PRN24 Mar 2026 07:14
24 March 2026
Quantum Blockchain Technologies Plc
("QBT" or "the Company")
Commencement of Testing of the AI Oracle on a Bitmain Mining Rig
Quantum Blockchain Technologies plc (AIM: QBT), the AIM-listed investment company focused principally on a research, development and investment programme within blockchain technology is pleased to confirm that an internal project, which it started in August 2025, to use a Bitmain Antminer S9 ("S9") mining rig as a testing and commercial demonstration environment for the software version of QBT's Method C's AI Oracle, has now reached the live in-house testing stage.
The purpose for this project is to enable the Company to demonstrate to potential customers results of the AI Oracle's enhanced performance on a commercial grade mining rig.
Historically, QBT's R&D team has provided results based on the performance of its software simulator which the Company has been running in its Milan laboratory for over a year. However, following a number of meetings with larger US-based Bitcoin mining companies, it is the view of the QBT Board that the AI Oracle's results can be expected to appeal to a wider market if the Company were to showcase successfully the software's efficiencies on an industry recognised commercial mining rig, such as the S9.
A key factor in the decision to select the S9 was that it is the last Bitmain mining rig to use a publicly available open-source operating system and firmware for field-programmable gate array ("FPGA") on the control boards. All new mining rigs produced by Bitmain (e.g. S19, S21 and S23) no longer provide open-source accessibility.
So far, QBT has successfully modified both the operating system and FPGA firmware on the S9 in order to make it suitable for the software version of Method C's AI Oracle installation which will be done in three steps:
· Data collection of the ASIC Hashing behavior to train the AI Oracle,
· Integration of the AI Oracle with the existing S9 software environment and,
· Testing and fine tuning of AI Oracle's performance during live mining.
QBT's S9 provides an excellent testbed to demonstrate the performance of the Company's technology on a real industrial mining rig which can facilitate proof of concept which QBT can then deploy on current commercial mining rigs.
The Company anticipates that the ability to demonstrate the increased quality hashing performance on the S9 is a key step in securing commercial demonstrations with large Bitcoin miners. QBT's commercial targets are therefore represented by companies that fall into two categories and QBT plans to target both:
those which have, in recent years, made material investments to develop their own proprietary versions of Bitmain's control boards, operating systems and firmware, and, the aftermarket control board system integrators, which have developed similar hardware and software