What’s hot in crypto this week?
Qtum (QTUM). It’s a blockchain technology designed to merge the smart contracts of Ethereum with the stable blockchain characteristics of Bitcoin. It also uses the “proof of stake” consensus mechanism to verify ownership. The platform went live in September 2017 and is primarily aimed at serving businesses and other organization. An added bonus is that decentralized applications built on Ethereum are compatible with QTUM, too.
Why?
The Qtum community has been hard at work testing its new offline staking feature, which went live this week on Testnet. With this innovation, users can securely delegate their coin’s address to an online Super Staker. These online nodes will run the Proof-of-Stake consensus for the coins of the offline address, via a smart contract. The offline address will get an instant payout with each block reward, while the Super Staker will get a fee for its services.
After a testing period, including a crowd-sourced community “Qtum Testnet Stake-A-Thon” program, Qtum’s mainnet will hard fork at the end of August to put offline staking into production.
Qtum Offline Staking is non-custodial, which means that users delegating their addresses retain full control of the coins and private keys. The delegation is thereby trustless and can be revoked at any time.
How has Qtum’s FCAS score changed?
QTUM’s FCAS went up 19-points (3.53%) in the past ten days, led by a 28-point climb in Developer Behavior. User Activity and Market Maturity remained stable.
What’s Flipside’s take?
Enabling offline staking means users can validate transactions without having to sync the entire blockchain or stay online 24/7 to operate. Running a full node takes up a lot of resources and power that are not accessible to everyone.
“Offline staking significantly reduces the barriers to entry to participate in Qtum’s consensus,” said Qtum executive John Scianna. “End users can delegate their tokens safely without giving up custody, or run a Super Staker node collecting fees from delegated tokens without the risks of slashing or taking control of other users Qtum.”
For perspective, if offline staking on the testnet is successful, an implementation on mainnet would make Qtum the first blockchain to offer offline staking of its cryptocurrency. As a result, the feature is likely to reward new users and investors to stake QTUM offline, further creating demand for the asset.
The Flipside Crypto Asset Score Tracker provides institutional and sophisticated retail investors the ability to track over 500 cryptocurrencies’ fundamentals. FCAS Tracker is currently free to a select group of new users as it continues to develop the product. Visit Flipside here to gain access to Flipside Analytics.