New hires, decentralized protocol progress, business developments and more — here’s what’s going on at Quantstamp recently:

New Hires

Michael Teixeira, who helped us in the Spring, has rejoined Quantstamp full time and is working with the product team. Before Quantstamp, Michael worked as a full stack developer for Scotiabank and Hubba, later focusing on blockchain development. He has a bachelors from McGill University.

Kyle Dunn is our new Devops engineer. Before coming to Quantstamp, he worked at Pivotal Labs for 3 years as a front deployed engineer, and has extensive experience optimizing IT operations for high performance and reliability.

Getting Ready for Betanet

During our time at Y-Combinator early this year, we pushed out an alpha version of our protocol onto the Ethereum Ropsten Testnet. This version allowed us to test some of the ideas presented in our whitepaper, and showed the feasibility of our project.

Now, we’re getting ready for the real thing. Less than a year since our crowdsale, we will soon launch the beta version of our protocol on the Ethereum mainnet. Compared to the current version of the protocol running on testnet, this version features a streamlined design with lower gas usage and is a distributed permissioned network which moves us closer to our goals of a more decentralized architecture.

Our teams have been heads down working hard to make this happen, and we’re proud of the milestones they’ve achieved:

We’ve done end-to-end testing

As we ramp up to our mainnet release we’re doing extensive testing of our betanet protocol. This goes beyond the unit testing we’ve already been doing. We are taking our smart contracts from start to finish through the auditing process.

In addition, we’re testing our QSP auditing nodes on different operating systems and hardware to make sure our software works on a variety of platforms.

Finally, we’ve done an internal audit of our auditing smart contract. Our smart-contract auditing protocol is accessed through a smart contract itself — the Quantstamp Auditing Smart Contract. As it is a smart contract, security is essential, so we ran an internal audit of the contract to check for vulnerabilities. Although no major vulnerabilities have been found, we addressed all the internal feedback to make sure our code conforms to our own best practices.

We’ve built upgradability into our Protocol

Immutability is great for storing important records on the blockchain, but it also makes upgrading software more challenging. By separating data from business logic in separate smart contracts, we’ve built upgradeability into our Quantstamp Protocol so that if we find new vulnerabilities, or want to incorporate new features, we’re able to do so smoothly and without losing existing audit data.

We’ve deployed our protocol smart contracts and nodes to mainnet internally

As we get ready for our betanet release — we’ve deployed our protocol onto the Ethereum mainnet internally. This allows us to do further end-to-end testing and to test our protocol with nodes run by Quantstamp employees before our formal release. This soft, internal release allows us to check that everything is working right before our external release that includes whitelisted nodes.

Brand New Web App

During our Y-combinator days, we built a proof-of-concept web user-interface for requesting security audits of smart contracts using the QSP token and viewing descriptive reports. That version utilized automated analyzers — but was distinct from our protocol. That original “Demo App” is still running and delivering useful results, but with advances in the protocol, we’ve made a fully-transformed new app.

This next version of the tool will have a fresh look and new features — but most importantly it will be using our Quantstamp protocol on the back-end. That moves us much closer to our goal of decentralized smart contract auditing.

This new UI streamlines the process of interacting with our Betanet auditing smart contract. It makes it quick and easy to pay for an audit through Metamask, it checks that your code compiles properly (to save users from failing an audit due to a simple coding error), and it retrieves the audit results from the audit node for you. You can even deposit extra QSP through Metamask into our auditing smart contract to pre-pay for future audits and save steps the next time you need an audit.

Smart Contract Security Alliance

We kicked off the Smart Contract Security Alliance with Modular Inc. The Smart Contract Security Alliance’s core mission is to support healthy growth and adoption of blockchain applications through encouraging and facilitating secure smart contract development. As part of that, we are working with other members of the industry to develop accepted standards for creating and evaluating the security of smart contracts.

We invite security companies interested in pushing forward the standard of blockchain technology to join the Smart Contract Security Alliance and help push forward the future of blockchain security. If you’re a smart contract developer or company using blockchain technology, we also welcome your input.

Partnerships

Facilitated by our offices across North America and in Japan, we continue to explore partnerships across the world. Besides talking with the consistently high quality projects coming out of San Francisco, we are continuing to see high interest in Japan, and are exploring numerous collaboration opportunities with Japanese startups and enterprises.

Events

As part of our mission to promote mainstream adoption of blockchain technology, we participate in community and developer events around the globe. Participating in these events allows us to educate the public on smart contract security and support the secure adoption of blockchain technology.

Research Engineer Jan presented our mission and what we do at the Stanford Distributed Trust Initiative Kickoff.

In the San Francisco area, research engineer Jan Grozny presented the Quantstamp mission, as well as the challenges we’re tackling in smart contract security, to the Stanford Distributed Trust Initiative kickoff event. Members of our team also attended the Decentralized Web Summit, which featured top Ethereum projects, thought leaders and discussions.

Head of Global Partnerships Krishna Sriram judged at EthIndia

Our Head of Global Partnerships Krishna Sriram judged at EthIndia — a major development conference in the region. EthIndia is one of a series of worldwide Ethereum hackathons organized by ETHGlobal. Krishna also spoke on a panel about Emerging Blockchain Technology and Security, along with ICON and Hosho, at the International Blockchain Congress.

Senior Research Engineer Martin Dercka did a code walk-through of a smart contract vulnerability at TheMuseum

Back in Canada, our Toronto office organized “All About Blockchains and Cryptocurrency” at TheMuseum. We organized this event to augment TheMuseum’s exhibition on eMoney and virtual currencies, and help provide a deeper look into smart contract technology and what it holds for our society in the future.

This event, targeted towards the general public, was an informational and networking event co-hosted by Quantstamp, BDO, Consensys, and BlockGeeks, and also featured leading projects such as Gitcoin and Miovision. It gave the community an introduction to blockchain technology, while also providing developers a more in-depth look at the technical aspects of blockchain security.

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