Author: Nancy, PANews

Zcash’s sharp rally has reignited market interest in the privacy narrative, heating up the long-dormant privacy sector once again.

Recently, Quantus, an L1 project whose mainnet launched not long ago, has become a hot topic in the market. With its positioning as a project combining “quantum resistance and privacy,” Quantus quickly attracted market attention and has even been seen as a quantum-resistant version of Zcash. Meanwhile, support from advocates of privacy narratives such as Balaji has further fueled discussion around this new public blockchain.

Just one month after its mainnet launch, Quantus is gaining popularity on the strength of its quantum-resistance and privacy narrative

In recent days, the crypto industry’s attention has been focused on TOKEN2049, held in Singapore. Today, a side event called “Quantum and Privacy Day” took place. Alongside the established privacy project Zcash and the public blockchain NEAR, Quantus—recently attracting attention from the community—was also one of the event’s organizers.

As quantum computing capabilities continue to advance, the potential threat they pose to existing network security systems is gradually moving from theoretical discussion toward reality, prompting growing interest in post-quantum security across the crypto industry.

Quantus is a PoW blockchain designed from the ground up to address the threat posed by future quantum computing. The project describes itself as “peer-to-peer electronic cash for the quantum age,” emphasizing post-quantum cryptography, privacy, and zero-knowledge proofs. It aims to tackle the quantum-security challenges that traditional public blockchains may face in the future from the outset of its design.

The project argues that the elliptic-curve signature schemes widely used by major blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana could theoretically be vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm once sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available. Unlike these traditional schemes, Quantus uses ML-DSA (Dilithium) as its core signature scheme. This algorithm is one of the digital signature standards selected during the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) post-quantum cryptography standardization process, and is intended to withstand cryptographic attacks that future quantum computers may enable.

In a recent interview, Quantus co-founder Christopher Smith said that Bitcoin’s proposed BIP-360 offers a possible path for upgrading Bitcoin to resist quantum attacks. One of the proposal’s core ideas is to introduce a new type of quantum-resistant address and have users actively move their assets to the new security system. In his view, however, this approach still faces a practical problem: it can protect only assets that are actively migrated. This means that Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoins, as well as some bitcoins that have been lost, forgotten, or left unmanaged after their owners’ deaths, may never be migrated—even if a quantum-resistant solution is eventually implemented. If sufficiently powerful quantum computers emerge, these assets could theoretically remain vulnerable to attack. Smith also believes that over the past decade, the crypto industry has continually layered new cryptographic schemes on top of one another, resulting in a highly complex system that is difficult to upgrade as a whole. Quantus therefore chose to incorporate post-quantum security into its underlying architecture from the very beginning of the blockchain’s design.

Beyond quantum resistance, privacy is another central part of Quantus’s narrative. In this respect, it bears some similarity to Zcash: both use zero-knowledge proofs to protect privacy, although their specific privacy models differ. Quantus’s private transactions primarily use Wormhole addresses. After a user sends assets to an encrypted address, the assets are provably burned. The holder then uses a locally generated zero-knowledge proof to mint the assets again at any withdrawal address, severing the direct on-chain link between the sending address and the final recipient. By contrast, Zcash’s private transactions are based on zk-SNARKs. They use a shielded pool to conceal the sender, recipient, and transaction amount, while also retaining transparent addresses so users can choose whether to enter the shielded pool.

However, post-quantum security also brings new engineering challenges, the most obvious being data size. The ML-DSA-87 signatures used by Quantus are much larger than traditional elliptic-curve signatures. If every transaction were to include a full post-quantum signature directly on the blockchain, signature data could quickly consume a large amount of block space, putting pressure on network throughput.

To address this issue, Quantus has introduced a “ZK + signature aggregation” mechanism. It uses a STARK-based zero-knowledge proof system and Plonky2 to generate and aggregate proofs for multiple transactions, compressing the large number of post-quantum signatures that would otherwise need to be verified and stored individually into a more compact aggregate proof. As a result, the chain does not need to process every signature one by one; it only needs to verify the aggregated proof to confirm the validity of multiple transactions.

For its consensus mechanism and token design, Quantus follows a PoW approach similar to Bitcoin’s. Its native token, QTC, has a hard cap of 21 million, but there is no halving mechanism. As for mining rewards, half of the fees from private transfers are burned and then reintroduced into future mining rewards according to an exponential curve, helping to address potential security-budget issues facing PoW networks.

Quantus’s mainnet officially launched on September 9, 2026. According to data published on its website, the network currently has more than 8,400 active accounts and has processed over 260,000 transactions. Quantus recently integrated with NEAR Intents, a cross-chain trading protocol that has attracted considerable market interest, becoming the platform’s first post-quantum asset. Users can exchange assets from multiple chains for QTC.

In short, the market buzz around rising privacy assets such as ZEC, along with growing discussion of quantum-computing risks, has quickly brought Quantus, which launched only recently, into the spotlight.

Backed by Zcash’s “inner circle,” but high pre-mining allocation draws criticism

In addition to the project’s “quantum-resistant + privacy” positioning, its attention-grabbing investor lineup is another major reason Quantus has drawn market interest.

According to public information, Quantus has completed two funding rounds, raising approximately $2.42 million in total. In the first round, it raised $1.65 million at a token valuation of $40 million; in the second, it raised $770,000 at a token valuation of $100 million. The total funding of $2.42 million is not particularly high, but the investors behind it have attracted considerable attention.

The second funding round was led by Balaji, with participation from AngelList co-founder Babak Nivi and Mert, founder of Helius, a Solana ecosystem infrastructure project, among others. Quantus co-founder Joseph Mattia previously revealed that Balaji also serves as an advisor to the project.

More notably, Quantus’s key investors have quite close ties to the Zcash community. Balaji was an early investor in Zcash and a longtime supporter, and has repeatedly voiced strong confidence in ZEC, even proposing a target price of $100,000. Mert has also publicly expressed positive views on Zcash on several occasions. Naval, another AngelList co-founder, was also an early Zcash investor, participating in its early funding round as far back as 2015. He has publicly described Bitcoin as insurance against fiat currencies and Zcash as insurance against Bitcoin.

With help from Zcash’s market momentum, Quantus’s investor lineup has also added to the project’s perceived potential. However, its tokenomics have sparked considerable controversy. One community member joked, “The quantum threat is still on the way, but a large share of the genesis allocation is already in the bag.”

According to the project’s published tokenomics, 27% of QTC’s total supply was minted at genesis. Of this, 23% was allocated to investors, founders, and the team, and locked for one year after mainnet launch before being released linearly over the following 36 months. Another 4% was allocated to the company. Of that amount, 1% was available to circulate from genesis, primarily for initial liquidity; the remaining approximately 3% is intended for the company’s future operations and will likewise be released linearly over 36 months after a one-year lockup.

The high genesis allocation has consequently become a focus of community criticism. In the community’s view, Quantus emphasizes a fixed supply, scarcity, and PoW—features associated with Bitcoin—to evoke the market narrative of digital gold and fair issuance. But unlike Bitcoin, whose early BTC supply was generated gradually, primarily through PoW mining, Quantus allocated a relatively large share of QTC to investors, founders, the team, and the company at genesis. This also means that the project could face potential selling pressure from ongoing token unlocks over the coming years.

Overall, Quantus has claimed a promising market opportunity with its narrative around privacy and quantum resistance, backed by capital, and has to some extent lowered the barriers to gaining market recognition and liquidity that new projects typically face. But whether its quantum-resistant technology will stand the test of time, whether its privacy features can translate into sustained user demand, and whether the network, liquidity, and ecosystem applications can continue to grow are questions that only time and the market can answer.