Qtum is a Value Transfer Protocol (VTP) blockchain that aims to combine the best features of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
source: qtum.org
This is the third blockchain in a row that is competing to provide a smart contract ecosystem for businesses. Similarly to Cardano and Lisk, Qtum offers a cryptocurrency token with its own specific governance model and developmental environment.
My thinking has evolved on smart contract blockchains lately. I used to see it as a winner-takes-all battle with many smaller players fighting against the current behemoth that is Ethereum for general supremacy in the market…
Now, I see it differently. Andreas Antonopoulos has a great talk called “Decentralized Truth”:
The idea being there need not be a big winner at the end of the day… everybody can use the blockchain that serves them best. In the future, we will have many niche blockchains.
Therefore the question is not: Can Qtum become the biggest smart contract blockchain in the world?, it’s, can Qtum capture some of the long-term blockchain market? We’ll explore this question in more detail throughout this post.
About This Series + Disclaimer
This post is part of a new series where I investigate each of the top 50 coins by market cap (based on coinmarketcap.com's rankings on October 11, 2017). My goal is to help steem’s userbase become the most knowledgable blockchain community in the world.
Disclaimer: I am not an investment expert and will not be providing investment advice. I will teach you about the top 50 coins, and you can do what you want with that info.
Why Use Qtum?
Qtum’s main target market is businesses that want to run apps on the blockchain. The elevator pitch as represented by the home page of their website goes like this: “Build Decentralized Applications that Simply Work. Executable on mobile devices, compatible with major existing blockchain ecosystems.”
You can take any “human-readable agreements” and turn them into trustless machine-based smart contracts by using Qtum. They claim several key benefits to their blockchain technology:
(1) By using Bitcoin’s UTXO model, Qtum is able to offer smart contracts that execute on mobile devices. This is supposedly a big innovation which will greatly improve the dapp experience.
(2) The inclusion of a “Account Abstraction Layer” in Qtum translates that effective Bitcoin UTXO information into an Ethereum-compatible development environment for smart contracts. This is designed to create a “best of both worlds” scenario for the blockchain.
(3) Qtum claims to be backwards-and-cross-compatible with Ethereum smart contracts, as stated on their website:
I don’t know if this is true for every single Ethereum smart contract, or how broad it is. But if it works properly, that is a big boon for Qtum.
Cross-Compatibility is a Killer Feature
QTUM’s “economic white paper” makes compatibility between QTUM, Bitcoin, and Ethereum a big part of the value proposition. Here’s the key sentence:
I think this makes a lot of sense. There are a few very strong contenders for the “Ethereum Killer” blockchain right now - EOS got a lot of hype earlier in 2017, Cardano is doing well (and is being built by an Ethereum co-founder), and that’s just to name two of the big ones.
Rather than try to throw yet another hat in the ring for that fight against Ethereum, why not build synergy with ETH into your product? There is a collective $350 billion in Bitcoin and Ethereum right now, which lends a lot of potential interest for any other blockchain that can reinforce the value of BTC and ETH.
Could Qtum gain a lot of support from BTC and ETH hodlers? It seems likely to me. With a current market cap of $4.7 billion as of writing this (Dec 19, 2017), there is a lot of support already happening for this project.
Token Distribution
The-Blockchain.com offers the scoop on QTUM’s ICO and general token distribution, perfectly summarized in one paragraph from a larger article:
It’s not a great distribution, offering only 51% of the total tokens to ICO participants. The idea of reserving 29% of the total token distribution for “community initiatives” sounds nice and all, but it’s a lot of centralized control for a supposedly decentralized currency.
This does not disqualify QTUM for me by any means - but I do think it is a subpar distribution.
The Team
Patrick Dai, Co-Founder
source: crunchbase
Patrick worked at Alibaba prior to founding Qtum with Neil Mahi and Jordan Earls. Before all of that, he pursued a doctoral degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences but eventually dropped out of that program. Now in addition to leading Qtum, he is building the Bodhi decentralized prediction market upon the Qtum blockchain.
Neil Mahi, Co-Founder
source: qtum.org
The only information I can find on Neil comes from his Qtum bio - rather than paraphrase, here it is in full:
Jordan Earle, Co-Founder
Similarly to Neil, there isn’t much info about Jordan on the internet. Here is his Qtum bio:
Market History
We are still experiencing an insanely volatile and potentially unpredictable cryptocurrency market right now… tread with caution.
Here is the current Qtum chart:
The price has gone very high very quickly. Thus, a price correction downwards seems likely at some point in the near future… beyond that, it is anybody’s guess.
Final Thoughts on Qtum
Qtum looks like a good blockchain idea. I’m all for any project that builds new synergy, in this case creating a cross-compatible smart contract environment that works with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
One thing I didn’t mention in this article is that Qtum is particularly popular in eastern markets. That might help it retain some value against western competitors.
Overall I do not think that Qtum necessarily can support its current $5 billion valuation, but I do think it has value. My only serious criticism is that I don’t think the founders have as much experience as I would like.
What do you think of Qtum??