Huffington Post: Blockchain is on the rise in Asia - Face to face with Quantum Chain

Eight years ago, a mysterious person who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper, and Bitcoin was born. Unlike most currencies, Bitcoin is not issued by a specific monetary institution, but is a peer-to-peer digital currency. At the beginning of 2017, the price of a single Bitcoin exceeded $1,000, and the total market value reached $15 billion. As an open source project and a free network fighter aiming to fight financial corruption, Bitcoin is a good start.

Soon after, Bitcoin, relying on its "rebellious" characteristics, quickly attracted the attention of entrepreneurs and regulators. More importantly, its underlying technology, blockchain, quickly ignited technology enthusiasts to build a blockchain utopia full of hope and dreams.

Four years ago, a mysterious figure named Vitalik Buterin, who was only 19 years old, led a group of talented technology enthusiasts to break the shackles of the decentralized model proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto, proposed Ethereum, and innovatively introduced the concept of self-executing "smart contracts", which can execute more complex transactions and will not stop execution due to external interference.

Ethereum proposed by Vitalik may completely break the existing business logic and provide unprecedented information transparency and corporate responsibility since the Industrial Revolution. However, these exciting features come at a considerable price: in order to meet the complex functional requirements of Ethereum, developers have to spend a lot of effort to make drastic changes to Bitcoin's concise and efficient transaction model, which has become one of the main factors restricting the development of Ethereum.

The rise of Asian power

The next battlefield of the blockchain revolution may be unexpected. Not long ago, the Chinese government included blockchain technology in the main development direction of China's 17th Five-Year Plan, hoping to use the characteristics of blockchain technology to fight against serious corruption.

In March 2016, a team of well-known blockchain developers from China and around the world proposed the "Qtum" blockchain, which has received widespread attention from the global blockchain industry for its innovative connection between the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems. The Qtum blockchain has even been called a "disruptive product" that provides unlimited possibilities for mainstream markets, including governments and enterprises, to embrace blockchain technology.

The Quantum Foundation (the highest decision-making body of the Quantum project) recently released the "Quantum Blockchain Economic White Paper", which has attracted widespread attention in the Western market. The Qtum management team, which has a "Chinese imprint", has brought together many well-known blockchain developers from around the world. For the first time, it has combined Bitcoin's mature UTXO transaction model with Ethereum's smart contracts - before this, the combination of the two was considered impossible. If its functions are really as advertised, then Quantum will break the current working model of the Internet and create unlimited potential for the development of a decentralized economic model.

In view of the various blockchain projects that have defrauded investors' funds by relying solely on so-called "innovative concepts" in the past, investors are no longer buying into empty "slogans" and "concepts". However, the high attention Qtum has received seems to indicate its advantages over other projects.

The disclosed investors of Qtum include: Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of JaxxWallet; Chen Weixing, the billionaire founder of KuaiDi, the Chinese version of Uber; Jeremy Gardner, co-founder of Augur and entrepreneur in Blockchain Capital; David Lee, founder of Left Coast & Libai; Shen Bo, partner of Distributed Fund, etc. In addition, many well-known industry consultants, scholars, lawyers, etc. have participated in the Qtum project.

In addition, the Quantum Chain Foundation also announced that the recently released "Quantum Chain Blockchain Economic White Paper" was launched in cooperation with one of the "Big Four" accounting firms. This is also the first time that a blockchain startup project has conducted in-depth cooperation with the Big Four.

This unusual level of participation from traditional investors and regulators gives us reason to believe that Qtum will become the third major milestone in the development of blockchain after Bitcoin and Ethereum smart contract platforms.

We have reason to believe that in the near future, with the continued efforts of Quantum Chain and its heavyweight partners, a decentralized and free international trade environment will be established, and the security, transparency, decentralization, immutability, and traceability of Bitcoin will be widely used in smart contracts, supply chain management, and corporate governance.

Source: The Huffington Post. This is a major American news website and aggregation blog. It was ranked first in the "25 Best Blogs" selected by Time magazine in the United States, and also ranked first in the "50 Most Powerful Blogs" selected by the Guardian in the United Kingdom. As a newly emerging new media website, The Huffington Post has launched the slogan of "the first Internet newspaper" and is ranked in the top 200 in Alexa's global website traffic.