Qiswap is Built on a Solid Foundation:
For Blockchain enthusiasts that have been involved in the greater crypto community a while, we’ve experienced the market fluctuations of 2013 and 2017. We can feel that something is different this time; Paypal’s onboarding of cryptocurrencies, billions of dollars locked in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and mainstream investment funds getting involved. If we’re lucky, big media may even update their inaccurate talking points.
This experience played a role in picking a blockchain for the QiSwap platform. The foundation needs to be solid so the project can grow. The Qtum platform adds layers of stability to a project that needs to mitigate as much risk as possible. If there’s billions of dollars being locked in DeFi pools, what happens if there’s a need to roll back the chain? It’s hypothetical situations like this that can randomly happen. It’s hard to guess them all, but if a platform has a large toolbox, there should be more ways to deal with problems.
Stability, +Speed, and Security:
Here’s a question, how much Ethereum has been lost forever because of hard forks? There’s no right answer to this question, but you can see where this conversation is going in relation to DeFi. The less forks the better. What’s better, Qtum doesn’t need to fork to implement the newest Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. Because of this, QiSwap gets to leverage the upstream work of both Qtum and Bitcoin.
There exists on the Qtum platform a series of community controlled Smart Contracts called the “Decentralized Governance Protocol”, which are built in tools that allow the Blockchain to change certain parameters that normally require a hard fork. For example, think back to the debate we all had to endure in 2017 about Bitcoin scaling. It ultimately led to the discussion of Segregated Witness, Lightning Network, along with the Bitcoin Cash fork. This debate just could not happen with Qtum, literally all of the projects in the market capitalization top 10 list couldn’t produce enough transactions to cause issues. If they could, Qtum just changes the block size and problem solved. This could be achieved in a truly decentralized fashion, where anyone with an internet connection and a device could run a full node, without needing to own coins.
If the Qtum network had an attacker spamming the network with junk transactions, it would be easy to mitigate. The community would either raise the block size or increase the gas fee. The problem is fixed, no hard fork is required, and the changes can be reversed later if desired.
What cannot be reversed is the Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs). This topic can get complicated quickly, but in a nutshell, for reorg security (having to reconstruct the Blockchain) this is a fantastic model. It’s another layer of prevention that makes Qtum (and all Bitcoin-like) platforms stable.
Decentralization
Let’s go with Cointelegraph’s definition of decentralization: “Decentralization is the process of distributing and dispensing power away from a central authority”. They go on to explain how this makes the network resilient because it doesn’t have a single point of failure. This is crucial when building a DEX. The Qtum team relies solely on the confidence of the community to accept their updates, they don’t centrally control the network.
If you think back almost a decade, the big topic was Bitcoin mining pools like BTCGuild solving almost half of the blocks. It’s centralized power like this that leads to attack vectors, and the issue today is centralized exchanges staking their customers’ deposits, giving them significant amounts of power over blockchains.
The definition we went with above got murky in the last half of 2017 when projects trying to raise funds had to claim their technology was superior and couldn’t produce results on a decentralized Blockchain. What they did was centralize what they could, then told people it was decentralized because you could vote for who controlled the centralized parts. This was a marketing magic trick which lead to centralized projects being accepted in an industry created to prevent their existence. The good news is that projects like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum exist and are actually decentralized. Qtum has over 1000 independent nodes at this time, which makes the network a lot stronger than having a few centralized entities that validate transactions. There is no risk that a few actors can blacklist transactions or wallet addresses on the Qtum blockchain.
Potential for Growth
Since 2017, Qtum has had everything they’re trying to dump onto Bitcoin or build into Ethereum. From staking to SegWit, there’s no talk of hard forking later to implement because it has been working for years. The ‘Account Abstraction Layer’ allows Qtum to host the EthereumVM along with others. Basically, any project with a good VM may find it Qtum incorporating it onto their platform.
From a DeFi perspective, this could help a lot when it comes to cross-platform liquidity swaps. Dealing with wrapped coins, stablecoins, and other things necessary for a DEX to operate. With new VM’s allowing us to bridge with other DEX’s, we can all grow together.
Thank you for your attention.
