D-Wave Quantum Unit Wins Most Quip Blocks but Runs Only Five Minutes Daily

A D-Wave Advantage2 quantum processing unit is participating in the Quip experimental blockchain network and winning 92 percent of the blocks on which it competes. The Quip network began running in April. Its proof-of-work calculation is an optimization problem related to scheduling deliveries or assembling investment portfolios.

Most participating computers are conventional machines, but the network also includes the Advantage2 unit built by D-Wave Quantum. Advantage2 is available to the Quip network for about 5 minutes each day. It competes on around one-third of the blocks added to the network yet wins 92 percent of those blocks, according to Colton Dillion of Postquant Labs.

5 watts of electrical power on average to win a block. Conventional computers competing on Quip use 1334 watts on average to win a block. Dillion says Advantage2 uses approximately 100 times less electrical power than conventional computers to win a block.

A conventional computer able to win blocks more often against Advantage2 would require 300 times Advantage2’s power, Dillion estimates. The Quip network was built to be safe against attacks from adversarial quantum computers.

“For me, quantum computing is energy-efficient computing for solving hard computational problems,” Baratz said. In 2024 D-Wave claimed one of its quantum computers solved a problem impossible for conventional supercomputers. A different research team later performed a similar computation on a normal laptop.

Dillion said the decentralized nature of the blockchain allows others to test the results themselves. “It’s exactly why it is a blockchain. People who don’t believe our results can join the network and try it for themselves,” he said.