IonQ Inc.’s public warrants are entering their final trading days before a Sept. 30 expiration, with the company’s common stock trading at nearly four times the warrants’ $11.50 exercise price. The shares also rose sharply in extended-hours trading following a separate quantum-computing announcement.
IonQ shares were most recently quoted at $45.17 in overnight trading at 12:36 a.m. EDT Wednesday on the Blue Ocean ATS, about $33.67, or 292.8%, above the public warrants’ exercise price. IONQ had closed Tuesday’s regular session at $40.74, up 0.57%, before ending the after-hours session at $45.70, a 12.17% gain from the regular close.
The extended-hours rally followed IonQ’s Tuesday announcement of a real-time quantum error-correction decoder. The approaching warrant expiration is a separate event that IonQ disclosed in August, and there is no evidence that the warrant deadline drove Tuesday evening’s stock move.
IONQ WS Trading Ends Before Sept. 29 Open
IonQ said its NYSE-listed public warrants, which trade under IONQ WS, will expire on Sept. 30. Each warrant gives the registered holder the right to purchase one IonQ common share at an exercise price of $11.50.
The warrants will stop trading before the NYSE opens on Sept. 29, a step IonQ said is intended to allow timely settlement of exercises before expiration. IonQ common shares will continue trading normally on the NYSE under the IONQ ticker after the warrants expire.
IonQ reported 1,065,043 public warrants outstanding as of June 30, down from 1,326,356 at the end of 2025. During the first six months of 2026, 261,313 warrants were exercised, and the company reported $3.005 million in proceeds from public-warrant exercises. IonQ said it had not redeemed any public warrants through June 30.
IonQ has not disclosed a newer numerical public-warrant balance since June 30. Its subsequent Aug. 28 warrant-expiration filing and Sept. 8 guidance filing did not provide an updated outstanding count or separately report post-June public-warrant exercise proceeds.
The 1.065 million figure therefore reflects IonQ’s disclosed balance as of June 30; it does not establish how many public warrants remained outstanding on Sept. 23. If all 1,065,043 warrants reported on June 30 were still outstanding and were exercised for cash, they would result in about 1.065 million common shares being issued and approximately $12.25 million in exercise proceeds. Actual issuance and proceeds will depend on how many warrants remain outstanding and are exercised before expiration.
IonQ’s current dilution cannot be calculated reliably using the figures it has disclosed. Its latest reported common-share count predates the completion of the SkyWater Technology acquisition. IonQ’s June-quarter filing showed 381.0 million shares outstanding around the end of July, while the company subsequently issued 24,135,775 common shares when it completed the SkyWater acquisition on July 31.
The governing warrant documents state that the public warrants expire at 5 p.m. New York City time five years after completion of IonQ’s 2021 business combination. For a standard exercise, holders surrender the warrant through the warrant agent with the required exercise documentation and full payment of the exercise price. The documents provide for cashless exercise only under specified circumstances, including certain registration or redemption conditions; trading above $11.50 does not by itself create a blanket cashless-exercise right.
Separately, IonQ also has Series A and Series B private-warrant positions, including 36.0 million Series A private warrants and 43.0 million Series B private warrants as of June 30. Those securities have different exercise prices and terms and are not part of the Sept. 30 public-warrant expiration.
Quantum Error-Correction Announcement Preceded After-Hours Jump
IonQ said Tuesday that its researchers had demonstrated what the company described as the industry’s first end-to-end real-time quantum error-correction decoder running on a single standard off-the-shelf CPU. The “industry first” characterization is IonQ’s own.
The underlying research, published as an arXiv preprint by IonQ researchers Min Ye, Andrii Maksymov and Nicolas Delfosse, describes an end-to-end decoding stack for a modeled fault-tolerant trapped-ion architecture. It reports benchmarks covering as many as 408 logical qubits and up to one million T gates, with the full decoding pipeline running on a single conventional CPU. The paper assumes trapped-ion cycle times of one to five milliseconds. The reported benchmarks were based on modeled fault-tolerant workloads rather than a physical 408-logical-qubit IonQ computer performing the workload.
Tokenized IONQon Also Trades Higher
Meanwhile, a tokenized version of IonQ exposure was also trading higher. CoinMarketCap showed IonQ Tokenized Stock (Ondo), ticker IONQon, up 12.69% at $45.17, with about 9.97K tokens in circulation and a market capitalization of approximately $450,640.
IONQon is a separate tokenized product and should not be confused with IonQ common stock listed on the NYSE as IONQ.