Quip's proof of work is tuned to favor quantum annealers, which is why the Advantage2 wins roughly 92% of the blocks it competes for. The difficulty window design, not the energy number, is the real milestone.
A D-Wave quantum annealer is currently winning most of the proof-of-work blocks it competes for on Quip, a small testnet that has been live since April. The result is real, narrow, and engineered. It is not a sign that quantum computers can break cryptocurrency, and it is not yet a claim that quantum mining is more sustainable at scale.
Quip comes from Postquant Labs, co-founded by Colton Dillion and Dr. Richard Carback. Its proof-of-work is a combinatorial optimization problem, the kind of puzzle used in delivery routing or portfolio assembly, deliberately chosen so that both classical and quantum solvers can attempt it. That choice is what makes the reported 92% win rate for a D-Wave Advantage2 possible at all.
At a 1 June 2026 investor presentation, D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz said the Advantage2 is allocated to Quip for roughly five minutes per day, enough to compete on about a third of the network's blocks while winning the great majority of those attempts. The figure comes from the company promoting the work, not from an independent public benchmark, and the win rate reflects a difficulty window the Quip team tuned to make the contest competitive rather than trivial.
Carlos Perez-Delgado, a quantum computing researcher at the University of Kent who is not involved with Quip, told New Scientist that the chosen problem is a "sweet spot" for devices like D-Wave's annealers, with a difficulty curve that lets a quantum device pull ahead of classical hardware. That framing matters. The puzzle is hard enough that classical machines do not solve it instantly, and structured enough that an annealer's strengths in finding low-energy states for a constrained problem translate into more frequent wins. Hard but not impossible is a design choice, and it is the news.
The energy claim is more contested than the win rate. Postquant and Dillion say an Advantage2 wins a block using about 12.5 watts, compared with roughly 1334 watts for a typical competing classical rig, and that a classical machine capable of beating the annealer more often would need around 300 times its power. D-Wave and Postquant have not released a detailed public benchmark for those numbers, and the figures should be read as company-attributed, not as third-party verified. Olivier Ezratty, of the Quantum Energy Initiative, pushes back on a broader reading: the capital expenditure and the energy spent manufacturing a dilution-refrigerator-cooled superconducting system are not in that 12.5 watt figure, and on a lifecycle basis the purely economic case does not yet close.
That history is part of why the testnet exists. D-Wave's 2024 claim of quantum supremacy was disputed the following year when a separate team reproduced comparable results on a laptop, an episode that hangs over every advantage claim the company has made since. Quip's open-network design is built to defend against that kind of dispute: anyone can join, attempt the same problems, and verify the winners. The current result is not a settled supremacy claim, and the project is presented as a long-running benchmark rather than a single headline.
Quip is also not the only entry in this space. BTQ Technologies and Quandela have a memorandum of understanding to develop quantum proof-of-work protocols on Quandela's photonic hardware, an alternative to D-Wave's superconducting annealers that is part of the same general bet: that proof-of-work is a useful first application for noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines, even though it has nothing to do with breaking the cryptography of Bitcoin or Ethereum. Dillion has said Quip is meant to evolve into a "worldwide distributed quantum computer" that aggregates many different QPUs for optimization, AI training, and mining, with additional PoW problem types planned. The 12.5 watt per win is a measurement in progress, not a conclusion the headline should rest on.
What to watch next: a public Postquant or D-Wave technical report documenting the exact optimization problem, the graph-embedding overhead of mapping it onto Advantage2's qubit connectivity, and the classical baselines used. Until that arrives, the 92% win rate is a meaningful engineering milestone on a small, deliberately tuned testnet, and the energy comparison is a useful but partial data point from a single vendor.