Overview

What is Qubic?

Qubic is an innovative cryptocurrency platform founded by Come-from-Beyond (Sergey Ivancheglo, founder of IOTA and NXT) and launched in the second quarter of 2022. Qubic enables high‑speed, fee‑less transactions and scalable AI‑driven solutions through a quorum‑based protocol. It supports dApps (decentralized applications) and smart contracts, catering to various industry challenges such as enhancing network resilience, reducing single points of failure, and promoting trust and collaboration. The platform emphasizes decentralization, security, and efficiency, using distributed ledger technology to maintain the integrity and immutability of transaction records.

What Makes Qubic Unique?

How does Qubic work?

The Qubic network is driven by 676 computors/validators, high‑performance hardware machines that run the Qubic protocol directly on bare metal to achieve optimal performance. These computing devices communicate with oracles, execute smart contracts rapidly, secure the blockchain, handle fee‑less transactions, and receive $QUBIC‑based rewards based on network performance.

Each computor requires substantial mining support (each computor may have thousands of miners participating, and each computor can operate as a mining pool) to maintain a top‑676 ranking. Miners maximize the use of mining energy through AI training tasks. Miners themselves do not receive direct payment for AI training work; instead, computors/mining pool operators reward miners based on the performance of their AI training tasks.

What problems does Qubic solve?

In addressing numerous challenges, Qubic adopts a series of innovative measures. First, all transactions on the Qubic protocol are fee‑less, which not only improves user experience but also provides vast prospects for applications such as NFTs, tokens, and dApps.

Second, Qubic is praised as one of the few protocols capable of seamlessly integrating smart contracts with oracles, enhancing smart contract functionality by providing real‑world information in real time. Its innovative quorum protocol ensures that every decision is based on majority consensus, enabling every transaction and smart contract execution to reach finality.

Moreover, in the field of mining technology, Qubic has found an effective way to reduce energy waste by using computational power to improve the training efficiency of ANN (Artificial Neural Networks). This strategy effectively harnesses the network’s vast resources, advancing the field of machine learning while alleviating the energy waste associated with traditional mining activities.

What is Qubic’s consensus protocol?

Qubic adopts a unique consensus protocol called the quorum protocol. Notably, Qubic does not operate like traditional blockchains; when creating a new tick (similar to a block in conventional blockchains), mining is not required. Even if all mining operations cease entirely, new ticks will continue to be generated without interruption. However, without mining, it becomes impossible to determine the most performant computor for the next epoch.

To create a new tick, an entity called a “tick validator” must broadcast a proposal for a new tick. The 676 computors send encrypted signed votes that include hashes of the internal Qubic network state. Once the new tick achieves a 2/3 majority quorum consensus, it can be accepted. If the tick validator does not announce a new vote, an empty tick is produced. In this case, the tick data is all zeros, and its hash is also all zeros, yet a quorum vote on the empty tick is still required.

If the quorum vote count cannot be reached, Qubic halts new tick generation. Continuous tick generation indicates that most computors are fully synchronized with the Qubic network state. Computors require substantial mining to maintain their positions. Therefore, mining activity in Qubic is not to produce the next block but to help computors secure one of the coveted computor seats, as only 676 computors receive rewards. Within each epoch, candidates can receive miner support and compete with other computors for one of the seats, and up to 225 computors may lose their positions each cycle. After a halving, a total of 450 billion $QUBIC is distributed to the 676 computors, calculated based on their work performance.

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