Qubic

The bare metal blockchain.

Where computation has a purpose.

by 10102
On the metal

Most L1s run on cloud VMs. Qubic runs on the metal.

Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche — the major L1s run their validators inside cloud hypervisors. The shared virtualization layer is the security ceiling, the performance tax, and the latency floor.

Qubic is the only L1 that demands bare metal hardware from its Computors: AMD Epyc class CPUs, 2 TB+ of RAM, NVMe storage, AVX2 today, AVX512 by end of 2026. No virtualization. No hypervisor. The consensus runs directly on the silicon.

The HPC and AI worlds are rediscovering this — xAI's Colossus, Tesla's Dojo, Apple's Silicon push. Qubic built its substrate on it from day one.

See the hardware requirements →
Not a blockchain. A tickchain.

Sub-second finality, 451 computors, quorum consensus.

Qubic doesn't produce blocks every twelve seconds. It produces ticks — near-continuous updates agreed by exactly 451 Computors, each holding one equal vote.

451+ approvals make a tick valid; the quorum is fixed, the consensus is democratic, the finality is instant.

No reorgs. No MEV in the Ethereum sense. No probabilistic settlement. The result is a continuous quorum-driven ledger that behaves more like a high-frequency consensus machine than a traditional block-by-block chain.

See the quorum mechanics →
Mining trains AI

Energy doesn't burn. It builds neural networks.

Traditional Proof of Work spends gigawatts solving arbitrary cryptographic puzzles that have no purpose beyond network security. Qubic's Useful Proof of Work replaces that with something simple and radical: miners train AI models.

Aigarth is the system that analyses the artificial neural networks emerging from the mining pool. Computor rankings reset weekly based on AI training performance. Security and intelligence become the same budget.

This is the substrate the agentic future needs — not arbitrary heat, but compute that resolves into useful artifacts.

Learn how UPoW works →
Lineage

By the architect of NXT and IOTA. The third act.

The first pure Proof-of-Stake chain. The first DAG-based distributed ledger. Both reshaped what a consensus layer could be. NXT launched in 2013 — the first cryptocurrency to use pure proof-of-stake from genesis, with no preceding proof-of-work phase.

IOTA followed in 2015, replacing the blockchain itself with a directed acyclic graph (the Tangle) to enable fee-less, scalable machine-to-machine transactions.

Qubic is the third act from the same hands. Conceived in 2012, ratified through years of public discussion on Bitcointalk, and shipped to mainnet in April 2022 — tickchain, bare metal substrate, AI as the security budget. The pattern: pick a problem the field hasn't taken seriously, build the architecture the problem actually deserves, ship it before the world is ready.

Original 2012 Bitcointalk thread →
Where to start

Pick your entry point.

For newcomers

For builders

For watchers

10102 is watching

And we may build here ourselves.

Qubic is one of the few L1s whose architecture genuinely earns the word different. Bare metal, quorum-driven, AI-fueled consensus — the pieces line up with where compute is heading, and they line up with the kind of permanent on-chain work we do at 10102.

We're watching this space closely. If you're building on Qubic, considering it, or just want to compare notes — reach out at info@10102.io.

Read 10102's full Qubic deep dive →