Very recently we traveled to Seoul, S. Korea to meet with people interested in our project. Our co-founder, Patrick was joined by John, Stella, and Xiaolong, who presented for nearly 90 minutes. There were a lot of topics covered, so we want to give a summary of the highlights. The meetup was held at Seoul’s D.Camp, one of the largest startup ecosystems in Korea, and was attended by over 100 people from the local blockchain industry.

To see a recorded version of the presentation, please watch on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/blockchainkoreameetup/videos/

Patrick’s speech was the longest, starting with his personal opinions on the state of the industry. He discussed how blockchain changes the way we think and cooperate, how it levels the playing field and creates an ecosystem where everyone can share the rewards, unlike the centralized systems we with. This comes with a large learning curve, which is difficult for many to understand. He goes on to mention 2 reasons for this; the technological barrier, with regards to cryptography and decentralization. The second reason is the social aspect, the fact that blockchain changes the reward structure of our entire economy. It is a very disruptive idea, but it should accelerate the efficiency of our society. He ends by saying: “ One of the reasons that Blockchain is growing so rapidly is because people realize the risk in the financial system we are using today, because it’s an inflationary system where the government can print money on a whim”.

The next section of the speech, Patrick goes on to introduce the Qtum project. He described that the idea started forming in early 2016, as a way to bring the stability of Bitcoin Core and the flexibility of the Ethereum Virtual Machine together, with the fairness of a Proof-of-Stake platform. He mentions the threat of centralization in the Proof-of-Work platforms, and how a lot of the hashing power resides in one province of China. His vision of the platform is to be compatible with the two biggest ecosystems (Bitcoin and Ethereum), this way people who are familiar with either will have no problem building on Qtum.

This was a huge undertaking, Bitcoin is built on the Unspent Transaction Output model. It’s very hard to port the Ethereum Virtual Machine to the Bitcoin network, no one did this before. It took a few months for us to figure this out, but one of the unique parts of the Qtum project is that everything in the White Paper that we discuss has already been built. This brought us to the first Test Network release, dubbed “Sparknet”, which proved that we could deploy Solidity Smart Contracts on a UTXO Blockchain, with a PoS consensus model.

Qtum Skynet

Enter Skynet, Qtum’s second Test Network. Patrick explains that we enhanced the PoS security with Qtum’s Smart Stake technology, which forces participants who have staked a block to receive the rewards over 500 confirmations. This will make it a lot harder for malicious users to perform “replay attacks”. Patrick went on to explain that the technical attacks are not the only problems that require solving. When Bitcoin was launched, Satoshi later vanished, leaving no mechanism for formal governance in the event the blockchain required upgrades. This lead to the scaling debate over how to increase the amount of transactions that could be processed by solving a block. This debate lasted over two years and continues to go on. To avoid this on the Qtum platform, a Decentralized Governance Protocol is being tested on Skynet. This allows certain parameters of the network, like block size, to be changed without hard forking. Qtum holders can initiate a vote, and if it gains a large majority, the nodes will adjust without disrupting the network.

Moving forward, Patrick highlighted what to expect over the next month. There will be an internal code audit and review, along with a public ‘bug bounty’. This will allow Blockchain developers to review our code, and earn Qtum tokens for submitting fixes. This will take us to the Main Network release, around mid-to-late September.

Xiaolong Introducing Skynet

Beyond this date, there is a lot to look forward to. Patrick mentioned that we have Non-Disclosure Agreements signed with corporations in China that want to support the Qtum Blockchain. He went further to say that after we launch the Main Network, there will be an effort put into the “Qtum Enterprise Alliance”. Effectively, this will be a permissioned blockchain that acts as a sandbox for the network.

The next topic discussed was a new virtual machine. If we are successful, we will have a VM that is compatible with the x86 family of programming languages (C, C++, Rust, Haskell, and many others). This will open the floodgate to the masses who are familiar with these platforms. Patrick pointed out that with Solidity, there’s just not enough people that can code for it, making it harder to review for vulnerabilities like the “DAO hack” and “Parity multisig hack”.

The last topic discussed had a lot to do with the Enterprise Alliance, permissioned blockchains, and regulatory systems. There is a need for identity verification on blockchains, above and beyond signing a message. Currently, Qtum creates ‘addresses’ in Base58 starting with the letter “Q”, which can get converted to hex (for compatibility reasons with Solidity) that start with “0”. But moving forward, a permissioned Blockchain will have the functionality to issue addresses starting with “V” for entities that have verified. Ideally, this would be a feature on Qtum’s public network as well.

Office Visits

Coinone & Qtum

At Coinone, we met with Steve Sang Hyuck Lim, Coinone’s CIO. There was a lot of Qtum fans around the Coinone office and were happy to meet Patrick. Coinone is a rising Korean exchange that is a part of Korea’s Dayli Financial Group that has grown exponentially over the past year.

The Loop & Qtum

The Loop, who is also a member of the Dayli Financial Group, is building a way to connect blockchain ecosystems with their ICON platform. It was great to interact with some of the Korean projects, we can see how fast the community is growing here from how much interest there is in Qtum from Korea and how many new projects are starting here.

Medibloc founders & Patrick

Qtum met with Medibloc, who aims to be the first healthcare platform built on top of Qtum’s blockchain. We first met Medibloc at Consensus in May, and have since met in Shanghai and now in Seoul. We are happy that they are able to build on Qtum and wish them the best.

Qtum & Korean Media

Lastly, we finished up our tour of Seoul by meeting with several media outlets based Korea. They hoped to learn more about Qtum because the blockchain industry is growing so fast in Korea.