Quantum Blockchain upbeat on latest development progress

Quantum Blockchain updated the market with the latest advances by its research and development team on Tuesday, which it said was working on proprietary methods to create “cheaper, faster and more energy-efficient” bitcoin miners.

The AIM-traded firm said the preliminary results of machine learning method ‘B’ indicated a 30% improvement over commercially-available ASIC chip-based miners.

Regularities were identified within the ‘SHA-256’ algorithm, marking progress towards potential patent filing.

Quantum said it was also investigating the potential of a third-party licensing strategy, to exploit early revenues.

It also announced the appointment of Dr Rita Pizzi as its chief research officer.

“Whilst the company is still considering direct mining, a more immediate and less capital-intensive approach is to exploit mining revenue with an existing bitcoin miner, who would be allowed, under licence, to adopt the company's method ‘B’ control software,” said chief executive officer and executive chairman Francesco Gardin.

“The company is currently exploring this route.

“We are engaged in an extremely demanding research and development effort to deliver competitive results.”

Gardin described the amount of information processed to achieve such goals as “huge”, as it searched and analysed regularities in data spaces of “large orders of magnitude”.

“Verification testing on hypotheses of discovered regularities is extremely demanding, hence the disparity of the timing of results confirmation between a discovery and its confirmation.

“I am therefore very pleased that despite the long verification time this approach is taking, such regularities and correlations have been identified.

“Moreover, the ability to control commercial ASIC mining chips with our machine learning methods, could provide a tactical shortcut to generate revenues.”

That, Francesco Gardin said, would allow the firm to continue with its proprietary ASIC chip design and work on its quantum computing algorithm, pending the availability of quantum computers with enough qubits to run its software.

At 1230 GMT, shares in Quantum Blockchain Technologies were down 17.15% at 1.08p.

Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com.