Some highly interesting developments around the team behind Qubitcoin $QTC Members of the Superquantum team, which created and actively manages Qubitcoin via the Foundation, recently won Lockheed Martin’s quantum-computing challenge at Vanderbilt’s inaugural 2026 Dry Dock event. Lockheed Martin’s quantum challenge was straightforward to understand but difficult to solve and the challenge was to use quantum computing to find the one thing that doesn’t belong. Examples included identifying a self-driving car amongst human-driven traffic or detecting a vehicle constructed from an unusual mixture of materials - essentially a high-powered anomaly-detection / pattern-recognition problem using quantum tools. The winner was Superquantum's/Qubitcoin's team - David Nizovsky, Daniil Shatokhin, Dmitrii Khitrin (Qubitcoin's Director), and, much to the community's surprise, a new face appeared among the ranks - Carter Steinberg. The attached clip is an excerpt from the winning speech conducted by Carter, who appears to be playing an increasingly visible business-facing role. He graduated in Economics from Vanderbilt and now works at Morgan Stanley . His background adds something rather different to a group otherwise dominated by quantum physics, engineering and computer science. Though not entirely relevant here, it is worth noting that Carter comes from good pedigree. His father is the esteemed David A Steinberg - founder of Zeta Group (AI market and intelligenc), co-founded in 2007 with former Apple CEO, John Sculley. Carter’s presentation (approx 4 months ago) also sets out what appears to be Superquantum’s target $1.5m pre-seed raise, designed to fund approximately 18 months. Note: Qubitcoin was fair launched at MIT in 2024 in a classroom of approximately 35 students. No pre-mine occurred and any QTC the team has was fairly mined. The presentation set out three key milestones: • Production-grade FTQC resource optimiser • Independent Shor / ECC-256 / RSA-2048 benchmarks • First paid hardware-OEM pilot What interested me most, though, was Superquantum’s “six layers of moat” slide. The strategy appears to comprise: 1 — Optimisation IP Building and protecting proprietary quantum-circuit optimisation/compression technology. 2 — Scheduler IP Developing architecture-aware scheduling and resource optimisation for fault-tolerant quantum computing. 3 — Hardware abstraction Creating a vendor-neutral layer capable of working across different quantum-hardware manufacturers rather than betting the company on one QPU architecture. 4 — Benchmark corpus Building an accumulating body of reproducible performance data that can compare quantum architectures and optimisation approaches. 5 — Validation workflows Providing reproducible evidence which hardware companies and customers can use when evaluating performance and future roadmaps. 6 — Qubitcoin's compute explicitly mentioned Perhaps the most interesting part for $QTC holders is Superquantum explicitly identifies Qubitcoin compute as part of its moat, with the network potentially generating circuit-optimisation data that can help improve future quantum compilers. That last point potentially gives Qubitcoin a much clearer place inside the wider Superquantum business moderl than simply being “a quantum cryptocurrency”. Qubitcoin is the only decentralized L1 network focusing on building real world quantum infrastructure and software, not another project trying to solve PQC on-chain. For transparency, as far as the community is aware none of this means those commercial moats or OEM relationships have already been achieved, but who knows.  What is clear is that this is a fundraising/business plan and a clear call for investment. It is encouraging to see the technology being framed around a route from research → optimisation IP → independent benchmarks → hardware integration → paying OEM customer, with Qubitcoin itself appearing inside that strategy. I got more👇

What IXS is building for the rest of 2026 and into 2027. Julian Kwan lays it out live in our Telegram on Tuesday. 🗓 Tue 27 Oct · 12:00 UTC / 20:00 SGT 📍 t.me/ixsfinance