Why QBit Splits Proving and Consensus Into Two Tiers

QBit splits its network into two tiers: Sentries (provers) and Validators (verifiers). This isn't aesthetic. It's the only way to make post-quantum cryptography work at scale without absurd hardware requirements.

Here's the problem. ML-DSA-65 signatures are 3,293 bytes each, compared to 64 bytes for Ed25519. If every validator verified every signature on every transaction, you'd need roughly 6.3 Gbps per validator. That rules out commodity hardware entirely.

So QBit adds a proving layer. Sentries collect transactions, verify ML-DSA-65 signatures individually, and generate a single ZK-STARK proof covering the entire batch. Validators verify that one compact proof instead of thousands of individual signatures. Bandwidth drops by about 27x, to around 237 Mbps.

There's a second benefit: hardware specialization. Sentries use GPU acceleration for proof generation. Validators run on commodity hardware. The two roles have very different resource profiles, and separating them means neither is over-provisioned.