What Is QTUM

Between late September and early October, at least seven financial institutions in South Korea experienced data breaches, including Shinhan Bank, Kookmin Bank, and Hana Bank. Approximately 25,000 customers of Shinhan Bank and around 40,000 customers of Yegaram Savings Bank were affected, with leaked information including names, phone numbers, annual income, and loan limits; however, no theft of funds has been reported. The attacks primarily targeted peripheral banking systems such as loan inquiry services used by loan intermediaries and employee mobile office systems. Several attacks involved overlapping IP addresses, leading South Korean regulatory authorities to suspect they were carried out by the same attacker. On October 6, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung stated that these attacks might have utilized AI. On October 7, CrowdStrike reported that the attacker controlled the operation using a server located in Hong Kong, and another server running the open-source AI penetration testing system ARTEX. Investigators obtained the ARTEX configuration files, Claude Code chat records, and AI memory files. The configuration indicated that the attacker primarily used DeepSeek v4.1-flash to drive ARTEX, also employing Claude Code, and had previously invoked GLM-5.3 and Grok 4.6 in other sessions. Chat records revealed that the attacker inquired about channels for selling the leaked data in South Korea and related Telegram trading groups, and requested AI to draft a resume for a security researcher documenting the ARTEX penetration testing results, leaving prompts that included information such as age 26, Maoming, Guangdong, South China University of Technology, and contact details, although the birth date did not match the stated age. CrowdStrike assessed that the attacker might be using Chinese and aiming for profit, but their true identity has not yet been confirmed.

Miguel Palencia, the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Qtum, stated that they plan to transition from a cryptocurrency mining operator to an AI chatbot and image operator. The GPU of the Qtum Foundation will support the Quantum AI program, which includes the deployment of the first phase of a conversation chatbot similar to ChatGPT called Qtum Solstice, based on an open-source model, and a text-to-image generation model similar to Midjourney called Qtum Qurator. After the first phase is deployed, the Qtum Foundation will begin to improve the underlying technology of the product, including the modeling layer and the decentralized economic layer, which will integrate all content on the Qtum blockchain.

Qtum announced on social media that it plans to build a set of tools this year to enable the Qtum network to support BRC-20 tokens, starting with support for Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens on the testnet.