Qubic is a layer-1 network whose validators, called Computors, settle state by quorum vote, and whose mining is aimed at outside workloads instead of arbitrary hashes. QUBIC is the native unit, burned when used rather than paid to validators. This article covers the architecture, what the unit does, the Monero and Dogecoin mining campaigns, the July 2026 GitHub compromise, and how to check all of it yourself.
What Is Qubic?
Qubic is its own layer-1 network, not an application on somebody else's chain. The official site calls it a high-performance layer 1 with instant finality, feeless transfers and smart contracts, built on Useful Proof of Work, and dates the mainnet to April 2022. Validation is carried out by a fixed set of 676 validators called Computors. The official ticker is QUBIC: the tokenomics page says the network uses "$QUBIC (and not $QU) as its official financial ticker".
Three things behind the name should be kept apart. Qubic is the protocol and the live network. Qubic Core is the open-source node software in the qubic organisation on GitHub. Aigarth is the AI research programme the mining feeds, presented as a route toward artificial general intelligence, which is a goal rather than a product today. The founder is publicly identified as Sergey Ivancheglo, who posts as Come-from-Beyond and co-founded NXT and IOTA; the team page lists him beside named staff and handle-only contributors.
The vocabulary also differs from most chains. Qubic organises time into ticks rather than blocks, and into epochs of one week. Contracts are written in a restricted C++ dialect: the developer documentation lists no pointers, no floats, no standard library, no division operator and a 1 GB memory ceiling. They run on baremetal, with no virtual machine and, in the documentation's own words, "no EVM-like gas mechanism".
What Problem Does Qubic Aim to Solve?
Proof of work buys security by making block production expensive, and the expense is the point: the hashes are worth nothing outside the ledger they protect, so any network wanting that security had to accept the waste. Separately, most smart-contract platforms price execution through a gas market that charges per instruction, so costs are least predictable exactly when a chain is busiest.
Qubic's stated answer is to keep proof of work but aim it elsewhere, and to drop per-transaction metering. The project says the computation that ranks Computors each epoch can also train neural networks for Aigarth or mine an outside chain, and that transfers can be feeless because a contract's execution budget is funded up front by an IPO. That is the project's own framing of its goals.
How Does Qubic Work?
A Computor is one of 676 validator slots. Computors execute the protocol's work and vote by quorum on the state of each tick, Qubic's unit of ledger time in place of a block. Epochs last one week, and a Computor's standing is re-set each epoch by how well its miners perform rather than by how many blocks it produces. Governance uses the same quorum: 451 of the 676 Computors must take part for a vote to count.
Useful Proof of Work is what the miners actually do: rather than hashing for its own sake, they run workloads the protocol assigns, and the results set their Computor's ranking. Through 2025 the network aimed much of its capacity at mining Monero. On 1 April 2026 it switched to Dogecoin, with Scrypt ASICs mining DOGE while CPUs and GPUs train Aigarth full time; mined DOGE is sold, the proceeds buy back QUBIC, and any undistributed remainder is burned. Since Epoch 224 in late July 2026 the AI side has run BPP-9000, scoring miners on how accurately a brain-inspired network predicts Bitcoin's direction.
Deployment is deliberately narrow. A contract is not deployed by paying a fee; it is merged into Qubic Core itself. The documented lifecycle runs to thirteen phases, from local testing and an automated restrictions check through a pull request, core-developer review, a computor proposal and a quorum vote, to a one-week Dutch auction in which all 676 shares must sell. Oracle Machines read outside data, and Outsourced Computing, which the project says reached mainnet on 29 July 2026, acts on it.
What Does QUBIC Do in the Qubic System?
The documentation treats QUBIC as a unit of computational energy rather than money. Executing a contract or querying an oracle consumes QUBIC, and the consumed amount is burned rather than paid to Computors. Ordinary transfers are feeless. Every new contract must run an IPO, and all QUBIC spent in that auction is burned too. There is no staking product in the base protocol and no separate governance token: the vote belongs to the 676 Computor slots, which also set the commission a contract pays.
Supply is capped and tightening at the margin. The network emits exactly 1 trillion QUBIC per epoch and that gross figure never changes; what changes is the share destroyed before distribution. The cap is 200 trillion, cut from an original 1,000 trillion by a community vote in 2024, so a halving here raises the burn rate instead of cutting the reward. The first landed at Epoch 175 in August 2025. The second is set for Epoch 227, which the official halving page dates to 19 August 2026, lifting the burn rate from 55% to 77.5%: 775 billion of the weekly trillion is burned and 225 billion reaches circulation, down from 450 billion.
Two caveats belong with those figures. The project calls 77.5% a ceiling rather than a fixed rate, because a Supply Watcher contract adjusts the actual burn beneath it from live supply data, and the halving explainer labels every number in it an approximation. And QUBIC is a native unit, so it has no EVM-style token contract address at all: addresses here are 60-character identities, not 0x strings.
Qubic Ecosystem and Adoption Today
Most of what is verifiable about the ecosystem sits in the code and the documentation rather than in usage numbers. The qubic organisation on GitHub carries the core node software, the contract sources for QX, Quottery, QEARN and QVault, the Doge Connect protocol, the Outsourced Computing machine and, since 4 August 2026, a developer kit for building and testing contracts locally instead of paying to run an IPO. The official ecosystem page lists community-built applications alongside those.
The adoption claims are the project's own and should be read that way. Qubic says its Alchemy Pay integration made QUBIC purchasable with cards and local payment rails across 173 countries from July 2026, and that an AEON Pay integration announced on 6 August 2026 makes it spendable at around 50 million merchants in Asia, Latin America and Africa. The same recap reports that the entity meant to carry a Qubic whitepaper through the European Union's MiCA regime has been founded. None of that is independently audited.
Traded liquidity is thin and easy to check. On 14 August 2026 CoinGecko's methodology note for QUBIC said its price was aggregated across 9 exchanges and 11 markets, and the venue table listed ten spot pairs, the deepest of which, QUBIC/USDT on LBank, showed roughly 6,253 US dollars of buy-side depth within 2% of the quote. The official site links thirteen exchanges plus two fiat on-ramps, so the two lists disagree; the aggregator counts only what it tracks. On that page the historical high and low fields contradicted the live quote beside them, so this article uses neither.
How Is Qubic Different From a Conventional Blockchain?
The first difference is how code gets on chain. On an EVM network anyone can deploy a contract by paying gas, and it runs inside a virtual machine that meters every instruction. On Qubic there is no virtual machine and no gas: contracts compile into the node binary, pass a pull request and core-developer review, need a quorum vote of the 676 Computors, then must sell all 676 IPO shares to be funded. That is a permissioned path with a hard failure mode, and it is why a live contract can stop dead once its execution reserve empties.
The second is where the mining work goes. On Bitcoin the hash rate secures Bitcoin. On Qubic it is aimed outward, at Monero through 2025 and at Dogecoin since April 2026, and what it settles at home is the ranking of Computors, with external proceeds recycled into buybacks and burns. Time is organised differently too: quorum-voted ticks instead of linked blocks, and week-long epochs as the unit that resets rewards. These are different trade-offs, not a ranking.
Risks and Limitations
The Monero episode shows what this design can do to somebody else's network. The Block reported that Qubic's share of Monero's hash rate went from under 2% in mid-May 2025 to over 27% by late July. On 12 August 2025 Qubic's own blog said it had "reached 51% of Monero's hashrate dominance" and reorganised the chain; CoinDesk reported the claim the same day alongside pushback from security researchers, and Kraken paused XMR deposits as a security precaution. The claim remains contested: a paper accepted at AFT 2026 (arXiv 2512.01437) reports "no evidence that Qubic sustained majority mining power, despite public takeover claims". As of 14 August 2026 there is no agreed figure for the share Qubic held and no settled conclusion in the Monero community.
A second incident is more immediate for anyone touching the software. On 13 July 2026 an attacker used a compromised contributor account to add a malicious GitHub Actions workflow, which exfiltrated a broad-scope access token stored as an organisation secret; the attacker then took repository admin on eight qubic repositories, and malicious code reached the Core-Lite Docker image and the Web Wallet before containment. The post-mortem of 14 July 2026 told Network Guardians to rotate their seeds, and told Web Wallet users who unlocked between 03:00 and 11:00 UTC that day to generate a fresh identity and move their funds. If that was you and you have not moved yet, do it now. Seven of nine remediation actions were complete as of 6 August 2026.
There is no public third-party security audit to fall back on. The contract lifecycle page lists a security audit as "Optional but Highly Recommended" rather than required, and the post-mortem files an annual independent security audit under what the team chose not to commit to, "deferred to a future budget cycle". No public audit report covering Qubic Core was found while writing this article. Maturity is a related risk: the site's own footer calls Qubic "a decentralized, open-source network for experimental technology", the third architectural pillar only reached mainnet at the end of July 2026, and the artificial-general-intelligence goal remains research. Early-stage networks fail outright more often than established ones.
Economic and regulatory risks stack on top. Mining revenue now depends on an outside asset, Dogecoin, and on ASIC economics the network does not control. Emission and burn parameters, contract approval and contract commissions are all set by the same 676 Computor slots. A contract whose execution reserve reaches zero stops executing entirely, and one whose IPO fails to clear can never be activated. Traded depth is very thin, so an ordinary-sized order can move the quote. The MiCA whitepaper entity was only reported as founded in August 2026, and this article makes no claim about how QUBIC is classified anywhere.
How to Verify Qubic Yourself
Start from the source rather than a search result. Type qubic.org, docs.qubic.org and github.com/qubic into the address bar yourself, and treat only the direction from the official domain outward as evidence that a social account or repository is genuine. Compare any domain you land on character by character, and stop if a page reached from an advertisement or a message asks you to connect a wallet to claim, migrate or verify anything. After July 2026 the same caution applies to code: pull binaries only from the official organisation.
Then get the identifier right. QUBIC is the native unit of its own network, so there is no token contract address to check and no chain selector to get wrong. Addresses are 60-character uppercase identities, and contracts carry an index too: the official architecture material gives QX as the reproducible example, contract index 1 at address BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARMID. Open explorer.qubic.org and read the network, assets and smart-contract views without connecting a wallet or signing anything. An 0x address offered for QUBIC on any EVM chain is a different asset sharing the name.
Take supply and burns from the chain rather than an aggregator. The circulating figure aggregators display is pulled from the project's own public endpoint, and burns are visible on the explorer at the NULL_ID address to which destroyed units are sent. The emission schedule and halving table live on the tokenomics page in the official documentation, and the Epoch 227 change traces back to a computor proposal in the qubic proposal repository. Read the epoch number together with the date, because the schedule is expressed in epochs.
Finally, grade every claim by who made it. Merchant counts, throughput records and adoption figures in an all-hands recap are the project's own numbers, so record the date and the definition before reusing them. For audits, find the report on the auditing firm's own site; a page that merely names an auditor is not a report. And treat aggregator pages as derived data: on 14 August 2026 one major aggregator's QUBIC page contradicted itself on that coin's historical high and low.
Conclusion
Qubic is a layer-1 network run by 676 Computors that settle quorum-voted ticks, with contracts compiled into the node software rather than run in a virtual machine, and mining aimed at outside workloads under the label Useful Proof of Work. QUBIC is the native unit: burned on contract execution and IPOs rather than paid to validators, and the second halving at Epoch 227 raises the burn rate from 55% to 77.5% around 19 August 2026. The same design also let the network aim its capacity at Monero in 2025, an episode whose true scale is still disputed, and the July 2026 GitHub compromise is a reminder that the software supply chain is part of the risk. Read the official documentation for current parameters, and check identities and burns on the official explorer.
Related market pages
Bitbase pages for the tokens named in this article:
- QUBIC: View price
Related reading
Other Bitbase articles on this topic:
- On-Chain Supply and Profit Metrics
- Sentiment and Developer Activity
Disclaimer: This article is educational content from Bitbase Academy, provided for information only. It explains what a project does and what role its token plays in that system; it does not constitute investment, trading, tax, or financial advice, and it is neither a recommendation nor an endorsement of any project or token. Bitbase has not carried out due diligence on the project described here, and mentioning it does not mean Bitbase lists or supports the asset. Crypto assets carry significant risk, including price volatility, thin liquidity, smart-contract failure, regulatory uncertainty, and the possible loss of their entire value. This project is at an early stage, and early-stage projects carry a higher risk of failing outright. Its contracts have not been publicly audited, or the published audit covers only part of the code. Written as of August 2026; a project's status, tokenomics, team, and contracts can change at any time. Verify everything yourself through official channels, the contract address, and a block explorer, and beware of imitation sites and phishing links.
References
[1] Qubic, official homepage (Layer 1 description, mainnet date, exchange links, site footer) qubic.org
[2] Qubic Tokenomics, official documentation (ticker, emissions, burns, 200 trillion cap) docs.qubic.org
[3] Smart Contract Lifecycle, official documentation (13 phases, quorum vote, IPO, audit optional) docs.qubic.org
[4] Qubic's bid for 51% of Monero's hashrate sparks controversy, The Block, 28 July 2025 theblock.co
[5] Qubic's Second Halving: What Epoch 227 Means for QUBIC Tokenomics, official blog, 17 June 2026 qubic.org
[6] April 1 Is Not a Joke. Qubic Meets Doge, official blog on the Monero to Dogecoin mining transition qubic.org
[7] Post-Mortem: 2026-07-13 GitHub Organization Security Incident, official QCT announcement, 14 July 2026 github.com
[8] Qubic All-Hands Recap: August 6, 2026, official blog (mainnet status, remediation progress, AEON Pay) qubic.org
[9] Qubic Claims Majority Control of Monero Hashrate, Raising 51% Attack Fears, CoinDesk, 12 August 2025 coindesk.com
[10] Inside Qubic's Selfish Mining Campaign on Monero: Evidence, Tactics, and Limits, arXiv 2512.01437, accepted at AFT 2026 arxiv.org
[11] qubic www.coingecko.com
[12] 2026 07 14 post mortem github security incident.md raw.githubusercontent.com
