Anti-Quantum Version of Zcash? New Public Chain Quantus Secures Investment from Balaji and Others, High Pre-Mining Ratio Raises Concerns

Author: Nancy, PANews

The strong surge of Zcash has reignited market interest in privacy narratives, bringing the long-dormant privacy sector back to life.

Recently, the L1 project Quantus, which launched its mainnet not long ago, has been a hot topic in the market. With its positioning of "anti-quantum + privacy," Quantus has quickly gained attention and is even seen as the anti-quantum version of Zcash. Meanwhile, support from privacy narrative advocates like Balaji has further added to the buzz around this new public chain.

Just One Month After Mainnet Launch, Quantus Gains Popularity with Anti-Quantum and Privacy Narrative

In recent days, the crypto industry has focused on the TOKEN2049 conference held in Singapore. Today, a side event called "Quantum and Privacy Day" took place, featuring well-known privacy project Zcash, public chain NEAR, and the recently community-attended Quantus as one of the organizers.

As quantum computing capabilities continue to develop, the potential threat it poses to existing network security systems is gradually shifting from theoretical discussions to reality, leading to increased attention in the crypto industry towards post-quantum security.

Quantus is a PoW public chain designed from the ground up to address future quantum computing threats. The project positions itself as "peer-to-peer electronic cash built for the quantum era," focusing on post-quantum cryptography, privacy, and zero-knowledge proofs, and aims to address potential quantum security issues that traditional public chains may face from the outset of blockchain design.

It believes that the elliptic curve signature schemes widely used by mainstream blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana could theoretically be attacked by Shor's algorithm once sufficiently powerful quantum computers emerge. Unlike traditional schemes, Quantus uses ML-DSA (Dilithium) as its core signature scheme. This algorithm is one of the digital signature standards selected during the post-quantum cryptography standardization process by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), designed to withstand cryptographic attacks that may arise from future quantum computers.

Christopher Smith, co-founder of Quantus, stated in a recent interview that the BIP-360 proposal currently being discussed for Bitcoin provides a potential upgrade path for quantum resistance. One of the core ideas of this proposal is to introduce new quantum-resistant address types, allowing users to actively migrate their assets to a new security system. However, he believes that this solution still faces a practical issue: it can only protect assets that actively complete the migration. This means that Bitcoin held by Satoshi Nakamoto, as well as some that have been lost, forgotten, or left unmanaged after the holder's death, may never be able to migrate even if a quantum-resistant solution is ultimately implemented. Once sufficiently powerful quantum computers emerge, this portion of assets could theoretically remain exposed to attack risks. Furthermore, Smith believes that the entire crypto industry has been continuously layering new cryptographic schemes over the past decade, resulting in an extremely complex system that is difficult to upgrade as a whole. Therefore, Quantus chose to incorporate post-quantum security into its underlying architecture from the very beginning of blockchain design.

In addition to anti-quantum security, privacy is another core narrative for Quantus. In this regard, it shares some similarities with Zcash, as both utilize zero-knowledge proofs for privacy protection, though their specific privacy models are not entirely the same. Quantus's privacy transactions are primarily implemented through Wormhole addresses. After users send assets to an encrypted address, the assets are provably destroyed, and the holder then uses locally generated zero-knowledge proofs to re-mint the assets at any exit address, thereby severing the direct on-chain association between the sending address and the final receiving address. In contrast, Zcash's privacy transactions are based on zk-SNARKs, which hide the sender, receiver, and transaction amount through a shielded pool while retaining transparent addresses, allowing users to choose whether to enter the shielded pool.

However, post-quantum security also brings new engineering challenges, the most obvious of which is data volume. The ML-DSA-87 signatures used by Quantus are significantly larger than traditional elliptic curve signatures. If every transaction were to write the complete post-quantum signature directly onto the blockchain, the signature data could quickly occupy a large amount of block space, putting pressure on network throughput.

To address this issue, Quantus has further introduced a "ZK + signature aggregation" mechanism. This is based on the STARK zero-knowledge proof system and utilizes 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 aggregated proof. As a result, the chain does not need to process all signatures one by one; it only needs to verify the aggregated proof to confirm the validity of multiple transactions.

In terms of consensus mechanism and token design, Quantus adopts a PoW approach similar to Bitcoin. The total supply of the native token QTC is capped at 21 million, but no halving mechanism is set. In terms of mining reward distribution, half of the privacy transfer fees will be burned and reinjected into future mining rewards based on an exponential curve to alleviate potential security budget issues faced by PoW networks.

The Quantus mainnet officially launched on September 9, 2026. According to data disclosed on its official website, there are currently over 8,400 active accounts on the network, with a total transaction volume exceeding 260,000. Recently, Quantus has also officially integrated with the highly popular cross-chain trading protocol NEAR Intents, becoming the first post-quantum asset on the platform, allowing users to exchange QTC through multi-chain asset cross-chain transactions.

It can be said that the market heat brought by the rise of privacy assets like ZEC, along with the ongoing discussions about quantum computing risks, has enabled the recently launched Quantus to quickly gain market attention.

Backed by Zcash "Circle of Friends," High Pre-Mining Ratio Raises Concerns

In addition to the project's "anti-quantum + privacy" positioning, its highly topical financing lineup is also an important reason for Quantus's market attention.

According to public information, Quantus has completed two rounds of financing, raising a total of approximately $2.42 million. In the first round, it raised $1.65 million at a token valuation of $40 million, while the second round raised $770,000 at a token valuation of $100 million. From the perspective of financing scale, $2.42 million is not particularly high, but the lineup of investors behind it is quite noteworthy.

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

More notably, the core investors behind Quantus have a close connection with the Zcash community. Balaji is an early investor and long-time supporter of Zcash, having publicly expressed extreme optimism about ZEC multiple times, even proposing a target price of $100,000; Mert has also publicly expressed positive views on Zcash multiple times; another AngelList co-founder, Naval, is also an early investor in Zcash, having participated in its early financing back in 2015 and publicly stated that Bitcoin is insurance against fiat currency, while Zcash is insurance against Bitcoin.

Therefore, leveraging the market heat of Zcash, Quantus's investment lineup has also added more imaginative space for itself. However, the token economic model of Quantus has also sparked considerable controversy. Some community members jokingly remarked, "The quantum threat is still on the way, but a high proportion of the genesis distribution has already been secured."

According to the token economics disclosed by the project, 27% of the total supply of QTC was minted during the genesis phase, with 23% allocated to investors, founders, and the team, locked for one year after the mainnet launch, and then released linearly over 36 months; another 4% is allocated to the company. Of this, 1% can circulate during the genesis phase, primarily for initial liquidity; the remaining approximately 3% is for the company's subsequent operations, also locked for one year and released linearly over 36 months.

The high proportion of genesis distribution has thus become a focal point of community skepticism. In the community's view, Quantus emphasizes narratives similar to Bitcoin's fixed total supply, scarcity, and PoW to gain market associations with digital gold and fair issuance. However, unlike Bitcoin, which gradually generates BTC primarily through PoW mining, Quantus allocated a high proportion of QTC to investors, founders, the team, and the company during the genesis phase, which also means that it will face potential selling pressure from continuous token unlocks in the coming years.

Overall, Quantus has seized a market window with considerable imaginative space through its technology story of privacy and anti-quantum, as well as capital backing, while also lowering the cold-start threshold for new projects in terms of market recognition and liquidity. However, whether anti-quantum technology can withstand long-term practical testing, whether the privacy solution can truly translate into sustained user demand, and whether network scale, liquidity, and ecological applications can continue to grow remain to be validated by time and the market.

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