Quantum has received approximately $32M from a combination of crowd funding and seed funding from famed investors such as Anthony Di Iorio. (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/qtum#/entity)
Why is there such huge financial interest in Quantum?
Patrick Dai, a cofounder, previously worked for Alibaba. There are also teammembers from Baidu and Tencent. These are some of the biggest internet companies in Asia. For those who don't know, Baidu is the Chinese equivalent of Google and Tencent owns both WeChat and QQ. Quantum can be thought of as the backbone of the decentralized internet and the equivalent of Ethereum in Asia. It is similar to Antshares, however, instead of competing with Ethereum, like Antshares, Quantum is intended to unify the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities.
Quantum will combine many of the best features of emerging blockchain technologies such as Ethereum, Zcash, and Bitcoin. The flexibility and API integration of Ethereum, the anonymity of Zcash and the robust security and scalability of bitcoin will all be implemented via the "Go Mobile" strategy in Quantum. The purpose of the "Go Mobile" strategy is to move blockchain applications into the hands of average consumers and business people who spend most of their time on mobile apps. The Quantum mainnet is scheduled for release in September, as shown in the roadmap below:
Quantum, trading under symbol QTUM, is currently only available on Asian exchanges, Yunbi.com composes 90% of trading, Allcoin.com is another trading platform that supports QTUM, but it is slightly more English-language friendly.
The Testnet will be released on June 28th. I suspect the price of the cryptocurrency will rise to approximately $30-35 following the Testnet release, and $100 by the September Mainnet release.
Patrick Dai presents the project in the following video, Vitalik Buterin comments at the end:
Here's another private interview with Patrick Dai: