The Qtum Foundation, an open source value transfer protocol and decentralized application platform has released a whitepaper detailing the technical workings of the Qtum blockchain stack. Qtum is a smart contract platform for industry use cases, allowing mobile use of smart contracts and employing a Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol. The paper, titled ‘Smart-Contract Value-Transfer Protocols on a Distributed Mobile Application Platform’, was authored by the co-founders of the Qtum project, Patrick Dai, Neil Mahi, Jordan Earls and the project’s Scientific Advisor Dr. Alex Norta.
Qtum’s UTXO-based blockchain supports the Simple Payment Verification protocol from launch, which will allow lite wallets, running on mobile devices, to engage natively with decentralized applications and smart contracts. This feature also allows IoT devices to be secured and operated with smart contracts. Lite wallets enable users to interact with the network without having to download and sync with the entire blockchain, permitting low bandwidth/storage access to smart contracts. With Simple Payment Verification support, transactions can be signed by the device itself rather than having to rely on third-party services to relay messages.
Patrick Dai, Co-founder of the Qtum Project, commented: “Getting smart contracts to work on smartphones and tablets heralds a new age in the field of decentralized computation. With about half of all Internet traffic being generated by mobile devices, every real-world use case for decentralized applications would massively benefit from mobile support - especially if we’re taking the tendencies of developing markets into account.”
The Account Abstraction Layer, described in the whitepaper, is what allows Qtum’s UXTO-based blockchain to interact with the Ethereum Virtual Machine and more virtual machines down the line. By enabling smart contract execution on a UTXO platform, contracts are given more functionality due to the relative complexity of the UTXO model compared to an Ethereum-account like model. In addition to mobile support for smart contracts and dApps, Qtum’s UTXO structure gives users traceability of smart contracts while offering privacy with blockchain innovations like Change Addresses and more privacy enhancements in the pipeline.
Scientific Advisor of the Qtum Project, Alex Norta explained: “This whitepaper fills the gap in the state of the art by presenting the Qtum smart-contract framework that aims for socio-technical application suitability, the adoption of formal-semantics language expressiveness, and the provision of smart-contract template libraries for rapid best-practice industry deployment.”
The whitepaper addresses some of the concerns presented by industry users with issues like the Ethereum DAO attack. Smart Contract Lifecycle Management aims to resolve this issue and other potential issues by allowing contract collaboration, negotiation, review, and tracking.
Jordan Earls, Co-founder of the Qtum Project, remarked: “Qtum aims to revolutionize business processes and the way that businesses interact with their customers by making smart contract technology mobile and practical. The SPV protocol allows smart contracts to move from servers and laptops, into IoT and mobile devices.”
