I have 0.1 worth of Qtum in my funding wallet. A Qtum coin costs about 3 dollars as of today (30.10.2023). But I am more interested in what the Qtum team has to offer the blockchain industry, and yes - what will become of my 0.1 Qtum in the coming years. Will it ride a quantum wave to millions or will it dwindle down to minuscules? 

I heard that its Multi-wallet Ecosystem supports Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, hardware wallet, web and other clients. But to learn more I visited their website. 

Their punchline is “BLOCKCHAIN  DONE  RIGHT”. [Courtesy: Qtum.com]

“Fast, Green, Stable, Decentralized,” says Qtum and identify itself as “a scalable Proof-of-Stake platform that allows developers to leverage the upstream benefits of Ethereum and Bitcoin” [Courtesy: Qtum.com]

I went through their whitepaper. There are four major developments worth noting: AAL, x86, MPoS and DGP. Going through them, I felt I should have invested more in Qtum. 

Account Abstraction Layer (AAL): 

The Bitcoin ecosystem is based on the UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) model. The Ethereum ecosystem is based on the smart contract Account model.  

Since their models are different, interoperability between blockchains is not strong. Account Abstraction Layer (AAL) alleviates this issue and enables smooth interoperability between the two blockchains. 

CoinStats site points out that this gives Qtum a unique ability to benefit from updates in both Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems.  

x86 Virtual Machine:

This solution carries out simple modifications using many existing compilers and programming languages making it possible to write smart contracts that run on the Qtum blockchain. 

Providing developers with more standard libraries that would exist as pre-compiled contracts, x86 would greatly reduce the difficulty of developing smart contracts and development operating costs. 

It also overcomes limitations of EVM computing and Solidity language issues. In addition, x86 sports a new state storage model to solve the problem of excessive growth for the blockchain.

Mutualized Proof-of-Stake (MPoS) Consensus Mechanism:

With regard to security vulnerabilities such as "junk contract" attacks, Qtum's MPoS "increases the cost of attacks by sharing the block reward among block-producing nodes and delaying the payments. Each new block reward is divided equally between the block producing miner and 9 previous miners (10%of the reward to each), and the remaining 90% of the rewards are delayed by 500 blocks". 

Due to this mechanism the attackers can neither "predict how much block rewards can be obtained nor to obtain block rewards immediately".

Staging "junk contract" attacks has become possible only in a theoretical sense; and impossible to make it happen in real life.

Decentralized Governance Protocol (DGP)

When disagreements take place in a community supported by a blockchain, critical consensus parameters should be modified and hard forks have to be implemented to facilitate the new direction adopted by the community.  

But rather than using a hard fork, Qtum handles most disagreements within its community through smart contracts deployed in the genesis blocks. Miners (stakers), developers, and Qtum holders within the entire ecosystem are involved in blockchain governance. 

Self-management, upgrades, and iteration takes place by voting by the said stakeholders. critical consensus parameters are modified by the DGP process for an on-chain software update without depending on a hard fork. 

In addition to AAL, x86, MPoS and DGP, there is Qtum 2.0 in the pipeline. It would enrich the existing Qtum with new features that include: Confidential Assets, Offline Staking, and Chain-Cloud Integration. But since they are still at experimental level, I will wait until they roll out. 

CoinStats site quotes a X / twitter post from Qtum that announces a mandatory update for the Qtum mainnet scheduled for 27, Nov 2023.

What I love most is the Qtum Incentive Program that consists of a developer incentive fund of 15 million dollars provisioned for smart contract developers who are passionate in trying out innovative ideas. Qtum states that they host frequent hackathons. 

Equipped with AAL, x86, MPoS and DGP, what is going to be the future of Qtum? According to their statistics, Qtum’s layer 1 network is currently around 1100 transactions per second. With 1371 Total Unique Staking Addresses, 223 Total Unique Delegated Addresses, 25 Total Unique Super Stakers, 40,500.5 Qtum Awarded to Stakers, the platform hosts the largest blockchain networks with 500+ nodes distributed across 60+ countries on 6 continents.

Qtum price predictions for the coming years vary from one website to another. I am not certain about a Quantum leap in price. The best thing is to carefully observe the technical analyses done by your fellow Bianancians you can see in BinanceSquare and do your own research before investing. 

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