Quantus Weekly: Wormhole Transactions
You burn coins to an unspendable address.
A ZK proof mints them somewhere new.
The trail is gone.
@QuantusNetwork calls these “wormhole” transactions.
You send coins to a wormhole address that looks identical to any other account on the ledger. But the address is mathematically unspendable. To withdraw, you prove knowledge of a secret with a ZK proof, and the chain mints equivalent coins to a fresh exit address.
No one can connect the entry to the exit.
Here’s where it gets interesting for miners.
The protocol requires miners to submit a 32-byte preimage for their reward address. The chain hashes it to create the address.
Dilithium public keys are massive. They can’t fit in 32 bytes. So the preimage can’t be a real public key, and the resulting address is guaranteed to be an unspendable wormhole address.
Privacy is enforced by the protocol, with no opt-in required.
This week, we built this into the miner app. In the next testnet, all block rewards route through wormhole addresses by default.
Here’s what else we built this week.
Github Activity (11 merged pull requests):
Core Tech & ZK:
- Built wormhole withdrawals into the miner app, giving miners private block rewards by default.
- Fixed heaviest/longest chain consensus bug and several other chain bugs.
- Released updated core libraries: qp-poseidon v1.1.0, qp-rusty-crystals-hdwallet v2.0.0, qp-dilithium v0.2.2.
Network & Infra:
- Updated Substrate dependencies from stable2506 to stable2512-2.
- Updated CLI, sc-network fork, and NEAR fork with new dependencies.
- Tested Heisenberg nodes with updated codebase and tech collective governance.
- Senoti notification system: fixed RabbitMQ startup glitch, removed auth layer from device registrar, fixed failover connection handling.
Web & Mobile App Updates:
- Shipped wallet v1.2.0 and v1.2.1 to all app stores with updated graphics.
- Pushed a version of the mobile app with a “swap” button to the app store to begin review process.
- Shipped happy checkphrase with more positive word list across wallet and explorer.
- Android edge-to-edge display fix.
- Recovery phrase UI update, button component fixes, standardized icon buttons, and reset sheet update.
- Updated remote notification integration and expanded notification support to all wallets.
Content & Partnerships:
- Hosted a panel discussion on privacy and quantum security with Tom Howard, Chris Smith, and Kenbak (Cipherscan) at Network School.
Industry Updates:
- Quantum Canary Article on ZK & Quantum Computing
