Announcing TOQEN

TOQEN, built on top of Qubic Lite, which itself is built on top of the IOTA Tangle is a new proof-of-concept cryptocurrency approach that tries to supplement the IOTA protocol by providing it with smart contracts. The consensus of the public ledger is built by a qubic consisting of multiple independent oracles which validate and confirm any transaction happening in the TOQEN network.

A first theoretical concept for such a qubic cryptocurrency has been described in this article back in June. With the development progress of Qubic Lite, building TOQEN appeared to be the perfect way of demonstrating the technical capabilities of the Qlite protocol. Now, with this article, an early TOQEN prototype will be released. Smart contracts are not included yet and will be implemented in the near future. However, it already allows you to send peer-to-peer value transfers, which is definitely enough of a feature for now.

The TOQEN Wallet, qApp available on qame.org/toqen

Theory and Features

Blockchain

TOQEN works like a blockchain and therefore, unlike IOTA, cannot scale vertically (at least for now; it would require a few major adjustments to the Qubic Lite protocol). However, scaling could happen horizontally by allowing multiple TOQEN Qubics to interact with each-other by exchanging TQN through atomic swaps.

Coordinator

Although TOQEN runs on IOTA, it is completely unaffected by the coordinator since Qubic Lite does not depend on IOTA transaction confirmations. Hence it might offer an alternative way to send value via the IOTA network in times of heavy Tangle congestion.

TOQEN APIs

For efficiency purposes and as spam protection, invalid transfers are filtered out and do not even reach the qubic. This is realized by bringing in API nodes, which act as a layer between user and qubic and do all the filtering. Just like a qubic’s assembly it consists of many oracles, there will be many API nodes. In fact, the API nodes cannot do any harm to the qubic consensus and there is really no technical reason to not allow hundreds or thousands of them for optimal decentralization.

Fees and Confirmations

There are no transaction fees. Instead the Privilege of the HODLer is used to prioritize transactions and prevent spam. The more funds you transfer and the longer you let them sit before sending, the higher the weight of your transfer. A transaction spending 100 TQN 10 epochs after they have been received has the same weight as 10 TQN after 100 epochs.

The TOQEN Blockchain Explorer (currently on qubiota.com/toqen)

Development Roadmap

Community Involvement

For the sole purpose of showcasing the current development state and because of the lack of available ql-nodes maintained by the community, the qubic is currently run by only a single oracle and a single API node. Running a big qubic with multiple oracles supplied by community members would show the true decentralization behind TOQEN.

Smart Contracts

Actually not that hard to implement since Qubic Lite already offers decentralized computations. Smart contracts can be expected in the very near future if there are no major obstacles.

IOTA-TOQEN Gateway

One of the most useful smart contracts would be a gateway between the native IOTA token and TOQEN. This would take away any need for exchanges since such gateways would already act as a decentralized exchange.

Inter-TOQEN Transfers

By allowing multiple TOQEN qubics to interact with each-other, horizontal scaling and colored toqens could be realized. Even completely different qubics can use a TOQEN qubic and trigger certain smart contracts or payments. One example would be decentralized gambling.

API Rewards

For game-theoretical purposes, API owners should be incentivized to act correctly and should receive a tiny reward proportionally high to the weight (TQN value times epoch age) of the spent inputs of the transaction they send to the qubic. Rewards would add an inflation to the total supply, but should stay insignificant because the work necessary to run an API is minuscule.

Private Transactions

Some kind of decentralized coin tumbler is definitely thinkable and would be a much-needed feature for IOTA.