Multiverse Computing announced it has completed a proof-of-concept project with the Bank of Canada through which the parties used quantum computing to simulate the adoption of cryptocurrency as a method of payment by non-financial firms.
Companies may adopt various forms of payments. So, it’s important to develop a deep understanding of interactions that can take place in payments networks. Multiverse Computing conducted its work related to applying quantum computing for modelling complex economic interactions in a research project with the Bank of Canada. The project explored quantum computing technology as a way to simulate complex economic behaviour that is otherwise very difficult to simulate using traditional computational techniques.
By implementing this solution using D-Wave’s annealing quantum computer, the simulation was able to tackle financial networks as large as 8-10 players, with up to 2^90 possible network configurations. Note that classical computing approaches cannot solve large networks of practical relevance as a 15-player network requires as many resources as there are atoms in the universe.
“We are proud to be a trusted partner of the first G7 central bank to explore modelling of complex networks and cryptocurrencies through the use of quantum computing,” said Sam Mugel, CTO at Multiverse Computing, in a statement. “Thanks to the algorithm we developed together with our partners at the Bank of Canada, we have been able to model a complex system reliably and accurately given the current state of quantum computing capabilities.”
“We wanted to test the power of quantum computing on a research case that is hard to solve using classical computing techniques,” said Maryam Haghighi, director for Data Science at the Bank of Canada, in a statement. “This collaboration helped us learn more about how quantum computing can provide new insights into economic problems by carrying out complex simulations on quantum hardware.”
Motivated by the empirical observations about the cooperative nature of adoption of cryptocurrency payments, this theoretical study found that for some industries, these digital assets would share the payments market with traditional bank transfers and cash-like instruments.
From an excerpt from the report: “According to our model, we find that cryptocurrencies would tend to share the market of financial transactions with traditional wire transfers. The total share of financial transactions made using cryptocurrency depends on the wire transfer costs set by each institution in the financial network. These costs are input parameters in our model, which allows us to apply the quantum algorithm to assess the stability of realistic financial networks.”