Patrick, Neil & Jordan

Qtum Main Network Launch

On September 13th, the Qtum team announced that the work required to launch the main network was completed. Nodes were put online, and the final platform, dubbed “Ignition” was officially launched. The source code can be found on Github: https://github.com/qtumproject/qtum/releases

Over 60,000 man hours went into the development of Sparknet, Skynet, and Ignition combined. Each release was delivered on time, according to our development road map. This does not mean the team will relax, there are some very ambitious goals we will work toward over the next few months.

The Qtum team currently holds all of the main network tokens until the swap happens on October 4th, 2017 (6pm PST). In order to keep the chain moving, we have been staking all of the blocks, resulting in approximately 2880 Qtum tokens created daily. We do not plan to keep these tokens for the team members, they will be sent to the industry development fund. For more information on this, please see our Economy Whitepaper: https://qtum.org/en/white-papers

There was a slight update made immediately after the launch. We noticed that some Skynet nodes were attempting to connect and work with the Ignition network and got banned, which may make node operators have problems connecting to the network later after upgrading

Around the same time, there was a new attack vector discovered Bitcoin Core. This effectively allowed a malicious entity to do a long setup process, and then afterwards continually DoS the network fairly cheaply by forcing nodes to load gigabytes of transaction data into memory. We have backported the code for this issue already, and are spending a lot of time testing it now, as it is an extensive change to fix this behavior

A quick reminder to withdraw your Qtum ERC20 tokens from Yunbi.com, and if you have tokens that were not retrieved from ICO365, please e-mail swap@qtum.org and we will get back to you within 1–2 weeks.

Qtum “Ask Me Anything” Event

On September 13th, the Qtum team held an AMA on Reddit. We were thrilled to see over 1700 people tuning in to see us answer the most upvoted questions. There were staff members from 9 different countries typing away to answer as many questions as we could in a 2 hour period. We asked the community to start posting questions about 10 hours before the event went live, and when we signed off, there were over 10,000 views.

Dozens of questions were answered, to see the entire event, please visit:

Qtum ERC20 to Main Net Token Swap

The swap from ERC-20 tokens to Qtum’s functional network tokens will take place on October 4th, 2017.

The participating exchanges will be ChBTC, Bittrex, AllCoin, BTer, and Coinone.

For Bittrex details, please see: https://support.bittrex.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001606011

This means that you must have your Qtum ERC20 tokens on a participating exchange before October 4th, 2017 for them to be swapped for Qtum Ignition tokens. We will ask exchanges to halt trading 24 hours prior to the swap. If you are not familiar with depositing tokens to an exchange, please orient yourself with this procedure. Always do a small test deposit before sending the entire contents of your wallet.

Once your Qtum ERC20 tokens have been converted to Qtum Ignition, you will need a wallet to withdraw. Please ensure that your computer is not infected with malware or viruses, and that you are using the correct wallet (not Sparknet or Skynet, you must download the Ignition wallet). Once the main network tokens are in your possession, you should encrypt your wallet, and back it up. Make multiple copies and make sure you use a strong password. If you lose or forget this password, your tokens will most likely be lost forever.

Please be weary of any other third parties and non-affiliated Qtum websites. We fully expect impostors to try and steal tokens from holders like yourself. Be advised that if you fall for one of these scams, or make an error with the swap, we will not reimburse you. There is no fund set aside for reimbursements.

For users with more than 100,000 Qtum tokens not willing to use an exchange, we may manually process these transactions. We will release details on this process later.

Lastly, we will not contact you directly about any swap details. If you are approached by a Qtum team member, it is most likely an impostor.

Here’s a checklist for your convenience:

Move your Qtum ERC20 tokens to a participating exchange before Oct 4th, 2017 (6pm PST). Wait until the swap completes. Download the Qtum Ignition wallet from https://github.com/qtumproject/qtum/releases Make sure your computer is free from malware or viruses, and wait for the wallet to completely update. Encrypt and back up your wallet, make multiple copies and keep them safe. Do not keep all your backups on one computer, use a DVD-R or USB storage device. Make sure you use a strong password for your backup, and be extremely careful not to lose it. Do a test withdrawal with 1 Qtum main network token from the exchange to your wallet, and then send it back to the exchange. If everything works properly, you can proceed to withdraw your Qtum main network tokens.

NYU Shanghai Blockchain Workshop

On September 14th, the Qtum Foundation, Energo Labs, DXA (Decentralized X Academy) and NYU Shanghai co-hosted a blockchain workshop at NYU’s Shanghai campus. Many students participated and showed great interest in learning about the technology and its use cases.

As the mentor of this workshop, Qtum Community Manager Brett Fincaryk gave a brief introduction of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. Although new to the technology, the students learned the basics of the industry and displayed their curiosity during the Q&A session. They asked detailed questions about blockchain technology fundamentals and also its application in different industries.

Brett from Qtum

During the workshop, Energo Labs shared with the students how blockchain technology could disrupt and empower the clean tech industry. Energo Labs is a peer-to-peer producing and transaction platform of distributed energy based on Qtum’s blockchain technology.

Energo Labs

DXA (Decentralized X Academy) is a Non-profit Organization dedicated to promote blockchain technology to young talented people.

Qtum is always thankful to bring blockchain technology to more people, especially to the next generation of business leaders. We are planning on more collaboration with universities and incubators to promote the technology. Please stay tuned for more workshops in near future.

Development Updates

Week of September 4th and 11th:

Changes made through this week to the core wallet:

Releases:

Mainnet v1.0 — A release for the final network protocol and the genesis block

Mainnet v1.0.1 — A release which blocks Skynet nodes and fixes various UI bugs

Bugs fixed:

[Consensus/MPoS] Fixed bug where refunds were treated in blocks as MPoS rewards, potentially allowing for MPoS rewards to be stolen when a contract transaction refunded occured from the same address in the same block

[Consensus/Network] Fixed a bug where some PoS checks would occur earlier than transactions were guaranteed to be in the database, resulting in nodes being banned during the initial syncing of the blockchain

[RPC/Contract] Fixed an off-by-one error in `searchlogs`

[Staking/EVM] Fixed a bug where the `coinbase` value in Solidity/EVM would be 0 during staking, but properly filled in during block validation, causing invalid blocks to be produced

[Consensus/EVM] Fixed an off-by-one error in the recent blockhashes provided to the EVM, resulting in block[1] and block[2] having the same hash

Work completed:

[Staking/Contract] Made staker properly prioritize transactions based on gas price

[Consensus] Added a hard cap of 1Mb to any transaction

[RPC/Contract] Add gas limit option to callcontract

[Walllet] Changed HD key deriviation path to not conflict with Bitcoin’s generated HD keys

[MPoS and Contract] Refactored reward checking to happen in the safer “block reconstruction” rule checks, and to check MPoS and contract refunds in the same code so that the rules are more clear

[Consensus/VM] Disallow version-0 transactions not generated by the AAL. Although this should be safe, it has not seen enough test coverage and so has been disabled for safety until the next fork

[RPC/Contract] Add error checking to contract addresses in contract RPC calls.

[Consensus] Modified the dust threshold for transactions, increased minimum relay fees and minimum fee per byte, as well as increased minimum gas price for EVM transactions

[RPC/Contract] Add maximum sane gas price threshold, to prevent people from sending insanely high gas prices

[Tests] Fix a multitude of broken tests caused by fee increases

[Consensus/PoS] Removed the dependency on txindex from consensus code. The PoS consensus and staking code now only relies on the chainstate header database, and the UTXO set. It is now possible to run a Qtum node without using txindex. Pruning also seems to work, but has not been tested well enough to recommend using in production.

[Misc] The version number was increased to 0.14.3 for main net release

[Docs] The readme was updated to include proper instructions for building Qtum using the new build system

[Misc] Code was refactored to remove std::regex, which is not supported by GCC 4.8 used by the Gitian build system. This also results in an insignificant performance increase

[Consensus] Created the mainnet genesis block, checkpoints, and other final parameters

[Network] Increased protocol version for mainnet network, as well as banned Skynet nodes from connecting to mainnet nodes

[Tests] Fixed various DGP tests

[GUI/Contract] Added the ABI interface to the Qt GUI wallet for contracts

[GUI/Translations] Fixed various errors in the Chinese translations

[GUI/Translations] Fixed various errors in the Korean translations

In-progress work and soon to be fixed bugs:

We are working on a fix to the “per-txout” exploit revealed at Breaking Bitcoin. A new mandatory v1.0.2 release will be made before the token swap to fix this as well as a few other non-critical bugs

We are aware of an issue in our 64-bit Windows build for the Qt wallet. We hope to roll the fix for this into the v1.0.2 release

We’ve been working on creating a Qtum Ledger (the hardware wallet) app, as well as porting Electrum to work with Qtum. We’ve had some success, but still a ways to go. There is no ETA yet, though we expect it to be done by the time the mainnet is released.

Upcoming Events

CESC 2017

The Qtum team will attend the first ever Cryptoeconomics and Security Conference in Berkeley, California. Jordan Earls will be speaking at this event, more details will come soon. There will also be a Qtum meetup on the 5th, so get in touch if you would like to attend.

Here is a description of the event:

Public, permissionless blockchains are dependent for their security and reliability on their economic incentives and mechanism design. Some private, permissioned ones may be as well.

This conference will explore the economic security aspects of blockchains protocols, including game theory, incentive design, mechanism design and market design along with other topics related to crypto-economics security, and to foster collaborations among researchers and practitioners working on these topics.

Distributed Health 2017

We will be attending this conference, as well as the hackathon. The Qtum Foundation will be sponsoring the hackathon, and we will be providing live updates during the event.

Here is a description of the event:

Healthcare Innovation Through Blockchain

Distributed: Health is where healthcare leaders from around the world come together to explore how blockchain technology is transforming the industry. This groundbreaking conference brings together the brightest minds in healthcare innovation and blockchain technology to reimagine how new technology will streamline and transform everything from medical records and payments to processing and analytics.

Join your industry peers as they explore how this transformative technology will revolutionize healthcare.

This year’s series of events will also include a 24-hour hackathon promoting the creation of innovative blockchain applications solving industry problems, a 2.0-unit CLE with leading attorneys in the field exploring the legal landscape of disruptive technology and a code camp designed to provide hands-on workshops for blockchain newcomers and seasoned veterans.

Press

Qtum has been featured in a few press articles lately, please see below for more details

Thank you for your continued support!