Once the main network is released in September, Qtum holders may offer to trade them. The test network will be available in June, and we will send test tokens to anyone who would like to help with testing.

If you look at the benefit of being on Bitcoin Core 0.14, see the performance improvements:



https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.14.0


Notable changes

Performance Improvements

• Validation speed and network propagation performance have been greatly improved, leading to much shorter sync and initial block download times.
• The script signature cache has been reimplemented as a “cuckoo cache”, allowing for more signatures to be cached and faster lookups.
• Assumed-valid blocks have been introduced which allows script validation to be skipped for ancestors of known-good blocks, without changing the security model.
• In some cases, compact blocks are now relayed before being fully validated as per BIP152.
• P2P networking has been refactored with a focus on concurrency and throughput. Network operations are no longer bottlenecked by validation. As a result, block fetching is several times faster than previous releases in many cases.
• The UTXO cache now claims unused mempool memory. This speeds up initial block download as UTXO lookups are a major bottleneck there, and there is no use for the mempool at that stage.

Because the target block time will be 120 seconds with Qtum Core, we won't have all those blocks that have no transactions in them, but it will be fast enough to avoid the issue that Bitcoin is currently having. Bundle SegWit into the equation, and yes, Qtum will be very efficient.

We realize there's a real race to get this kind of technology out, you will see in June when our Test Network launches that we can compete with these other projects.

Service providers like Coinmarketcap cannot list Qtum because the Main Network hasn't been released yet. Sites like that require API data to fetch their statistics, which won't be available until September.

As far as the Test and Main network, it will all be this year. If you look at the roadmap, there is more planned, along with other announcements that will happen.

If anyone would like to help with testing in June, we will provide test tokens to anyone who asks.

Test Network will launch in June, with around 3 months of testing leading up to the September Main Network release.

After mainnet release, we have the plan to make Qtum more scalable.

Qtum development updates of Week April 24th

Changes made through this week to the core wallet:

Bugs fixed:

* [Wallet] Fixed a bug where transactions were sometimes unnecessarily sent with extremely high fees

Work completed:

* [Tests/regressions] Fixed several Qt and EVM tests that had become out of date

* [Consensus/PoS] Added almost all of the necessary support code for staking and creating valid PoS blocks in the wallet

* [Tests/regressions] Fixed regression tests that broke by adding nTime to the transaction format

* [Consensus/EVM] Completed the support code and functionality changes required for formalizing the nVersion argument for OP_CALL and OP_CREATE so that future forks are easier

* [Wallet/PoS] Added the notion of "reserve balance" so that it is possible for users to opt-out of staking a set amount of funds.

Ongoing in-progress work:

* [Consensus/AAL] Adding the "condensing transaction" design to the AAL which greatly simplifies the accounting process and eliminates several weaknesses in the original design. The core code is now completed but in review and testing

* [Consensus/PoS] Adding the support code necessary for signing blocks and checking the signature of existing blocks. The core code is completed but in review and testing

Design work:

* [Consensus] More design work is being done and details will be released later when the design is complete

If you're referring to "Transactions Per Second" then yes, Qtum will be faster than Bitcoin but slower than Ethereum.

While Qtum will be very similar to UTXO blockchains, like Bitcoin and Litecoin, point #3 doesn't take into consideration that Ethereum Smart Contracts will be portable to Qtum. This means that if a developer has an idea, creates it for Ethereum, there will be little effort required to make this work on Qtum. This goes the same for developers looking to build on Qtum, both blockchains use the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

The Roadmap shows that the Main Network will launch in September, but the Test Network is due in June.

We have provided updates on the status of the Testnet a few posts back, and you can see recently:

https://forum.qtum.org/topic/109/qtum-development-updates-april-21st-2017

Agrello, a blockchain startup developing artificial-intelligence (AI) powered smart contract solutions, has selected the Qtum blockchain as the infrastructure for its smart contract interface, The announcement was made in Shanghai this week.

The Estonia-based company’s purported business case is that its interface allows users with no coding skills to create and manage automated smart contracts that will be stored and secured on the Qtum blockchain while being translated into documents in natural English. According to Agrello, their solution will allow individuals and businesses to use smart contracts as a substitute for and enhancement to standard paper contracts.

Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, Co-founder and CEO of Agrello Hando Rand described his path from doing early research on what had not yet been termed “smart contracts” at Tallum University of Technology. He was “blown away” when Ethereum was first announced as he realized that blockchain technology could be the means for his work to become reality.

Rand said of the choice to build on Qtum that his team has been “searching for over a year to find a blockchain platform that would fit our needs. Qtum allows us to build a mobile-compatible and scalable smart contract solution, and hence is our technology of choice.”

Qtum Co-Founder and CEO Patrick Das weighed in on the news to Bitcoin Magazine, “Qtum aims to build the first POS smart contract platform that is mobile supported; we welcome more and more startups to build applications on Qtum platform in the future.”

The professional legal view of smart contract technology and its potential applications in the field trends positive, and several U.S. states have passed regulations confirming smart contract applications over the last year, while formally defining what they deem smart contracts to be.

In 2016 the state of Vermont passed a law providing that a blockchain-based digital record will be considered a business record under the Vermont Rules of Evidence; just this April the state of Arizona passed a law confirming that smart contracts managed on the blockchain are considered electronic records. The Arizona law defines smart contracts as an “event driven program, with state, that runs on a distributed, decentralized, shared and replicated ledger that can take custody over and instruct transfer of assets on that ledger.”

Agrello’s AI smart contract interface corresponds with Qtum’s Smart Contract Lifecycle Management solution, detailed in Qtum’s whitepaper, which proposes a workflow to derive smart contract code from human-readable agreements and manage them in real time.The Qtum project, with management support from PWC, raised $15.6 million this March, and plans for its platform to be ready for public use in Q3 of this year.

Agrello, an Estonian blockchain startup developing business-ready smart contract solutions, has announced that it has selected the Qtum blockchain as its infrastructure of choice for the company’s AI powered smart contract interface.

The London Summit 2017 is coming, get involved!

Agrello develops an intuitive AI powered interface, allowing users with no legal or coding skills to easily create, manage, and automate legally binding smart agreements which are both – stored as smart contracts on the blockchain, as well as translated to legally biding documents in natural English.

According to Agrello, their solution will allow individuals and businesses to use smart contracts as a substitute and enhancement to standard paper contracts – a practice until recently regarded as impossible due to the complicated and obfuscated nature of smart contract technology.
Hando Rand

Explaining the company’s choice, Hando Rand, Agrello Project Lead and co-founder stated: “We’ve been searching for over a year to find a blockchain platform that would fit our needs. Qtum allows us to build a mobile-compatible and scalable smart contract solution, and hence is our technology of choice.”

Agrello’s decision to base its technology on Qtum was announced Wednesday in Shanghai, at an Qtum event. The Qtum project has recently raised $15.6 million in one of the industry’s fastest token crowd-sales to date, and seeks to open its platform for public use in Q3 this year.

Subsection 4: 

SPV extended to support syncing contract state without full chain download


The Simple Payment Verification protocol was created before the Ethereum Virtual Machine, so it needs to be extended to allow interaction with Smart Contracts, and to allow verification and validation of a contract’s state. In order to release a wallet that does not require the entire blockchain to be downloaded (only the headers) and can control a Smart Contract, the wallet needs to synchronize the Qtum contract state.


The SPV protocol does not keep track of Smart Contract State, which is paramount to our goal here. This addition to SPV allows developers to create wallets that can validate both transactions and smart contract state, by only downloading the block headers and the interesting transaction or contract state data.

We are building a layer that allows the Ethereum Virtual Machine to operate within a UTXO blockchain. This requires us to modify some Bitcoin Script opcodes, and make adjustments so the Ethereum Accounts model can communicate with UTXO's.


Here's a quick diagram:







There's more information about this on our website: https://qtum.org/en/account-abstraction-layer-overview




"Account Abstraction Layer Overview

Building on bitcoins reliable and proven-to-deliver blockchain, Qtum stacks its Account Abstraction Layer, allowing the Bitcoin Core 0.13 blockchain to seamlessly interact with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). With this innovation it is now possible to execute smart contracts and run decentralized applications, simply and securely, in environments that were previously out of reach for Ethereum, combining the endless possibilities provided by smart contracts with the stability and maturity of the bitcoin ecosystem.

Until now, attempts to implement smart contract solutions on top of the bitcoin blockchain have had issues, been lackluster, or failed to break into the mainstream business market. This is primarily due to the fact that the bitcoin blockchain employs an Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) scheme to associate coins with addresses, rather than the easier to understand, but otherwise problematic, account-based model used by Ethereum.

An account based model works pretty much the way one would imagine:  if Alice has 10 tokens, and sends 5 of them to Bob, who has zero tokens; 5 tokens are simply subtracted from Alice’s balance and added to Bob’s, who now owns 5 coins.  On a UTXO blockchain, however, Alice does not directly hold 10 tokens, but a series of outputs, which are collections of coins resulting from previous transactions.

In such a model, instead of owning 10 tokens, Alice would, for example, hold 3 outputs: (a) consisting of 6 coins, (b) consisting of 2 coins, and (c) consisting of another 2 coins. In this scenario Alice couldn’t simply send 5 coins to Bob, but instead she (or her wallet, for that matter) would have to pick the best-suited output and receive “change” in return (a process called coin picking). In our example this means that Alice would transfer output (a), consisting of 6 coins, and receive 1 coin back as “change”. This “change” is what is called the Unspent Transaction Output, or UTXO. After the transaction Alice would still hold 3 outputs, this time (a) consisting of 1, while (b) and (c) remain 2.

Employing such a seemingly complex bookkeeping scheme allows the Bitcoin blockchain to support Simple Payment Verifications or SPVs. The SPV protocol enables the support of light wallets, which are wallets that can interact with the Bitcoin network in a decentralized and trustless manner, without having to download the entire Bitcoin blockchain. This property is immensely useful for mobile applications or in any low bandwidth/storage environment.

Until now, Ethereum smart contracts couldn't execute in such environments exactly because Ethereum’s account based blockchain does not provide a SPV analog. To solve this, Qtum builds its decentralized application platform on the proven-to-deliver Bitcoin blockchain and introduces the Qtum Account Abstract Layer, which serves as a communication layer between the Bitcoin Core 0.13 protocol and the EVM.

To achieve this, Qtum has extended the Bitcoin 'Script' language, adding 3 ‘opcodes’ so that it functions as a vehicle to transport code to the EVM, while adding special processing conditions, executing these EVM-using transactions immediately when added to the blockchain - allowing the EVM to operate within a UTXO environment.

In order to relieve Qtum smart contracts from the need to perform coin picking for every transaction, Qtum comes coded with an automated, generic coin picking algorithm which allows contracts to ignore the UTXO mode of operation, while functioning normally, as if deployed in an account-based environment. This method is what enables Qtum to be compatible with pre-existing Ethereum smart contracts, allowing them to be executed on Qtum with little to no change to their code.

For more information about Qtum’s architecture in general, please read the blog post or review our Technical Whitepaper.    "





You can also see some press articles where this was briefly discussed:


https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogeraitken/2017/02/06/qtum-mixing-bitcoin-ethereum-launching-proof-of-stake-smart-contracts-platform/#7534ad71775b

There's no connection between our projects, nor is this a copycat clone of the Qtum project. They had a presence on Twitter months ago, before our Crowdsale.

Subsection 3:


Should be stable, but features and RPC layer subject to change from community feedback

The Qtum Test Network is a lead up to the Main Network release. It’s designed to attract interested developers. Service providers that plan to adopt Qtum into their business model will be able to analyze the code so they are prepared for the Main Network release in September 2017.



The RPC layer mentioned in this section is the same part 1, but this section is about the RPC commands directly related to calling on the Qtum Daemon. Some of the typical BitcoinD calls, like “setgenerate” will obviously be removed, as this allows the user to mine for tokens with their computer, which is not needed for Qtum. The standard RPC commands will be available, but the Qtum developers may choose to add some that BitcoinD does not currently have. This is the best time for third party developers to make suggestions.

Subsection 2:

Designed for developers, not consumers

Stability is not the major concern at this point, the point of a Test Network is to find issues and improve the code, thus leading to a stable release. The Qtum developers will give test tokens to any interested party, allowing them to implement their ideas, and have the gas to execute contracts. These test tokens will hold no value  and are not the same as the tokens which will be given to participants of the crowdsale.

Interested parties that have been planning to develop on the Qtum platform will now be able to learn and test their ideas. Service providers, who have developed their own products, can start to explore if they will have to modify their systems to provide Qtum.

For example, if an exchange would like to list Qtum, there are so many factors that come into effect. They need to make sure their accounting systems are compatible with the various RPC calls, and may need time to adjust their platforms.

We spoke with Bittrex and Poloniex to see if they'd host our crowdsale, but Poloniex said they do not do this anymore. Our lawyers advised us that US citizens should not participate in the Crowdsale, so we stuck with Chinese and a Canadian exchange.

It's an open source project, if any exchange wants to list it, that's their prerogative. So far we have not been contacted by any other exchanges.