LuxQuanta, a Spanish maker of quantum key distribution (QKD) equipment, said on July 6, 2026, that QUARTERNEXT, a six-member European consortium it coordinates, had officially launched. The consortium plans to mature continuous-variable QKD (CV-QKD) and related components into what LuxQuanta called “certifiable, industrial-grade systems.”
In QKD, two parties use quantum states of light, typically sent over optical fiber, to agree on a shared secret key and to detect an eavesdropper who disturbs those states. In the continuous-variable form, the sender encodes the key in the amplitude and phase of weak laser pulses. The receiver reads them with coherent detectors similar to those in conventional optical telecom equipment, instead of the single-photon detectors used in other QKD designs.
For security buyers, QUARTERNEXT is a four-year plan to make CV-QKD equipment ready for formal certification. Formal certification is an official confirmation, after independent testing, that a product meets a published security standard.
LuxQuanta said the consortium would give Nostradamus its hardware and software “as primary test vehicles.” Nostradamus is the EU project to set up a laboratory for testing and evaluating QKD equipment for EuroQCI, the quantum communication network the EU is building across its member states.
Members and funding
Four of the six members, LuxQuanta, Quside, Chilas, and fragmentiX, are small and medium-sized companies. The other two are the Spanish telecommunications operator Telefónica and the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT). LuxQuanta described AIT as Austria’s largest research and technology organization.
On its project page, the consortium said QUARTERNEXT would run for 48 months. It said the European Union co-funds the project through call DIGITAL-IRIS2-2025-QCI-01 of the Digital Europe Programme. LuxQuanta referred to the funding call as the program’s “IRIS² QCI call” and to the effort as “a four-year project.”
In the launch release and on the project page, the consortium gave no amount for the EU grant, no start date, and no targets for transmission distances or for key rates, the number of secret key bits a link generates each second.
Roles
According to the release, LuxQuanta will work on the security of CV-QKD protocols and deliver “a certifiable system aligned with end-user and EuroQCI requirements.” Quside will improve its quantum random number generators for cryptographic applications. Such generators draw random numbers from a quantum process, for use in keys.
Chilas will adapt its tunable lasers for the consortium’s devices. Another member, fragmentiX, will develop a secret-sharing appliance with higher data rates and standardized interfaces for delivering QKD-generated keys, and it intends to have the appliance certified. In secret sharing, data is split among several holders so that the original can be rebuilt only when enough shares are combined.
Telefónica will lead work on software-defined network architecture for quantum communications and will validate the results in TEFQCI, its production quantum communication infrastructure. In software-defined networking, operators manage a network’s devices centrally through software. AIT will develop its key management and software-defined networking tools for QKD networks and carry out security testing and vulnerability assessments of the QKD layer.
Certification route
“Certification is central to the QUARTERNEXT mission,” LuxQuanta wrote. On the project page, the consortium said it is driving QKD “toward formal security certification” for deployment across EuroQCI and Europe’s critical infrastructure.
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) said that Nostradamus began in early 2024 under the Digital Europe Programme. Deutsche Telekom leads the Nostradamus consortium, whose partners include Thales and AIT, Telekom said in January 2024.
The JRC also said it had been selected to host the Nostradamus laboratory, with operational activities planned from 2026 onward. It said operation of the laboratory would pass progressively to its site in Ispra, Italy, with the transfer complete by November 2027.
Interoperability and components
Beyond laboratory tests, the consortium plans to demonstrate “multi-vendor interoperability” on Telefónica’s TEFQCI infrastructure, under what LuxQuanta called “real-world deployment conditions.” It also plans to design ways for quantum channels to share existing optical fiber with classical channels, which carry ordinary data traffic. According to LuxQuanta, telecom operators would pay less to deploy QKD if the two kinds of channel share fiber.
The consortium has committed to developing EU-made quantum communication components, LuxQuanta wrote. It will align its work with PIXEurope, the EU pilot line for photonic integrated circuits under the Chips Joint Undertaking. Photonic integrated circuits are chips that guide and process light.
QUARTERNEXT follows QUARTER, a three-year European project in which, LuxQuanta said, the partners validated QKD integration in finance, healthcare, cloud infrastructure, and data centers.
