Michael Shad

Married with Blue collar hands, and a White collar mind.
investing in Faith+Family+Fire= legacy

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@IonQ_Inc The more I study the companies that consistently win, the more a pattern stands out.
They don’t just build products..they build the system around them.
Apple built a closed loop of hardware, software, services, and distribution.
NVIDIA didn’t stop at chips.. they built the software layer and developer ecosystem that everything runs through.
Tesla connected vehicles, energy, and infrastructure into one integrated system.
IonQ is doing the same.. not just building quantum computers, but building the full stack: hardware, cloud access, software, networking, secure communications, and manufacturing partnerships.
That kind of integration is what creates real staying power.
It’s not about one product,.. it’s about owning the system the future runs on.

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@quantum_nyang Absolutely 💯

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@Clip_Station_ Now that's hilarious

[Gene @genejchan]

$QNT has almost caught up to $IONQ's market cap at $21B.

This is despite revenues being an order of magnitude less than IonQ, and despite not being a platform.

What is the market telling us?

It's saying it values PROVEN and DELIVERED quantum computing specs over anything else.

IonQ needs to deliver Tempo and 256. Roadmaps no longer cut it.

What's commercially available right now - the Forte Enterprise - is way out-of-date.

Put up or shut up indeed.

[Desmond @DesFrontierTech]

$IONQ

A lot of the conversation right now revolves around qubits. Hardware gives people something to count. You can rank companies by qubits, put the numbers in a spreadsheet, and convince yourself the future will cooperate.

Sergey Brin recently made the point that compute is dessert. He wasn't arguing against compute. Google spends billions on it. His point was that algorithmic improvements have often mattered more than raw increases in hardware.

Niccolo de Masi said something similar when he described the industry evolving from hardware to compilers to software to algorithms and called quantum algorithms a scarce pinch point.

We've seen versions of this before. Hardware gets everyone excited because hardware is visible. Then other pieces start showing up. More software and tools. More people figuring out what the machine is actually good for. Before long, everyone is arguing about entirely different things. So I wonder whether investors are focusing on the easiest things to measure rather than the things that matter later.

Of course qubits and fidelity and scaling are important. If the hardware doesn't work, nothing else matters either. I don't think ten years from now anyone is going to care who posted the biggest number.

The stuff I spend time looking at is harder to fit in a spreadsheet. I look at customers trying to fit these systems into existing workflows, software beginning to form around the hardware, useful algorithms showing up in new places, and work in one domain spilling into another. I like seeing customers come back with new problems instead of treating quantum as a one off experiment.

de Masi called algorithms a scarce pinch point because they require domain expertise, classical computing expertise, and quantum expertise all at once. A useful algorithm for materials science doesn't necessarily stay in materials science. Optimization techniques don't remain inside logistics. Industries overlap. It's how technology has always worked.

I spend less time worrying about qubit beauty contests than I used to. What I see from IonQ management is a lot of discussion around networking, security, software, applications, and ecosystems. Maybe they're wrong. But at least they're talking about the parts of the stack that become important once the machine itself stops being the whole conversation.

Everyone can count qubits. Putting a value on them has always been the harder part.

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@genejchan I'd like to read your article! Its something I enjoy doing a lot is going over stuff like that.

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

The story will have to change eventually. I think the difference is investors vs traders.
The trader wants a catylst the inventory wants a trend.
The trader focuses on the next earnings report.
The investor focuses on the future that is being built.
Neither approach is wrong,
But they are playing different games

[Hanna353 @HannaSuds]

$IonQ President Trump’s June 22 Quantum Executive Orders and the Tsunami Thesis: Why the Policy Turn Strengthens IonQ’s Position

When The Quantum Networking Tsunami argued that quantum networking sat at an inflection the market wasn’t yet pricing, the §0.3.2 shoreline image — the water pulling back before the wave — was a deliberate wager that federal and institutional attention would arrive after the thesis, not before it. The two executive orders President Trump signed on June 22, 2026 are that arrival. Executive Order 14411, “Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation,” writes quantum networking into national policy as a named priority, and the companion order, Executive Order 14409, “Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks,” accelerates the precise national-security timeline the report’s §10.5a identified as the reason militaries fund quantum networking ahead of visible need. The President called the signing “a big step forward” for the United States in the sector, and for an IonQ networking leadershipthesis built on positioning before the inflection, the orders are the strongest external confirmation the argument has received — landing squarely on the part of the stack where IonQ is most differentiated amongst competitors and the clear leading stakeholder in quantum networking.

The clearest validation is the order’s treatment of networking as the enabling layer of distributed quantum computing — the report’s analytical core, not a peripheral claim. Section 5(b)(ii) directs the Department of Energy to plan for using quantum networking to enable distributed quantum computing, and Section 5(c) directs agencies to prioritize research, development, testing, and evaluation of both applications and hardware for quantum networking. This is the federal government adopting, in its own statutory language, the two-networks architecture the report’s Option C cover framing described as infrastructure ownership across land and space with compounding effects. The §12 orbit metaphor — stable orbit requires velocity, vector, and altitude achieved at once, while competitors “launch sounding rockets that arc up and fall back” — was an argument that full-stack integration beats single-layer point products.

An executive order that funds networking as the connective tissue of distributed computing is that argument elevated to national policy. IonQ’s trapped-ion modality, with its high-fidelity, networkable qubits, is among the architectures best suited to the near-term, error-corrected machine the order’s §4(c) asks DOE to specify within 90 days.

The supply-chain, foundry, and security provisions extend the validation directly into IonQ’s vertical-integration story, and they do so on the geopolitical and national-defense stage rather than the commercial one alone. Section 6(d)(i) directs the Secretary of War to increase domestic access to QIST-relevant foundry resources and strengthen critical supply chains — the policy analogue of the SkyWater acquisition thesis the series has tracked, in which owning domestic manufacturing converts a commercial advantage into a national-security qualification.

The China dimension is explicit and central: Section 9 directs the government to prevent countries of concern from acquiring critical quantum-enabling technologies by harmonizing research-security and export-control policies with allies, while directing State, within 120 days, to align bilateral and multilateral efforts behind these priorities. Read alongside Executive Order 14409’s accelerated post-quantum-cryptography migration — a direct response to the “harvest now, decrypt later” threat from strategic adversaries — June 22 marks a decisive step in repositioning quantum from a research ambition to an instrument of American statecraft and defense readiness in open competition with China. For a U.S.-domiciled, full-stack operator that already owns its land and space network layers and is bringing a domestic foundry in-house, that elevation is not abstract: it moves IonQ closer to the center of a capability the government has now defined as essential to national security, inside exactly the trusted-supply-chain, allied-market environment Section 9 is built to protect. The report’s §0.1 launch-window image — miss the window and “the lead does not merely grow; it pulls the reachable window closed behind it” — describes precisely the compounding dynamic these provisions reward.

The orders also mark a transition in the Quantum Tech Integration series including the Quantum NetworkingTsunami report that have been long anticipated: the maturation of quantum from a speculative research field into a structured national market. White House science adviser Michael Kratsios framed the moment as an inflection point — private-sector research, he said, is now “starting to pay off into commercial applications,” and the executive order is intended to “turbocharge that.” The mechanisms back the framing: the QC-ADDS effort establishes a concrete federal demand signal anchored at a DOE national laboratory, and Section 4(d) directs Commerce to develop a plan — potentially including advance market commitments — to draw private quantum-computing firms into the national effort. Advance market commitments are, by design, market-maturing instruments: they convert uncertain future demand into bankable near-term signal, the kind of demand-side scaffolding that lets a capital-intensive sector cross from demonstration to deployment.

A maturing market rewards operators who already span the full stack and can absorb a federal demand signal across hardware, networking, and applications at once — which is the precise competitive shape the Tsunami report argued IonQ had assembled ahead of the field. As the market matures, the premium shifts from who can show a single impressive result to who can deliver an integrated, fielded capability, and that shift runs in IonQ’s favor.

The maturation thesis extends into application domains the orders enable without directing, and healthcare is the clearest example — a point worth stating carefully, since neither order funds healthcare specifically and the connection is a downstream one rather than a mandate. QC-ADDS is explicitly oriented toward scientific-discovery applications, and the fields the order and its commentators name — materials science, chemistry, and the modeling of complex systems — are the same computational foundations that underwrite drug discovery, molecular simulation, and medical research.

As a science-grade machine moves toward a national laboratory and the surrounding commercial ecosystem matures, the application surface that quantum can credibly address widens toward exactly these high-value, healthcare-adjacent problems. For an operator positioned across the full stack, that widening application surface is the long-horizon demand the networking-and-distributed-computing infrastructure ultimately exists to serve — though, consistent with the report’s evidence discipline, this is a directional thesis about where a maturing market leads, not a claim that the June 22 orders fund healthcare outcomes.

The one fact that invites a further reading and understanding - something I have written about extensively in recently — IonQ’s absence from the May Commerce tranche of roughly $2 billion in CHIPS-Act equity stakes — dissolves once the funding mechanism is examined firsthand, and the executive orders only widen the channel that remains open. That program is not a closed pool: its underlying vehicle, the NIST CHIPS R&D Office’s Broad Agency Announcement (2025-NIST-CHIPS-CRDO-01), remains open on a rolling basis through October 2029, and Commerce’s own release states it continues to solicit proposals. The nine awards were explicitly characterized as an “initial portfolio” of non-binding letters of intent, not a finished allocation.

The most plausible reason IonQ could not sit in that first tranche is mechanical rather than strategic — and this is my analytical inference based upon understanding of law, not a determination IonQ or Commerce has publicly stated: the disclosed equity model requires each recipient to issue new stock to Commerce (D-Wave’s 8-K showed $100 million in newly issued common stock; Rigetti’s used a discount-priced equity formula), and a company cannot cleanly issue federal-award equity while a transaction the size of the SkyWater acquisition sits under FTC HSR Second Request review, with the deal’s final structure and consideration not yet fixed. Nothing in the BAA forecloses a later application.

Critically - once the government’s review concludes and the HSR desk closes, that constraint lifts, and IonQ would be positioned to apply into a still-open program — now operating under executive orders that have specifically prioritized the networking, distributed-computing, and domestic-foundry capabilities IonQ brings. The absence, properly understood, is most likely a timing artifact that resolves on its own, into a more favorable policy environment than existed in May.

The strong view is that June 22 moved IonQ’s activities to federal priority. The escape-velocity test the report set in §0.3.2 — “below it, every climb decays; above it, the trajectory is irreversible” — now has policy beneath it: a DOE specification due in 90 days, a Commerce advance-market-commitment plan due in 180, foundry-access and supply-chain provisions that reward exactly the vertical integration IonQ has built, an export-control and security architecture aimed at preserving U.S. advantage over China, a market-maturing demand signal anchored at a national laboratory, and a networking mandate that reads as the report’s two-networks thesis in the government’s own words. The §22 surfer was always meant to describe an operator positioned before the wave formed — “first on the wave owns the wave,” not swimming after one already gathering speed. On the evidence of June 22, the wave is no longer hypothetical, IonQ is sitting where the Quantum Networking Tsunami report said it would be when the water came back in, and the one door that looked closed in May turns out to have been open the whole time — and to open wider now.

With the signing of President Trump’s two Executive Order’s, IonQ’s leadership operations are a clear critical focus by the United States Government.

For more information on IonQ's quantum networking advantage, please click here:
https://t.co/T6gzXrpuKN

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

Hanna,
Sounds a lot like what IonQ has been building and what you've been reporting on for quite some time now.
That's some well-earned validation!
It's always interesting to watch the rest of the world start talking about things you've been connecting the dots on for some time now.

[Hanna353 @HannaSuds]

$IONQ Another step forward. Another risk reduction.

All about Alpha’s and Beta’s.

One word comes to mind: Delicious!

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@TechInnovationz You took the words right out of my mouth..

[TechInnovation @TechInnovationz]

$IONQ

Trump signed Executive Order 14411 today quantum is now a whole-of-government priority.

It's broad: a DOE-hosted quantum computer (QC-ADDS), domestic foundries, sensing, networking, post-quantum, and advance market commitments for commercial players.

That's the full stack IonQ has spent billions acquiring now written into national policy.

#IonQ #Quantum #QIST

[IonQ @IonQ_Inc]

IonQ welcomes the Trump Administration’s Executive Orders on advancing U.S. leadership in quantum technology. The Executive Orders reflect the growing strategic importance of quantum technologies to U.S. economic competitiveness, scientific leadership, and national security.

As the Q-Day timeline accelerates, organizations across the public and private sectors must prepare now for the transition to post-quantum security. Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is a critical first step in protecting existing infrastructure at scale. Longer-term resilience will increasingly rely on advanced quantum communications technologies, including Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Sustained federal focus and investment across research, infrastructure, manufacturing, workforce development, and commercialization are essential to maintaining U.S. leadership and strengthening national security.

IonQ operates commercially available quantum systems built in the U.S. and works with federal agencies, national laboratories, research institutions, and industry partners to advance deployable quantum technologies. We look forward to supporting efforts that strengthen America’s quantum ecosystem, accelerate innovation and adoption, expand the nation’s quantum workforce, and ensure the U.S. remains the global leader in quantum technologies.

Executive Order - Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation: https://t.co/8OpbiUrPbv

Executive Order - Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks: https://t.co/OwREat6mHm

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

You were 💯% right Hanna and that report was a dandy for sure. Me and a friend started racing and betting shares on who could build faster it was a good decision my friend. Thank you for all your reports they are all equally valuable in my eyes but the one on Horizon definitely was golden.

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@RealChickenBoy9 There's no bigger blessing than children! Congratulations

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@natemcgrady That's awesome congratulations

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@genejchan @unusual_whales I foresee a lot of rich people moving across state lines.. 😂

[Michael Shad @Truthinthetape]

@genejchan @HannaSuds I guess it depends on what kind of pool content it is. There's always a weirdo out there

[4FIRE @netcreat]

It's past 2 a.m., but I've finally wrapped up my analysis. Here's what I found.
https://t.co/vv8JUBg7OU

Duke University researchers have demonstrated tripartite entanglement between three remote trapped-ion quantum memories using only photonic interconnects.

At first glance, this may look like "just another entanglement experiment." In reality, it represents something much more significant.

For over two decades, Christopher Monroe has argued that the future of quantum computing will not be built from a single giant processor, but from many smaller quantum processors connected through photonic networks. This paper provides one of the strongest experimental validations of that vision to date.

The team created a heralded three-node GHZ state across independent ion-trap systems, achieved a fidelity of 84.1%, violated the Mermin inequality by 27σ, and closed the detection loophole.

Importantly, this is not yet a quantum internet. The paper does not address quantum repeaters, quantum routing, entanglement swapping networks, or distributed logical qubits. Those remain major challenges for the field.

What this work demonstrates is something more fundamental:

Remote quantum memories can be connected through photons and made to share a single quantum state.

In classical networking terms, this is less like building the internet itself and more like proving that the first reliable road between distant cities can actually be built.

The result marks an important transition from point-to-point Bell pairs toward multi-node quantum networks and moves the field one step closer to modular quantum computing and distributed quantum systems.

The work also provides new context for IonQ's acquisition of Lightsynq. One of the key bottlenecks highlighted by this experiment remains the generation, storage, synchronization, and distribution of photonic entanglement across multiple nodes—precisely the area where Lightsynq has been focusing its research.

It is also closely aligned with the concept behind Lightsynq's Entanglement Service Provider (ESP) patents, which envision a future network layer capable of creating, managing, and distributing entanglement as a network resource. While this paper does not implement such a system, it demonstrates one of the fundamental building blocks that would be required for it.

Perhaps most interestingly, it aligns remarkably well with the long-term roadmap Monroe outlined more than a decade ago—and with the broader quantum networking vision now being pursued by Lightsynq, Harvard, MIT, AWS Center for Quantum Networking, and other leading groups.

The performance is still modest. The architecture, however, is beginning to look very real.

Outstanding work by Team Duke and Prof. Monroe and and the @IonQ_Inc team.

[Paul LeCoque @paullecoque]

@netcreat https://t.co/esAxFU2Cwf

[TechInnovation @TechInnovationz]

$IONQ

Weekly Recap · June 13–19 🧾

The week IonQ stopped looking like a stock and started looking like sovereign infrastructure.

🇮🇹 Rome de Masi's doctrine: "the quantum age will be powered by sovereign infrastructure"
🇮🇹 Italy 1B+ project, state-backed, with the government in the room
📄 The document Chris Monroe's new white paper: a quantum future like the early internet (small, high-quality systems linked by light, not one giant machine) + the first 3-node network, 88% fidelity
👥 5 senior hires + 30 summer interns
🧠OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI named as the next rooms

Full recap below 👇

#IonQ #Quantum #QuantumComputing