Blockchain Innovations On Tap, As Qtum Partners With Storm Player, China’s Largest Video Player

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Smart contracts platform Qtum and China’s Baofeng Bokocloud have joined forces to create a blockchain concensus network service for video using Baofeng’s Storm Player, one of the most popular online video players in China.

Storm Player already has more than 200 million users and its parent company has a market cap of $8 billion. Like Hulu or Netflix, Storm Player broadcasts its video and audio licensed content to a largely Chinese audience. Storm Player plays hundreds of millions of video streams per day to millions of Internet users. The video files played by Storm Player account for 50% of the total videos played on the internet in China, making it the biggest Internet video playing platform in China.

Qtum is a blockchain platform that allows developers to create their own decentralized application. At its core, Qtum builds on the advantages of bitcoin and combines that with solid smart contracts, all while using an energy efficient consensus algorithm for industry use cases.

With Qtum, Baofeng hopes to expand its international reach and leverage the strengths of blockchain technology to develop new ways to reach that massive audience. At launch, the new network will boast 50,000 full nodes, or more than double ethereum’s estimated 20,000.

“We’re excited to have the support of Baofeng, and Storm’s massive user base is a treasure for us,” said Patrick Dai, CEO and Co-Founder of Qtum. “We look forward to their developers’ ideas and contributions to the Qtum platform, and to dedicating this collaboration to the advancement of blockchain technology.”

Patrick Dai, the CEO of Qtum, explained the impact of the new network service to Block Tribune.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: What is Qtum’s role in this and how will it work?

PATRICK DAI: Bokocloud has already started deploying some nodes in China, Japan, and Canada. Bokocloud is building a node deployment service starting with Qtum. The Qtum Foundation is supporting Bokocloud in this effort. Since Qtum is proof-of-stake, Bokocloud can mine with their nodes. This allows Baofeng and Bokocloud to explore blockchain technology in-depth. By building a node deployment service, users can more easily set up a node to secure the network and begin staking.

BLOCK TRIBUNE: What will 50,000 nodes do that 20,000 can’t? PATRICK DAI: The main advantage of having 50,000 nodes is the network stability. A large network is much more stable. Besides stability, there’s also some scalability benefits. When we think of the scalability of blockchain, we are in the early stages. Blockchain technology, despite having enormous potential, is being used for fairly simple transactions and smart contracts, and we are already close to hitting capacity. In the coming years, the average transaction type, which is typically peer-to-peer and transferred from a mobile phone or standard computer, will change. Although adding nodes doesn’t add capacity to the amount of transactions that can take place, it lends capacity for SPV (simple payment verification) support to make these nontraditional transactions. The SPV is ideal for light clients performing in low bandwidth environments. Allowing for more SPV clients means that projects in near-remote locations can utilize blockchain technology. Companies could collect data from oil wells, IoT sensors, cargo ships, logging operations, etc. and input it into the blockchain. All this data can put significant pressure on nodes when SPV clients make requests, therefore adding nodes would make the variable cost for another node lower and make operating a node currently cheaper, ceteris paribus. Since adding nodes increases the capacity for SPV clients, we can help increase the amount of these users utilizing blockchain technology without this being a limiting factor. BLOCK TRIBUNE: What are the copyright protections? How are they different from other systems? PATRICK DAI: There is no user-uploaded content like YouTube. The copyright protection is comparable to Netflix. BLOCK TRIBUNE: What content restrictions are there? PATRICK DAI: Baofeng only has rights to offer certain content in China.

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