot of it is, yeah. A lot of it is really just learning seeing what works, what doesn't work, and getting feedback. Also just proving, you know, where a real team with a real product, because it's kind of sad. But nowadays with AI, you can produce so many things and you can pretend to have a good product. And then you'll kind of break at the end, you know, in the last step because you don't have a real team behind it launching it. So that's also where you're going.