Last September, we published quantumpunks.org, laying out the quantum punk thesis.
Over the last four months, we’ve watched this effort nucleating from an idea into an early community. It’s been particularly rewarding to see the thesis getting some early validation by both quantum cryptography researchers and blockchain builders welcoming quantum punks with open arms.
Some of the key community milestones so far:
- The first quantum punk event at devcon 7 (see recordings here) gathered more than 120 attendees, with a total of 650 (!!) who applied, far exceeding our expectations of interest from the blockchain crowd.
- NeverLocal became the first quantum punk company to raise venture funding, showing early appetite from investors for quantum punk projects.
- VeriQloud became the first quantum cryptography company to join the movement, marking an early step in the merging between quantum and blockchain communities.
- the ‘quantumpunks study club’ was started, and is now a small but mighty groupchat of quantum punks discussing quantum papers and applications together.
While this is still very early days, we celebrate these steps from zero to one. Shoutout to everyone who joined the event in Bangkok, signed up for updates, read the manifesto, and who started calling themselves ‘quantum punk’!
Looking ahead to 2025 there are three items we Deep Quantum commit to pushing forward as members of the Quantum Punk community:
- A main Quantum Punk event: the launch of a yearly, hybrid academic-industry event for the quantum punk community to meet, and to foster cross-disciplinary interactions between hardware, software, quantum, cryptography, blockchain people.
- A stack for deploying early quantum cryptographic protocols: the existence of an end-to-end open-source stack for people to easily design and deploy quantum cryptography applications using BB84 states in live systems.
- A roadmap: a roadmap detailing how we can get several quantum cryptography applications to practicality, and surfacing the key problems between here and there for us all to work on.
These are items we’ll commit funding, effort and time to in order to help them see the light of day. We want to help and collaborate with any of you already working on this, or interested in working together!
Cheers
Nico & Alex ⚛️
: to avoid any confusion — ‘Quantum Punk’ is not owned, it is not a company nor a foundation, it is simply a word we use to describe the community, and that you can use too. Anyone can join the community and contribute. As an analogy, Quantum Punk is the network and Deep Quantum is a node in the network, alongside other nodes such as NeverLocal and VeriQloud.
About us
Deep Quantum: We are a quantumpunk r&d group working on accelerating quantum tech and the value it will create for the world. We conduct research, build prototypes, invest early-stage checks, coordinate grants, and promote cross-disciplinary collaboration in the field.