QRL Monthly, December 2023

Iain Wood, the new operational manager, takes on the strategic leadership goals including community growth and finalizing the project’s roadmap. QRL Zond enters final work before a public beta-testnet is released

technical

9th January 2024

Highlights

QRL: The Next Chapter

The QRL project has appointed Iain Wood as its new operational manager, entrusting him with strategic goals such as community growth and finalizing the project’s roadmap. The original founder, Peter Waterland, reflects on the journey, expressing excitement for QRL’s future while transitioning to an administrative role in the latest blog post. Learn more about these developments

Iain Wood is a GP with extensive experience in pre-hospital medicine who served in the British military for almost 25 years. He went from combat operations to advising a NATO Commander in Italy to becoming the operational manager of QRL, which is establishing itself as a global hub for distributed ledger technology.

QRL Zond Development

In the recent updates, several improvements and adjustments have been made to enhance the functionality of the system.

The P2P handshake process has been enhanced with additional logging. Changes have been implemented in the zond-contract-example, utilizing new web3.js and cryptography libraries. Successful testing of smart contract deployment, on-chain and off-chain calls has been accomplished.

Work on unit tests for the beacon-client is ongoing. A significant fix addressed a peer pruning issue preventing new nodes with the same IP from connecting to bootstrap nodes. Additionally, testing for the API to manage trusted peers has been conducted. Parameters, such as minimum staking amount, epoch size, and block timing, have been updated, with corresponding code modifications.

Various other parameter changes are still in progress. Several bug fixes have been made, including resolving API path and staking-deposit-cli issues. The web3.js library has been updated to align with the latest changes. A milestone has been reached with the Private Testnet surpassing 100,000 blocks without issues. The private testnet has been released with a reduced sync committee size of 16. Further adjustments to parameters and ongoing work on unit tests for the beacon client are part of the current development focus.

Quantum News

Encryption upgrade in 2024 will keep data safe from quantum computers

On 31 Dec 2023: The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been working on standardizing post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms since 2012.

Out of 82 submitted algorithms, NIST has shortlisted four, with a final decision expected in 2024 after a public consultation period.

Albrecht anticipates nation-state adversaries having quantum computers before criminal gangs, making the practical implementation of quantum computers for encryption cracking a distant possibility. - newscientist.com

Europe Aims for Leadership Role in Quantum Computing

On 26 Dec 2023: The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is investing €100 million in a project to establish the first European quantum computers at six sites within the EU. With equal funding from the EU and 17 participating countries, the initiative aims to address real-world challenges in materials development, drug discovery, weather forecasting, transportation, and more. Notable companies like Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and Qilimanjaro are playing significant roles, showcasing advancements in quantum computing technology. The European commitment to quantum milestones positions the region as a key player in the evolving quantum era, emphasizing the importance of vigilance and international cooperation in the face of global security concerns. - eetimes.com

Google wants to solve tricky physics problems with quantum computers

On 19 Dec 2023: Ryan Babbush and his colleagues at Google have developed an algorithm to translate a large range of classical problems so that they can be run on quantum computers. “There's an important class of classical systems in which we can get an exponential speed-up in simulating the dynamics of those systems on a quantum computer,” says Babbush.

Babbush and his team realised that the mathematics of these classical spring systems, however complex, could always be expressed as a version of the Schrödinger equation, which describes how any quantum system changes through time.

Babbush and his team haven't calculated how many qubits would be needed to run their algorithm, but it is likely to be beyond today's machines. However, it could be one of the first applications that a “relatively modest” error-corrected quantum computer is used for, says Babbush. - newscientist.com

DARPA program breakthrough promises more practical quantum computers

On 11 Dec 2023: The DARPA program ONISQ has achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing by creating the world's first quantum circuit with logical quantum bits (qubits).

Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize various fields by exploiting quantum effects and complex mathematics to significantly speed up information processing. However, the high error rate in quantum computing has been a challenge. DARPA's approach involves using Rydberg qubits, which have the advantage of being homogeneous, allowing for rapid scaling and easy manipulation using lasers. This enables dynamic reconfiguration and transportability of logical qubits on a quantum chip, overcoming previous error-prone methods. DARPA has connected 48 logical qubits so far, paving the way for scalable quantum computing processors with less complexity than originally anticipated. - newatlas.com

IBM releases first-ever 1,000-qubit quantum chip

On 04 Dec 2023: IBM has announced Condor, its first quantum computer with over 1,000 qubits. However, rather than just focusing on increasing the the number of qubits, IBM intends to make them more error-resistant, shown in simultaneous release of Heron, with 133 qubits and a record-low error rate. - nature.com