Qtum QTUM is based on Bitcoin's UTXO transaction paradigm, with the addition of smart contract execution and decentralized applications (DApps). The platform has added support for DeFi applications.
Qtum QTUM is a general blockchain aimed at addressing four issues that the founders of BTC and ETH blockchain platforms have found most problematic: interoperability, governance, rigidity and cost-effectiveness of proof-of-work mechanisms and the difficulties of connecting smart agreements with applications of real life.
The Account Abstraction Layer (AAL) and the Decentralized Governance Protocol (DGP) are two unique technologies on the Qtum blockchain that try to solve this problem (DGP).
The Account Abstraction Layer combines the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) account layer from Bitcoin with the Ethereum-inspired smart contract layer. It enables users to create and host programs on virtual computers, including the virtual machine of Ethereum (EVM) and x86.
It can also be implemented in i686 commands, C, C++, Rust and Python, which makes adopting existing apps and compiling for Qtum very easy. This includes several languages.
Qtum QTUM plans to integrate the common programming libraries in the form of intelligent contracts not only allow smart turing completed contracts.
The decentralized governance protocol allows smart contracts to change the core network parameters such as block size and gas fees without ever hardly having to fork the blockchain. Through voting, miners (stakers), developers, and QTUM holders across the ecosystem participate in blockchain governance, allowing the blockchain to self-manage, upgrade, and iterate.
The project was introduced in March 2016 and an initial coin offering (ICO) was held a year later in March 2017, bringing the project's founders 15 million USD. The primary chain of Qtum was launched on September 13th, 2017. Originally, the Qtum coin was issued as an ETH-20 token, but it was switched to the native blockchain with the introduction of the mainnet.
Patrick Dai is the project's founder and the Qtum Foundation's chairman. He went to Draper University to study computer science before dropping out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' PhD program. He began his career as a product manager at Alibaba before moving on to several blockchain start-ups, including Factom, Vechain, Bitse Group, and Meilink until founding Qtum in 2016.
He used to go by the name Steven Dai when he was the CTO of the controversial BitBay project, which was the focus of an alleged exit fraud incident.
Neil Mahi, the CTO and blockchain architect, and Jordan Earls, the main developer, are the other two co-founders. Stephen (Xiaolong) XU has been a lead developer at Qtum since 2017. He previously worked as a software developer for Tencent and Microsoft and holds a degree in Computer Vision from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Many of the team members listed on the official Qtum website do not appear to have a LinkedIn or GitHub profile. However, some high-profile backers have expressed their support for Qtum, including Roger Ver of Bitcoin.com and Jeremy Gardner, an early crypto investor turned skincare professional, co-founder of Augur, and EIR in Blockchain Capital.
The technical approach taken by Qtum differs from those of Bitcoin and Ethereum. For network security, Qtum selected the MPoS (mutualized proof-of-stake) consensus mechanism. It is a modification of the Proof-of-Stake 3.0 protocol.
The system encourages users to keep their currencies locked to make block validation easier and more secure. This is referred to as staking. Confirming each block is a competition amongst coin holders, in which they compete for the opportunity to validate the block based on network connectivity and random chance.
Unlike earlier PoS protocols, the block reward is fixed and does not depend on the age of the coins to determine the likelihood of receiving it.
The pay-outs are proportionate to the number of coins invested, therefore the more coins staked, the more incentives the user receives. Furthermore, the MPoS protocol protects against "junk contract" attacks by dividing 10% of the block reward among the block producer and nine previous miners and deferring the remaining 90% by 500 blocks in the future.
Unlike Bitcoin's proof-of-work method, proof-of-stake algorithms are much less expensive to operate, are more environmentally friendly, and can give a large amount of decentralization, which is the cornerstone of blockchain security.