Blockchain-enabled smart contracts that employ proof-of-stake validation for transactions promise significant performance advantages compared to proof-of-work solutions, a new smart contract solution argues in its recently-released white paper.
Qtum’s smart contract system seeks to answer the question of how to develop a smart contract solution to satisfy critical customer requirements for enabling cross-organizational information logistics and, subsequently, reduce costs and time. In doing so, Qtum aims to build the first UTXO-based smart contract system with a PoS consensus model, an academic advisor working on the project says.
Smart contract wallets
Alex Norta states in a chat: “In combination with simple payment verification, Qtum already is able to provide Lite wallets for smart contract management that run on mobile devices. Differently to Ethereum, Qtum has been keen right from the very beginning to conduct real-life industry projects for harvesting critical requirements that satisfy the needs of the market. While Ethereum uses an account model like a bank account that does not scale, Qtum takes advantage of Bitcoin's unspent transaction output protocol.”
Saving computer effort
According to the white paper, the project’s adoption of PoS constitutes a considerable saving of computational effort over the non-scaling Ethereum alternative that still uses PoW. The purpose of launching a new algorithm is to prevent the accumulation of computing power by one entity and ensure that Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) can not be introduced into the economy.
Though most PoS Blockchains can source their heritage back to Peercoin, which is based on an earlier version of Bitcoin Core, Qtum Core now chooses PoS based on the latest Bitcoin source code for basic consensus formation.
The network is compatible with the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems and targets to produce a variation of Bitcoin with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility. Qtum is counting on this edge to integrate Bitcoin whose scripting language is not Turing complete, has no loop function and has a limited volume of transaction executions together with the EVM. In addition, the EVM uses the PoW transaction validation that reportedly diminishes scalability and its smart contracts’ limited utility and lack of formal semantics as a proposition to make it a market favorite.
As for its QTUMs crowdsale, which will serve as the staking currency of the Qtum Blockchain and fuel computational operations performed by the network when it debuts on March 16, the network will seek to employ industry use cases with a strategy comprising mobile devices. This will allow the promotion of Blockchain technology to a wide array of Internet users and thereby decentralizing PoS transaction validation once fully operational.
The project has already received over $1 mln from 32 early investors including Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Jaxx, Roger Ver, the world’s first major investor in Bitcoin startups, Jeremy Gardner, co-founder of Augur EIR at Blockchain Capital, Bo Shen, Fenbushi Capital managing partner and Star Xu, CEO of OKCoin.