Quantum money is a proposed form of digital cash where authenticity and scarcity are enforced by quantum physics, not by ledgers, miners, or validators. In the NeverLocal Live session, Stefano Gogioso, Fabrizio Romano Genovese, and investor John Lilic articulated a deeper vision: quantum money as a new monetary primitive, one that anchors value to physical reality itself, enabling trustless exchange without consensus, institutions, or global shared state, and pointing toward a future where finance is enforced by Nature, not coordination.
For readers coming from crypto, it helps to start from the familiar: blockchains solve double-spending by keeping shared state and running consensus, which introduces tradeoffs in throughput, complexity, and privacy engineering. Quantum money aims at the same underlying target, value you can transfer without it being clonable, but tries to do so by leveraging physical constraints of quantum states rather than coordination through a global ledger.
The session starts with John highlighting a provocative implication: the long term quantum threat to blockchains may not be limited to breaking cryptography, but could also come from a future monetary rail that makes many ledger-based payment designs unnecessary. He described this as the bigger picture that is often missed: quantum money could make blockchains obsolete for large categories of payments because it can enable local, physics-enforced transactions without validators, miners, or shared state.
Where the idea comes from (Wiesner to modern research)
Quantum money traces back to Stephen Wiesner’s foundational proposal known as Conjugate Coding, which introduced the core idea of encoding information in quantum states so that counterfeiting becomes fundamentally difficult. Wiesner’s concept, as commonly discussed in later surveys and popular explanations, is that a mint could issue banknotes containing quantum states that can be verified but cannot be copied, because measurement disturbs unknown quantum states.
During the Live dialogue, Fabrizio emphasized that Wiesner’s early work was not originally presented as a solution to a widely recognized industry problem, which contributed to it being misunderstood for a long time. Fabrizio’s framing is that Wiesner’s real breakthrough was recognizing the applicability of quantum information as a resource rather than ordinary data, something that does not behave like a copyable file and therefore opens new cryptographic possibilities.
A key physical ingredient behind the resource framing is the no-cloning principle: unknown quantum states cannot be copied, which is why quantum states can be used to design anti-counterfeiting schemes. Modern research on quantum money goes beyond the original idea where only the issuer could check if a banknote was real. Today, people explore different ways to design quantum money and think about how it would work in real situations. Because of this, quantum money is not one single system, but a group of related approaches based on the same quantum principles.
This idea matters because money is not just a technical tool, but rather shared infrastructure. To work in the real world, it must scale across many users and situations, while balancing verification, privacy, and ease of use. During the session, the discussion often returned to a simple question: if quantum physics allows states that cannot be copied, can those states be used to create digital bearer instruments that behave like cash and still move across networks?
Why quantum money matters for crypto, stablecoins, and tradfi
Stefano grounded the motivation in a plain economic reality: whenever a society uses a medium of value that must be scarce and transferable, it must also be hard to forge or duplicate. Physical cash approaches this with sophisticated anti-counterfeiting measures, In purely digital environments, information can normally be copied at no cost. Cryptocurrencies solve this problem by adding external mechanisms such as cryptography, global ledgers, and consensus systems to prevent duplication and double spending. This comes at the cost of significant compromises, which users experience as fees, throughput limits, latency, MEV dynamics, privacy challenges, and governance or coordination risk. Quantum money would solve the same problem, without any of these downsides.
John’s argument goes further: if bearer value can be transferred peer to peer with cash-like privacy and without shared state, the economic rationale for many ledger-based stablecoin rails becomes less compelling. He connected this to how stablecoins function today as major trading counterparts and settlement instruments in crypto markets, suggesting that a quantum native bearer dollar could change what assets trade against and how liquidity routes form.
He also highlighted a security and governance angle that resonates with experienced crypto builders: blockchain finality can be protocol-defined and, in some historical circumstances, socially or politically reversible, whereas physics enforced transfer is anchored to physical law rather than to governance processes. Even if many users will continue to value blockchains for programmability and composability, the session’s thesis is that the money layer itself could migrate if physics offers a superior bearer primitive.
The discussion also stressed that quantum money is not merely a crypto issue, because the target is the broader financial system: settlement, cash-like transfer, and bearer instruments are fundamental primitives across markets. John framed the direction as physics-enforced finance, with quantum money as a flagship use case that could eventually reshape how institutions think about trust, transfer, and settlement guarantees.
At the same time, Fabrizio and Stefano were candid that many banks and large institutions are not seriously focused on quantum money today, often treating quantum initiatives as opportunities for signaling rather than near-term transformation. In their view, a meaningful shift will happen when the enabling stack, especially quantum networking and practical early forms of quantum memory, moves from prototypes to deployable demonstrators, at which point issuers and market structure players will have stronger incentives to engage.
The core concepts: qubits, photons, quantum internet, and memory
A recurring challenge in public discussions is vocabulary, so the session paused to clarify what a qubit is in practice. Fabrizio explained that a qubit is not a single physical object but an abstract unit of quantum information that can be implemented across different physical systems (with different trade offs), including photons, neutral atoms, trapped ions, and superconducting systems.
This matters because the implementation choice shapes what kind of money is feasible. For fast transfer across distance, photons are especially relevant because they can move through optical infrastructure and therefore act as flying carriers of quantum states suitable for networking.
However, photons are difficult to store for long periods, which is why quantum memory becomes central once the goal is not just transfer, but holding value in a usable way. Fabrizio identified quantum memories as a major bottleneck for implementing quantum money in practice, because money must be storable, not only transmissible.
He also highlighted a second engineering constraint: interoperability between transmission friendly and storage friendly substrates, meaning the ability to convert or interface quantum states between mediums (for example, receive a photonic state and store it in a memory based on neutral atoms). That requirement links quantum money directly to the broader quantum internet roadmap, because quantum networking also depends on distributing quantum states and often requires storage and interfacing to scale beyond short distances.
This is why the NeverLocal conversation treated quantum money and quantum internet as parts of the same trajectory. John described quantum internet infrastructure as being built quickly and argued that the world is approaching a modem moment, where once the missing enabling pieces click into place, utility expands rapidly.
Broader discussions of quantum networking similarly emphasize that quantum memories play a critical role in networking and distributed quantum protocols, reinforcing the session’s focus on memory as a gating factor. From an applied perspective, the NeverLocal view is that money is a uniquely powerful demand driver: once a credible path to quantum bearer value emerges, investment and engineering focus can accelerate the infrastructure flywheel.
A practical takeaway from the session is that quantum money should not be imagined as a single monolithic device, but as a stack. That stack includes (1) a method for encoding and verifying quantum states as bearer instruments, (2) networking to transfer them, and (3) memory and interfaces to store and handle them reliably.
Roadmap, early use cases, and common misconceptions
One misconception the speakers emphasized is timeline perception: quantum money sounds like far future science fiction, but the conversation argued it is closer than people assume because multiple parts of the enabling ecosystem are advancing in parallel. Stefano argued that fabrication and hardware progress are materially different today than in earlier decades, and that parts of photonic hardware are increasingly accessible, narrowing the gap between theory and deployable components.
Another misconception is underestimating how disruptive cash-like digital bearer could be once it exists. Stefano framed the value proposition for a broad audience as Bitcoin without miners and without consensus, meaning peer to peer transfer without global throughput bottlenecks and without needing a shared ledger for every payment.
John extended that narrative with a crypto native lens: privacy in blockchains often demands heavy engineering (for example, sophisticated cryptographic systems), while cash like local transfer has privacy as a default property because it is not broadcast to a global network. In his framing, quantum money can bring back that locality for digital value transfer, potentially delivering private transactions at scale without the same global coordination constraints.
A third misconception concerns who is building toward this future. Fabrizio and Stefano argued that some organizations discuss quantum tokens as a way to justify hardware roadmaps or attract investment, while NeverLocal’s posture is that quantum money is the end goal and the roadmap should be organized around making it real rather than around marketing demonstrations.
On early use cases, the session floated high frequency trading and fast settlement as plausible first wedges, precisely because short lived quantum states could still be economically useful when holding times are brief. Gaudenzio explicitly raised the idea that early quantum memories may be short lived but still valuable in ultra fast trading contexts, where consumption of states happens quickly and storage duration is less demanding.
Another near to mid term path discussed is that institutions that already issue money (banks and central banks) are natural candidates for minting or issuing quantum bearer instruments once the stack is viable, because they already sit at the origin point of value issuance. In that scenario, quantum money adoption could look less like a grassroots movement at first and more like an infrastructure transition led by issuers and market operators, with consumer UX arriving later as devices and networks mature.
The final misconception is that progress will be linear. The speakers argued that technology transitions often look slow until a threshold is crossed, after which applications and infrastructure reinforce each other in a flywheel. Their point was that quantum money benefits from a broader ecosystem building quantum networking and hardware for many reasons, so once early applications demonstrate real economic pull, acceleration can be rapid.