The Qtum Foundation (www.qtum.org) today announced it raised $15.6 million in 117 hours, becoming the fourth most-funded cryptocurrency crowdsale and the eighth most-funded crowdsale of any kind. The Qtum crowdsale started off fast by selling $10 million of its tokens in just 90 minutes. By comparison, Ethereum (now the #2 market cap in cryptocurrency with a valuation of $3.6 billion) took 42 days to raise $18 million, and the prior record for funds raised in the first 24 hours was Golem, which raised $8.6 million in its first day.

The Qtum crowdsale, scheduled to last 30 days or until all tokens were sold, ended with the project raising 11,156.766 bitcoins (BTC) and 77,081.031 ether (ETH) in exchange for the 51 million Qtum tokens being distributed to the public. Instead of sending tokens to a single crowdsale address, Qtum enlisted six cryptocurrency exchanges/crowdfunding portals to conduct the sale in a coordinated fashion. The sites participating in the campaign were Bizhongchou, Yunbi, ICOAGE, Allcoin, ICO365, and BTC9.

“We are confident that we can finish what originally started a year ago, and we hope that our supporters can work with us to build the greatest blockchain platform for enterprise and consumer use cases,” said Patrick Dai, co-founder of the Qtum Project. “There are so many possibilities for the blockchain industry, and with Qtum we are just at the beginning of a long journey.”

Qtum tokens (QTUM) are the cryptographic software tokens used to engage with distributed applications and smart contracts on the Qtum platform and will serve as the staking token for the Qtum blockchain, as well as fuel for computational operations performed by the Qtum network. Details on the Qtum concept can be found in the Foundation’s white papers.

“Qtum is developing what I believe can be the blockchain platform for businesses to automate processes, track assets, and create applications beyond our imagination,” said Neil Mahi, co-founder of the Qtum Project. “With Qtum, we know we can build off of today’s blockchain technology and take it to the next level.”

The total QTUM token supply will be allocated in three primary ways. 51 percent of QTUM tokens (51 million) will be distributed through the now-completed crowdsale. Funds raised this way will finance the Qtum Foundation’s operations for the next four years, including development, administration, marketing, and financial/legal consulting. Of the remaining 49 percent, 29 percent of QTUM tokens (29 million QTUM) will be allocated to community initiatives concerning business development, research, education, and market expansion. 20 percent of QTUM tokens (20 million) will be distributed among founders, early backers, and the development team. Further details are outlined in the Foundation’s governance white paper.

“Since we began this project, I have been excited about its premise,” said Jordan Earls, co-founder of the Qtum Project. “This excitement has been validated and shared by thousands of backers. Qtum will bring about a new blockchain and smart contract revolution and will bring together the many disparate communities into one common goal of action.”

Qtum recently announced that one of the leading professional service providers, PwC, will support Qtum’s efforts to help fuel blockchain adoption across global business sectors. Qtum has previously raised $1 million from investors including Chen Weixing (Founder of Kuaidi), Star Xu (CEO of OkCoin), Anthony Di Iorio (Founder of Ethereum & Jaxx Blockchain Interface), Jeremy Gardner (co-founder of Augur), Bo Shen (Fenbushi Capital’s Managing Partner), Roger Ver (First Investor in Bitcoin Companies), and Xiaolai Li (blockchain angel investor).

Qtum is a hybrid blockchain application platform. Its core technology combines a fork of bitcoin core, an Account Abstraction Layer allowing for multiple virtual machines, including the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), and a Proof-of-stake Consensus protocol, aimed at tackling industry use cases. The Qtum Foundation, headquartered in Singapore, is the decision-making body that drives the project’s development. The Qtum Foundation has engaged one of the world’s leading professional service providers, PwC, for project management support. Learn more at https://qtum.org