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Open-source distributed quantum compute network

Details

External ID
47614801
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Open-source distributed quantum compute network
Website domain
quip.network
Launched
April 2, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
11
Upvotes percentile
0.62146529562982
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hey HN. I'm Colton (YC S21, ex-Acorns), one of the founders of Postquant Labs. My cofounder Richard is a cryptographer out of Draper Labs and DARPA. We're building Quip.Network, the first distributed quantum compute network. We just opened our testnet and wanted to share it here.The basic problem: quantum hardware is here and already competitive on certain optimization problems, but for most people, there's no way to access it. The machines cost millions and the hardware and research are gated by the companies who own them.Also, quantum providers regularly have machines sitting idle because demand isn't consistent, and that's a problem because many architectures need to be cooled near absolute zero and can't just be turned off. There's currently no equivalent of spinning up an on-demand cloud instance for quantum compute.So we're building one. Quip.Network is a spot clearinghouse and marketplace where quantum providers contribute excess capacity, developers deploy their best solvers to an open library, and anyone can submit a workload and get a result without needing to own or understand the hardware. Classical operators (CPUs, GPUs, TPUs) can also participate in solving and verifying.The first quantum subnet was built in close collaboration with D-Wave, the world's leading quantum computing company. It focuses on optimization problems, the kind that appear across finance, logistics, and manufacturing. It runs on annealing QPUs and has demonstrated competitive performance on solution quality, speed, and energy cost relative to classical computing approaches. The mining protocol is designed around these benchmarks, so participants compete to find better solutions.We had about 13,000 signups before launch. The codebase is fully open source because we think quantum advantage should be a verifiable result, not a marketing claim. We want people running nodes, challenging our implementations, and submitting proofs of work optimized for their own hardware.Unlike GPU clusters where one more processor is a linear improvement, the value of adding just one more QPU to your cluster is exponential. It won't be enough to be just AWS, GCP, or IBM. To solve the toughest problems, we'll want to connect together every processor on Earth and have them operate as one giant quantum system. That's why we think a distributed system is the right approach, and that's why our mission is to build the worldwide quantum computer.Happy to answer anything!Docs: quip.gitbook.io/docs | GitHub: github.com/quipnetwork

Enrichment

Theme
scientific computing and deep tech tools
Vertical
Energy & climate
Function
Model & infra
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Hobby / open-source project
Normalized one-liner
distributed quantum computing network
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No Building a distributed quantum computing network and quantum smart contract runtime involves cutting-edge quantum hardware abstraction and cryptographic research.

What it would actually take: This platform requires quantum circuit compilation tools (Qiskit/Cirq interfaces), distributed consensus mechanisms, and hardware abstraction layers capable of interfacing directly with physical QPUs and cryogenic controllers. The hard parts include quantum error mitigation, distributed quantum scheduling, and secure multi-party verification protocols for quantum execution. It demands specialized quantum information scientists, advanced cryptographers, and specialized distributed systems engineers.

Discussion

10 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: Classical communication channels cannot provide quantum speedup over single quantum computers, Distributed quantum computers not yet in broad distribution today, Requires quantum channels (not classical) for actual quantum speedup

Feature requests: Quantum channel connections between distributed processors, Quantum repeaters and interconnects for ubiquitous distribution

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 156 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #65 of 157 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 154 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a model & infra tool for Fintech yet.