What Is Qubic (QUBIC)? The AI Blockchain 29% Above Its Record-Low Close

Qubic (QUBIC) is a layer-1 blockchain whose miners train artificial intelligence, and its coin closed 29 September 2026 about 29% above its lowest close on record. That low came on 20 September, and the searches follow the rebound off it. QUBIC lives on its own chain with no token contract.

The Qubic price bottomed at a close of about $0.37 per million QUBIC on 20 September on both CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. It then closed higher every day from 23 to 29 September and finished at about $0.48 per million, or $0.00000048 a coin, on CoinMarketCap. That's 29.6% above the 20 September close on CoinMarketCap and 29.2% on CoinGecko, and still 95.8% below CoinGecko's record close of 2 March 2024.

What Is Qubic (QUBIC)?

Qubic is a layer-1 network with its own ledger and its own coin, so Qubic crypto has no token contract to look up. The project's documentation calls QUBIC an energy unit that pays for smart contracts and gets destroyed when it's spent.

The chain runs on 676 computors, the machines that execute transactions and smart contracts. Qubic's documentation says 451 of them must agree before anything is final, and transfers between addresses carry no fee.

Classic mining, laid out in our guide to how proof of work secures a blockchain, spends electricity on puzzles with no other use. Qubic points that effort at training neural networks for Aigarth, its long-running AI project, which the docs still describe as in development.

Why Is Qubic Trending?

Qubic is trending because its coin hit bottom and turned. On 20 September 2026 QUBIC closed at about $0.37 per million on both CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. That was the lowest close in CoinGecko's series, which starts on 14 November 2023, and the lowest in CoinMarketCap's since January 2024. The intraday low that day was about $0.34 per million on CoinMarketCap.

The first bounce came on 21 September with a 9.0% gain, and a small dip followed on 22 September. From 23 to 29 September QUBIC closed higher every day on both feeds, reaching its highest close since 12 July 2026.

Seven higher closes in a row sound like a breakout, yet this run was the smallest of its kind. CoinMarketCap's series holds five runs of seven or more higher closes, and this one added 20.0% from the 22 September close. The other four added between 36.1% and 113.5%.

Qubic pitches itself as decentralized AI, and the news came from its own all-hands call on 17 September, recapped on Qubic's blog on 22 September. The headline item was Neuraxon, a brain-like model the science team grows from fewer than 200 artificial neurons. The recap says it scored a best 0.38 on the ARC-AGI-3 reasoning benchmark on ordinary CPUs, up from 0.13. Qubic claims that beats several frontier AI models on the same test. The team also switched on its Ant Colony algorithm, BPP-9000, and a cross-chain oracle that lets Qubic smart contracts read other blockchains.

None of it lifted the price straight away. QUBIC closed 0.5% lower on 17 September and set its record-low close three days later. The seven-day climb began on 23 September, the day after the recap went up, and this page gives it no single cause.

How Does Qubic Work?

Qubic calls its design useful proof of work, with miners solving AI training tasks for computors. The better a computor's miners score, the higher it ranks, and the top 676 identities take the computor seats for the next epoch. Each epoch runs a week, from Wednesday 12:00 UTC to the following Wednesday.

What searchers call the Qubic Monero 51% attack grew out of that mining power's side job. Before its 2026 switch, Qubic split its miners' time between AI training and Monero mining. The network sold the Monero it earned to buy and burn QUBIC, and a community vote later sent half of those proceeds to computors as a bonus.

On 11 August 2025 the Qubic pool began what its blog headlines as a Monero network takeover demonstration. It used selfish mining, a tactic in which a pool withholds the blocks it finds. A message the blog quotes from 12 August counts 63 of the 122 Monero blocks in one window as Qubic's, a 51.6% share. Controlling most new blocks is what a 51% attack in crypto is, and Qubic's post says the push reorganised Monero's chain. QUBIC's close rose 44.1% on CoinMarketCap from 11 to 13 August 2025.

Qubic Dogecoin mining came next, on a timetable the team published on 27 March 2026. It set 1 April 2026 as the start of a three-phase switch away from Monero, with ASIC machines mining Dogecoin and CPUs and GPUs training Aigarth full time. Dogecoin runs on the Scrypt algorithm, which our guide to what Dogecoin is and why it still matterstouches on. The plan sold the mined Dogecoin to buy back QUBIC for computors and burned whatever went undistributed.

That phase is over. Qubic's 22 September recap says Monero and Dogecoin mining have both wound down as the protocol moved to its Ant Colony miner. It also lists Neuraxon mining integration as the next step on the core roadmap, so the benchmark model isn't mining work yet.

Qubic Tokenomics

Qubic tokenomics start from a cap of 200 trillion QUBIC in circulation, cut from 1,000 trillion by a community vote. The tokenomics page in Qubic's documentation sets seven-day epochs and a net emission that falls in steps.

A Qubic halving works differently from Bitcoin's. The page on how the emission mechanism works says the protocol still mints 1 trillion QUBIC every epoch. A halving raises the share of computor revenue sent to a burn contract, so the net figure falls while the gross stays fixed. At seven days an epoch, the next step down lands around 18 August 2027, a date this page derives from the schedule.

Smart-contract fees and the auction bids for each new contract's IPO are also destroyed, and the mechanism page says the 2025 Monero programme burned about 672 billion QUBIC. At 12:53 UTC on 30 September, Qubic's network RPC counted 55.22 trillion QUBIC burned. That equals 31% of the coins it counted in circulation.

The circulating figure depends on who's counting. At the 29 September close, CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko both counted 143.18 trillion QUBIC in circulation. The network's own count at 12:53 UTC was 177.78 trillion in circulation, 24% above the aggregators' figure. At the 29 September close that's a market value of $68.82 million on CoinMarketCap's basis or $85.45 million on the network's.

The real QUBIC has no contract to check. At 12:58 UTC on 30 September, CoinMarketCap's pair list still carried two QUBIC/SOL pools on a Solana exchange. Anything those pools hold is a separate Solana token with a contract of its own.

How to Buy Qubic Safely

Phemex lists no QUBIC market. Its public product list, read at 12:52 UTC on 30 September 2026, carries no QUBIC spot pair and no QUBIC futures contract.

If you buy QUBIC elsewhere, withdraw it to a Qubic wallet you control. Qubic's documentation lists official wallets from the core team for the web, for browsers and for phones, and says all of them are open source. A Qubic address is an ID derived from a private seed, so the seed is the key to your coins and never belongs in a website form.

Size the order to the books, because they're thin. At 12:58 UTC on 30 September the markets CoinMarketCap counts in its QUBIC price held about $14,200 of asks within 2% above the price. Bids within 2% below came to about $36,100. On 29 September QUBIC traded $1.82 million on CoinMarketCap, 1.65 times its 30-day daily average, so a $15,000 buy spread across all of those books would have lifted the price more than 2%.

What Are the Risks of Qubic?

Two Supply Counts, Two Market Caps

The aggregators and the network disagree by 34.6 trillion QUBIC on circulating supply. A screen showing the lower count makes Qubic's market value look about 19% smaller than the network's own count implies.

The Outside Buyers Have Left

Monero and then Dogecoin brought in money from other chains to buy QUBIC, and the 22 September recap says both have wound down. That leaves the emission burn, contract fees and IPO auctions as the supply brakes.

An Arbitrator Qubic Can't Identify

The arbitrator sets mining parameters, publishes the computor list every epoch and collects the QUBIC that underperforming computors don't earn. Qubic's own glossary says the entity controlling the current arbitrator remains unknown.

A Buy-and-Burn That Is Only a Proposal

The recap's investor plan would have outside buyers purchase QUBIC on the open market, burn it at once and collect 1.25 times their money over twelve months. Its pilot table lists 24.5% of the burn donation as redirected over a 15-epoch window, so less emission would be burned while the $1 million pilot runs. The recap says the plan is still at the feedback stage in Qubic's Discord.

Long Winning Streaks Have Faded Before

Two of the four earlier runs of seven or more higher closes left QUBIC higher 30 days later, and two left it lower. After the run that ended on 4 October 2025, QUBIC fell 47.1% by 3 November.

Is Qubic a Good Investment?

The honest answer is that the 29 September close says more about how far QUBIC fell than about where it goes. That close stands 56.2% below the 2026 high close of about $1.10 per million, set on 31 March on CoinMarketCap. It's also 83.1% below the close of 12 August 2025, the day Qubic's blog announced the Monero blocks.

The case for more than a bounce needs two things to come true. Fee and auction burns would have to offset about 240 billion of net emission a week without mining revenue behind them, and Neuraxon would have to become the paid mining work the roadmap promises.

It suits you if you want exposure to Qubic's AI research or plan to spend QUBIC through the AEON payments app, which the recap says takes it at more than 20 million merchants in six countries. It doesn't suit you if you need a Phemex market, one agreed supply number or a large exit in a single order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does QUBIC have a contract address?

No, because QUBIC is the native coin of Qubic's own chain and lives at Qubic IDs. The documentation says an ID starts as a seed that becomes a private key and then a SchnorrQ public key. That key becomes a string of base-26 letters with a checksum appended.

Who created Qubic?

Qubic's documentation names Sergey Ivancheglo as its founder and credits him with IOTA and NXT, two earlier crypto projects. At the 17 September 2026 all-hands, David Vivancos and Jose Sanchez presented the science work.

Can you mine Qubic?

Yes, by running Qubic's miner on your own hardware and pointing it at a computor or a pool. Each epoch up to 256 candidates can climb into the 676-seat computor set, and only computors that serve the full week collect QUBIC.

What is the Qubic price?

QUBIC closed 29 September 2026 at about $0.48 per million on CoinMarketCap, the last settled close this page uses. That day it traded between about $0.454 and $0.495 per million, and CoinGecko's record close was about $11.39 per million.

Final Thoughts

The number that will outlast this bounce is the cap. On the network's count, 177.78 trillion of the 200 trillion QUBIC already circulate, so the schedule can add at most 12.5% more coins. On the aggregators' count of 143.18 trillion, the same cap leaves room for 39.7% more, and a holder can't size the dilution ahead until those two figures agree.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.