- ✓Quip Network sponsored Quantum.Tech World 2026, which drew more than 1,000 attendees to Encore Boston Harbor on June 25 and 26.
- ✓We ran a live trading competition, where booth visitors built a trading agent and every portfolio rebalance became a real job on the network.
- ✓CEO Colton Dillion gave a talk on Quip Network as the worldwide quantum computer, an overview of the project and what we’re building toward.
- ✓We also hosted Rare Qubits, an after-hours reception that drew a packed room of industry professionals from across the world.
Quantum.Tech World, one of the premier quantum events in the United States, ran its 2026 edition in Boston on June 25 and 26. Quip Network sponsored it, and a group of us staffed a booth both days, the largest presence we’ve brought to an event so far.
Every other conference we’ve taken part in this year has been a crypto event, so this was the first time we were in a room that wasn’t already crypto-native.
More than 1,000 attendees came in from quantum computing, AI, high-performance computing, cybersecurity, finance, pharma, and government, and the sponsor list reflected that range: D-Wave, IBM, IonQ, QuEra, QuSecure, Fujitsu, and PwC were all there.
Throughout the event we talked with quantum hardware providers and the people who want compute time on their machines, introducing them to Quip Network, a decentralized marketplace where providers list spare capacity on their quantum processing units (QPUs), consumers submit workloads and pay for what they use, and the network routes, verifies, and settles the work.
Build a quantum trading agent, win money
The centerpiece of the booth was a trading competition where anyone could build an agent, put it on the leaderboard, and win real money. We built it as a proof of concept, the fastest way to show the testnet working in public, where a workload comes in, the network routes it to quantum hardware, and a usable answer comes back in a fraction of a second.
Building an agent took a couple of minutes. Attendees picked from a 28-asset universe of crypto and frontier tech, set their risk and rebalance preferences, and launched with a $10,000 virtual bankroll.
From there, every rebalance became a job on Quip Network. Each job came down to choosing which of those assets to actually hold, and that was the computationally hard part. The network sent it to two solvers at once, simulated annealing on an ordinary CPU and a D-Wave Advantage quantum annealer. Everything after that choice was identical for both, so the only difference was the assets each one picked, and the better portfolio won the job.
Every agent's profit and loss updated live on a public leaderboard, and people came back through both days to retune their strategy and check their rank. Across every head-to-head race, the classical solver never once came back with a better portfolio than the quantum one. Most races were ties, and whenever the two disagreed, the quantum answer was the better one.
Note that this is a comparison of the two solver configurations we deployed, not a quantum-advantage claim. The full method and the numbers behind it are going in a follow-up technical post.
The winning portfolio rose 4.05% over the two days. Prizes were paid in USDC. Congrats to the three agents at the top of the leaderboard when the competition closed:
First place: David Bao ($500)
Second place: Prakash ($250)
Third place: Brian Song ($100)
The game brought a constant stream of people to the booth. People who came for the leaderboard stayed to ask how the routing, verification, and settlement actually work, and those conversations took up most of our time.
Rare Qubits at the Rare Lounge
On the first evening we hosted Rare Qubits, an after-hours reception inside Encore Boston Harbor. We had some fun with the menu, a quantum-themed drink list where every name was a physics joke. One was named Hofstadter’s Butterfly, after the fractal our logo comes from. The room filled early and stayed full, and a lot of the conversations that started at the booth carried on there for hours. Thanks to everyone who came by.
Final thoughts
We were lucky to be right next to D-Wave. Their team sent people our way all event, curious about what we were building on their hardware and how quantum and blockchain fit together.
Several of us have spent close to a decade building in crypto, and this event had the same feel as the ones we went to in those early years, plenty of energy, and still fairly intimate.
A lot of the people who stopped by were new to quantum entirely, some scoping it out professionally and some working on it academically, and there were more students and faculty in the room than we expected. Seeing that many newcomers is what made it feel early, and that was the main thing we took away from two days in Boston.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by to check us out and ask questions, and to everyone who built an agent and kept the leaderboard competitive right up to the close! We’ll be sharing the technical write-up of the trading game soon, covering the algorithm and the full two days of results. Join the community and check it out when it gets published.
Links
→ Website: quip.network
→ Docs: quip.gitbook.io/docs
→ GitHub: github.com/quipnetwork
→ Discord: discord.gg/quipnetwork
→ Telegram: t.me/quipnetwork
→ X: @quipnetwork
