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The Quantum Internet Application Challenge begins Round Three: Innovation accelerates the Entangled Future blueprint

The third annual Quantum Internet Application Challenge (QIAC) has accelerated the race to build a Quantum Internet (QI), a revolutionary network that uses quantum mechanics' unusual and powerful properties. The Quantum Internet Alliance (QIA), part of the EU's Quantum Flagship, opened 2025 registration on October 31, 2025. The Challenge invites global scholars, inventors, and students to propose quantum application prototypes.

More than a competition, this effort helps turn theoretical physics into practical technologies. By providing sophisticated modelling tools, the QIAC is crowdsourcing the "killer apps" that will define the earliest phases of this new network infrastructure. The quantum internet is open to new ideas and prototypes. Quantum entanglement must revolutionise sensing, processing, and communication in the entries. Innovators must submit ideas by December 21, 2025.

Software Foundation: Impossible Prototyping Use of SquidASM is crucial to the 2025 challenge. SquidASM is QIA's open-source quantum-network simulation framework. SquidASM, based on the sophisticated NetSquid network simulator, lets engineers test and execute complex quantum protocols before implementing a quantum internet. Participants can use the framework to test their apps in real life. Applications are evaluated against numerous quantum device and channel-specific noise models to illustrate technological challenges, specifications, and error-reduction tactics for forthcoming quantum hardware.

A powerful software stack is needed because quantum networks are governed by physics that differs from classical networks in superposition, entanglement, and the no-cloning theorem. In light of this new reality, programming must change. NetQASM is a low-level instruction set architecture utilised by SquidASM and NetSquid. The NetQASM interface allows hybrid quantum-classical programming, enabling remote entanglement, classical logic, and local quantum gates. These technological limits and the expensive cost of practical quantum gear would slow the field's advancement without this modelling capacity.

Quantum Internet Alliance Strategy The QIAC aims to create a cross-European Quantum Internet based on entanglement. The Quantum Internet (QI) should work with the classical internet when completely completed. It will use qubits to distribute entanglement across long distances, surpassing conventional networks.

QI development requires new network end nodes, quantum repeaters, and quantum memory. This new architecture's application layer must be investigated using the QIAC to ensure that the network is built with impactful, well-defined use cases.

The Challenge's ideas typically show where the quantum internet could make a difference, said Michele Amoretti, QIA Use Case Team Lead and Director of the University of Parma's Quantum Software Laboratory. These submissions can help it research and specify future quantum network uses. In his conclusion, the QIAC “is a way to bring fresh ideas into the heart of mission together they are shaping the use cases that will drive the global quantum internet of tomorrow.”

Applications Driving Round 3

Round 3 candidates should focus their prototypes on three basic quantum applications. Secure communication, distributed computation, and quantum sensing are the most revolutionary fields powered by entanglement-driven networking.

Quantum Distributed Computing

The Quantum Internet's Distributed Quantum Computing is intriguing. Quantum computers can only manage a few qubits, severely limiting their potential. To overcome this limitation, DQC combines numerous smaller quantum computers to construct a conceptually larger system.

These abilities depend on how successfully the quantum network distributes high-fidelity entangled qubit pairs to remote nodes. This enables quantum teleportation and gate teleportation to convey quantum states and activities over vast distances. The successful implementation of DQC can scale up computations for complex network optimisation problems or quantum simulation. QIAC participants must develop resource management and routing plans for this hybrid quantum-classical, multi-node environment.

Secure Advanced Communication

Despite Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), a well-known and commercially available approach that uses quantum mechanics to guarantee unconditionally safe key exchange, the Quantum Internet will enable more complicated protocols.

The 2025 challenge encourages unique applications beyond key exchange. Since it allows secure information transmission without pre-assigned keys, quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is an important research topic. Healthcare, defence, and finance companies that handle sensitive data need this capacity to convey data in an impregnable method that detects eavesdropping quickly. It predicts that quantum networks would use these and other innovative cryptographic methods that use entanglement for physical-layer security.

Quantum Metrology and Sensing

Entanglement brings distant quantum systems together for distributed quantum sensing and metrology. This application employs a quantum network to link scattered quantum sensors for exact measurements that classical devices cannot match.

Sharing quantum states allows these networks to synchronise processes. A new navigation system needs ultra-precise distributed clocks, while upgraded battery technologies and material research need better magnetic field measurements. These submissions must leverage entanglement between distant nodes to get this crucial “quantum advantage” in synchronisation and measurement accuracy.

The Reward and Legacy

Innovative creativity has made the Quantum Internet Application Challenge famous. Italy's Claudio Cicconetti won the 2023 competition with his quantum-network benchmarking tools and a QuTech/Delft research tour. The highest award in 2024 went to Mexican Roberto Navarro for his work on “Graph State Generation,” which is crucial to multi-party quantum communication architecture. Both years' runners-up projects include quantum key distribution methods, quantum-based voting protocols, and network coordination algorithms, demonstrating the field's creativity.