We started off 2019 with a few short months to remember! The hard work from the team and community has led to an eventful first quarter with an even more ambitious roadmap for the second quarter.

“QTUM Expansion — New office”

Just as predicted, our project has grown at a frantic pace, and we have been adding highly skilled people into our ranks for some time, it was time to celebrate our growth and to start fresh in a new, bigger office space.

Starting 2019 with an Award

We had a great start with an award right as 2019 was getting started! Representing QTUM at the Forensic 2019 blockchain awards ceremony in Hangzhou, China, our lead engineer from China, Zhong Wenbin, was presented with a “Most Valuable Decentralized Application Platform” Award.

For more information, visit: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/DDRbIhkCx3CBeIv9CJSwuw (English translation available)

QTUM Atomic Swap

On January 9th, we had folks excited about our first on chain atomic swap with BTC. Atomic swaps are a direct way to exchange value across two separate blockchains. In this case, our swap was configured for QTUM and BTC. There can be many advantages in doing atomic swaps. On a high level, being able to process a transaction between two different platforms without having to involve a third party makes things easier and faster than our current system of centralized exchanges. Atomic swaps allow parties to make transactions in a trustless manner. When implemented successfully there is no risk to either party involved in the transaction, no 3rd party to wait for confirmation, and if the transaction is canceled, assets return to their owners. Our atomic swap can be viewed from start to finish via block explorers. 1.2345 QTUM held by party #1 is exchanged with 0.005678 BTC from party #2 and then BTC is redeemed by party #1 and QTUM redeemed by party #2

INITIATE 1.2345 QTUM: HTTPS://QTUM.INFO/TX/FFD08F31CEFF36C39FA142B0507B1C71839F4684CCE42B2A74EC06917A71C4AE

PARTICIPATE 0.005678 BTC: HTTPS://WWW.BLOCKCHAIN.COM/BTC/TX/5984F23230715F7C20163356DCE62A4AFE0EE476B8567987432FA52758967F0F

REDEEM 0.005678 BTC: HTTPS://WWW.BLOCKCHAIN.COM/BTC/TX/1DFC072337D079847FB634EBF7D4A5D51874142DD3BBB958C3556AFA1B2FC29C

REDEEM 1.2345 QTUM: HTTPS://QTUM.INFO/TX/10008E0A43A56B19266BCC087785789EB4AF75C34F3501FB1CAED05B63B11A61

For more information, visit our blog: https://blog.qtum.org/atomic-cross-chain-swap-on-qtum-7e756a890ed7 or check some of the news articles posted on Bitcoin Magazine.

Space, the final frontier — we’ve been there!

Block 301421 became active on Jan 16th of this year, included in that block was the first QTUM transaction completed in space! Since then, SpaceChain has been continuing to use QTUM blockchain tech with their space system. This was the second SpaceChain node to be launched into orbit and continues to function today. SpaceChain benefits from the Qtum blockchain method of “low power” proof of stake consensus mechanism, instead of computationally heavy POW blockchains. That history-making transaction is viewable at https://qtum.info/tx/7dfdfa9322ac5b9b4a89da44f7db90d300c636117f456514f8c27f60d0224a54

For more information, visit https://www.satellitetoday.com/innovation/2019/01/18/spacechain-carries-out-1st-qtum-transaction-in-space/ and also check out https://spacechain.com/ for the current status of the SpaceChain Satellite.

First 2019 Hackathon

Our first major QTUM sponsored hackathon of 2019 happened at the Binance Blockchain week in Singapore. The SAFU (Secured Assets for Users) hackathon featured two straight days of development around new tools to prevent and secure users’ assets. Our CEO Patrick was part of the judging panel and saw some great projects literally start from the ground up. https://www.binancefair.com/safu-hackathon/

“10,000 Transactions Per Second!”

Our enterprise level blockchain system, Unita (previously known as QtumX) had been in deep development for some time and we felt it was time to share some exciting developments regarding Unita’s scalability and show off a little of the transaction power the new enterprise network was capable of achieving. Included with our announcement was additional details about Unita block processing — namely that the system does not have to produce new blocks if there are not any pending transactions, which reduces both resources and storage loads

For more information visit our blog or view one of the news articles at https://bitcoinexchangeguide.com/qtum-blockchains-new-qtumx-system-has-broken-through-10000-transactions-per-second/

“Fake Stake”

Just as things were starting to move along smoothly in the crypto community news of potential issues with proof of stake blockchains started spreading around the internet like wildfire, initially sparked when a report and security disclosure called to attention “Fake Stake” attacks that could potentially take out nodes on proof of stake blockchains. Most of the issues involved the potential for attackers to run nodes out of memory or disk space when a specially crafted header was sent to them. This could have potentially lead to networks being attacked and having multiple nodes offline.

The original people who discovered this widespread bug, members of the Decentralized systems lab from the University of Illinois had contacted us with their findings back in October 2018 and our development team had taken steps to prevent this type of exploit against our network. Of the 25 main POS blockchains affected, Qtum had the vulnerability patched quickly after discussions with the Decentralized systems lab and had no reported issues prior to disclosure.

For more information, visit our blog or view the disclosure.

“Qtum version 0.17.1”

The major features implemented in Qtum Ignition include:

The Ethereum Virtual Machine, which allows for compatibility with most existing Solidity based smart contracts.

The Smart Staking Protocol is complete, which is an optimized Proof of Stake implementation designed for a smart contract platform (however, smart contracts cannot participate in staking yet).

An improved smart contract GUI has been implemented that can be used for creating contracts, sending data and Qtum to them, and checking their status by executing them locally, The GUI also offers easy QRC20 tokens management.

Regtest mode, which is ideal for developers who wish to create their own private blockchain. It is tuned specifically to make development easier. It will stake blocks automatically every 30 seconds and can generate proof-of-work blocks instantly as needed.

The Decentralized Governance Protocol is completely implemented and functional, which allows certain network parameters to be modified without a fork.

For more information visit our GitHub or view one of the news articles at Today’s Gazette.

“Chinese New Year — AWS and IPFS Development”

February was a month of service offerings at QTUM, we launched a new AMI for Amazon web services users, which contains all the software and settings needed to run QTUM. Additionally, we released guides on DApp building using IPFS

The AMI and signup information is available at: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B07FB214D3?qid=1555540162461&sr=0-1&ref_=srh_res_product_title

Qtum and IPFS development info can be found at https://blog.qtum.org/how-to-build-a-dapp-based-on-qtum-and-ipfs-692bc3ab607a

“QTUM Space Node 1700+ orbits”

As of writing, the satellite continues to function while zipping along in orbit.

“0.17.2”

This release saw our continued efforts to refine our user experience with updates to the GUI for most users and a welcome revealing of the GUI for RaspberryPi users.

Every week our developers have been releasing updates to keep our userbase and DApp developers informed of changes and additions to the project. Most of these updates are available directly at https://qtum.org/en/news

“Qtum + Zeux Payments”

QTUM users can now directly pay for goods and services via the Zeux App. Zeux automatically handles currency conversion and works as a 3rd party between the Apple/Samsung pay application. Finally, you can order lunch using QTUM tokens on your phone!

For more details about this development visit our blog: https://blog.qtum.org/qtum-zeux-payments-9e40edaedf9d