Almost a decade ago, the first distributed, decentralized and public ledger came into being. We are talking about the Bitcoin phenomenon. As it rose to fame for offering anonymity and privacy, blockchains like Ethereum, Ripple, Hyperledger, and Quorum mushroomed.

But now, the excitement for newer blockchains is growing. Part of the problem Ethereum and Bitcoin face is to do with interoperability. As a matter of fact, there exists no common network that would connect these technically diverse blockchain networks.

The internet approach

If the internet could overcome the problem of diversity and work as a single strong network, so can blockchain. Up until now, the blockchain interoperability hiccups are being addressed only at the transactional layer. What does that mean?

Let’s assume blockchain X is attempting to connect Bitcoin and Ethereum. It will basically follow this approach:

Bitcoin Transaction -> X Transaction -> Ethereum Transaction

And vice versa.

Unfortunately, there is a Gordian knot in this solution.

As progressive technology, the blockchains will keep evolving. Sometimes the progress may happen in the form of faster TPS (transactions per second). And sometimes the transaction format itself might change. In short, the biggest roadblocks for interoperability are factors relating to consensus models, smart contract functionality and transaction schemes.

That means the blockchain X will never be future-proof.

Inspired by Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, Team Quant took a unique approach to the interoperability issue. Instead of creating a new blockchain to connect the Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) networks, it created something that runs on top of blockchains. That comes in the form of Quant’s patented Blockchain OS, Overledger.

Future-proof Overledger

Designed to run on top of blockchains, Overledger doesn’t concern itself with the blockchain, the consensus method or any other aspect to connect the blockchains. This setup ensures Overledger is a future-proof way to connect blockchains.

The journey of a transaction in Overledger

To explain this in simple terms, let us examine the following transaction.

Alice wishes to buy a pizza from a marketplace multi-chain application (MApp) owned by Bob that uses Overledger. This particular transaction chain involves Alice, Bob, the restaurant, and the delivery man.

Let’s say Alice pays for her pizza in BTC, but the restaurant only accepts ETH and on top of that the delivery man accepts only XRP. Do you smell trouble?

This is what Overledger intends to settle

Bob has a multi-chain smart contract on MApp. According to that, when Bob receives BTC, a part of the payment will process as ETH towards the restaurant and another, as XRP towards the delivery man.

Overledger has multiple layers where ledgers remain isolated. These are transaction layers, messaging layers, filtering and ordering layers, and the application layers.

The BTC transaction received from Alice goes to MApp-1 and invokes Bob’s contract. The BTC transaction thus heads to the BTC ledger of the MApp-1 transaction layer. It extracts the transaction info which is directed to the messaging layer. This layer then lets the filtering and ordering layer create a verification block. That is how the application layer gets to know that it has to make an ETH and XRP payment to the restaurant and delivery man respectively.

How does one trust Overledger?

The MApp used by Alice uses Quant’s patented fingerprint verification technology called TrustTag. This assigns digital fingerprints to physical goods, documents or any other item to make sure it is secure and maintains the integrity of transactions.

GoVerify is another such MApp that is currently in use to verify invoices, letters, emails, and texts. Lloyds Bank, government authorities and logistics organizations have trialed it for verification.

Why would one want to create a marketplace with MApp rather than DApp?

This point is very interesting. We can sum up the advantages of MApp over a decentralized application or DApp as below:

Front end– Easy to integrate front ends into existing apps. It has also released an Overledger SDK (software development kit) for quick developments.

API- This programmable interface allows Bob to store the MApp rules to interact with the Overledger OS and the multiple blockchains.

Treaty Contracts– Multi chain contracts

Blockchains– Decentralized networks of nodes with no smart contract capability necessary.

QNT token utility

Regulated by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), the QNT token is a utility token. It provides digital access to an application or service. Anyone can access the Overledger OS by using the QNT tokens. These are required to pay the annual license or platform fee.

The Quant market share

Quant might not be aggressively going after exchange listings or GitHub commits but it has an impressive business development pipeline that comprises over 300 clients at enterprise levels.

It is running an ongoing project with SIA, the European ICT giant. SIA has over 580 banks in its networks and it intends to use Quant to process all these banking transactions.

Exchange presence

Currently, QNT is available on IDEX, Bithumb, and Bittrex. Quant explains this conservative spread as due to its heavy enterprise involvement.

According to a Telegram AMA, Quant’s enterprise associates restrict it from listing the token on every possible exchange. We learned from a Reddit thread that it was trying to list QNT on Kraken, Bitstamp and Coinbase. And it is also attempting to list on traditional exchanges for its institutional clients.

At the time of publishing, the QNT price is trading at over $5. It had seen an all-time high in July 2019, a surge of almost 800%. But as we understand, Quant is a project that is bridging the interoperability gap between blockchains. And that makes it a high-value proposition in the ecosystem. It is thus no wonder that Quant made it to our top altcoin blockchain protocol list.

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Disclaimer

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