Quantus founder Christopher Smith on the 9 September mainnet launch, the NEAR Intents route from Bitcoin without KYC, Chinese miners who took over in days, and why he says Bitcoin won't upgrade in time.
Christopher Smith was a Bitcoiner when the coin cost $2. That is the credential he leads with when he tells Bitcoin maximalists they are about to be late twice. "They were late to Bitcoin, and they're going to be late to quantum too," he told Block Insider. "I know where all the bodies are buried, and these guys are not going to upgrade it."
His response was to build a chain that does not need upgrading. Quantus, a post-quantum Layer 1, went live on 9 September 2026, a date the team chose for the symmetry.
Quantus's first major integration was with NEAR, specifically NEAR Intents, the cross-chain settlement layer. The practical result is a DEX-style experience that reaches across chains. "It's a Uniswap-like experience, but you could go from, say Bitcoin into Quantus," Smith said.
"You don't have to go through an exchange, you don't have to do KYC, that whole sort of fairly abusive and stressful process you can just bypass."
The second piece is less visible and, for Smith, more important. NEAR already supports post-quantum addresses, which means a NEAR account can be controlled by a Quantus key. "If you look at all the different chains that need to add a post-quantum option for their users, NEAR is by far the largest that has done that so far."
Quantus now trades on NEAR's front end, which Smith called "a huge relief," and he wants more partnerships of the same shape, "where we can both contribute post-quantum expertise as well as gain access to users and liquidity."
Mainnet did not go the way the team planned, in a way Smith seems to have enjoyed.
"We had a tremendous amount of support come, like more than we expected, come on the mining side, and a lot of it from China. Some new mining pools sprang up overnight and started competing quite hard."
The founders had intended to mine the chain themselves at the start. "We quickly realized, okay, actually we're not GPU experts. We had a pretty good version of the thing, but the experts sort of took over." He called the experience "quite rewarding, to feel like the ecosystem kind of responding to us."
On throughput, he gave a number and a caveat. "We have a few hundred TPS, it could be a lot faster. We have a clear roadmap for how to do that." Other items exist but are not public. "I have people who tell me to shut up."
Asked to explain Quantus to someone with no crypto background, Smith started with a 30-year-old warning.
"Cryptographers have known for 30 years that eventually elliptic curves would fall to quantum computers."
He was careful not to overstate what a quantum computer does. "It can't do just anything instantly. There's a small range of problems where you get an extreme speed-up with a quantum computer, and that just happens to cover the elliptic curve cryptography that we've based the entire blockchain industry on."
His framing of the industry's position is a debt metaphor. "It's a bit of technical debt that we piled up, and now it's coming due. And sometimes it's easier to build a new fence than to fix an old one." Building a Layer 1 "was not that easy. It wasn't our first choice, but I think it was the right solution," he said, adding that the standards developed along the way are meant to be reusable by other chains.
Most founders at TOKEN2049 were not talking about quantum. Smith's pitch to them has three parts.
First, scale. "AI is accelerating quantum. That's going to force $3 trillion in blockchain to move to something post-quantum." That value could migrate to upgrades on existing chains, to new chains like Quantus, or out of crypto entirely. "Gold is post-quantum and is also inflation resistant to some degree."
Second, timeline. He cited IonQ's projection of 800 logical qubits by next year, which he said "is already crossing the memory threshold to crack Bitcoin keys," while allowing that "there's other dimensions of things that have to happen." His conclusion: "It's getting really close."
Third, a reading of government behaviour. "If you had a cyber nuke that could break everybody's cryptography, would you tell everyone? Probably not. So the fact that they're telling people to move means maybe they're worried about somebody else getting it." He added the disclaimer himself. "I don't have a crystal ball."
The sharpest part of the conversation was about Bitcoin's own community. Smith thinks the people who could lead an upgrade are not listening. "Some of the Bitcoiners are really just like they have their head in the sand," he said, describing a tendency to defer to prominent developers who say there is nothing to worry about. "I think it's a mistake. We need to be proactive about this."
His prediction, offered with a warning that it might be "too mean," is that the money moves before the protocol does. "I wish they would, because I don't want the $3 trillion to leave crypto, but a lot of it is going to leave if we don't fix this issue."
Not everyone agrees on the timeline. Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman, interviewed by Block Insider at the same conference, said he is confident Bitcoin will upgrade "when push comes to shove," and that the real risk is starting too late for millions of holders to migrate their keys. Both men agree on the clock; they differ on whether Bitcoin will hear it.
Underneath the cryptography is a complaint about how crypto treats ordinary users. "This is a huge mistake that the crypto industry has done. They made it too complicated. They say, 'Oh, don't worry about that. Here's another casino.'"
Smith's standard for Quantus is blunt. "You shouldn't have to be a cybersecurity expert to use crypto. It's never going to be freedom money if only super elite hackers can use it."
Quantus is seven weeks old, with a few hundred transactions per second and a mining base it did not expect. Whether the $3 trillion ever moves is a question for the quantum labs, not for Smith. What he has built is the place he thinks it will move to.
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