Market stance
The total coin supply is 107,822,406 QTUM. On March 12-17 2017, the QTUM ICO harvested 11,156.766 BTC and 77,081.031 ETH equivalent to $15.7M at the time of investment. In the course of the ICO, 51M QTUM (51 percent of the total supply) was allocated for public use, 29M were destined for community bonuses, and 20M went to the founders and the dev team. QTUM posted its peak price of $103.45 on January 6, 2018.
Background
An open source platform Qtum concentrated on the mobile dApp (decentralised application) market and nourished a solid tech ecosystem and an active community. Co-founders Jordan Earls, Patrick Dai and Neil Mahi have vast blockchain expertise under the belt and a long track record of projects for companies like Alibaba, Nasdaq, and Baidu. Aside from the Qtum protocol per se, the development team delivered an enterprise-grade scalable consensus algorithm (SCAR) Unita. Giving back to the community, the Qtum Foundation closed the year 2018 donating $400K to blockchain researchers at Columbia University.
What’s inside?
Qtum is a smart contract blockchain platform based on the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) architecture where node operators reap their benefits for authorising transactions. It’s a value transfer protocol building on Bitcoin’s UTXO transaction model blended with Ethereum’s smart contract execution. In line with its name, Qtum (pronounced ‘quantum’) aims at quantum computing for the global community, positioning itself as a business-scale payment system and a game-changing AI-backed smart contract platform.
Features
Decentralisation. Qtum encompasses a Decentralised Governance Protocol (DGP) that enables users to alter specific blockchain settings with the use of smart contracts. For example, users may decide to enlarge the Qtum block size with no hard fork involved.
Business focus. Qtum provides a unified, stable and secure framework for smart contracts, facilitating enterprise-friendly smart contract development, implementation and execution. Qtum also renders custom blockchain services to corporate customers.
AAL for better performance. As a symbiosis of Bitcoin and Ethereum, Qtum was designed by adding the Account Abstraction Layer (AAL) over the Bitcoin fork to enable integration with blockchain virtual machines, such as the Ethereum VM. Thanks to AAL, Qtum decouples apps from the base protocol, sustains high blockchain performance and allows for greater smart contract scalability.
Ample node network. Qtum runs around 6.5K distributed nodes on six continents trailing only Bitcoin and Ethereum, both having over 10K nodes.
Trading
Over $83M worth of QTUM trades day-to-day on a slew of crypto exchanges. A few crypto wallets work with QTUM, e.g., Qtum Core Wallet (Desktop/Mobile), Qtum Web Wallet (web) and Bitpie Wallet (mobile).
Check out QTUM as part of EXANTE’s crypto-backed assets!