QTUM SKYNET

Skynet

We are just a couple of days away from what marks the next chapter of our journey at Qtum with the release of our second testnet — Skynet. Skynet will be almost identical to our mainnet in September, and it will include our revolutionary Decentralized Governance Protocol (DGP) and Smart Stake Technology that we have been developing.

DGP will make Qtum the first blockchain to be governed by the people and the system itself. The community can vote whether to change blockchain parameters like the block size, time and gas fees with a smart contract. And with Smart Stake, Qtum will become the first smart contracts platform that uses proof-of-stake consensus.

These are just two of the many innovations we hope to bring to the community over the years.

Skynet isn’t some dystopian vision of the future that we have, but rather a glimpse of our hopes. The sky isn’t guarded by the Walls of Westeros. It’s a place where the birds can soar through the air with dragons. And most importantly, it’s a place where information can flow freely between the clouds.

We hope blockchain technology to be the backbone of the new information era where the freedom to collaborate between people, houses, nations, businesses, and devices is inherent.

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Charles Xue Joins Qtum as a Strategic Advisor

We are happy to announce that Charles Xue, billionaire entrepreneur and angel investor, will be one of Qtum’s strategic advisors. Charles was one of the founders of UTStarcom, a global telecommunications infrastructure provider, and he helped lead the company through China’s roaring 1990’s. Charles recognizes that now is the time for blockchain technology to see its rapid development, and we are glad he will share his wisdom with Qtum.

Development Updates

Changes made through this week to the core wallet:

Bugs fixed:

* [EVM/Consensus] Fixed a bug with the minimum gas price consensus rule

* [DGP/Consensus] Increased the maximum serialized block size to allow DGP to work properly with segwit blocks

Work completed:

* [Build System] Reworked the build system so that Ethereum’s cmake system is no longer used. Imported cryptopp directly into the Qtum repository. Reworked some Bitcoin dependencies so that they also work with cpp-etheruem

* [Build System] Made the Gitian build system work properly for all platforms, making it possible to easily do deterministic builds for Linux, Windows, and OSX.

* [Documentation] Updated the gitian and release process documents to work specifically for Qtum

* [DGP/Consensus] Moved several DGP consensus rules to ConnectBlock rather than CheckBlock, fixing a bug where DGP rules could cause initial syncing to fail

* [AAL/Consensus] Ensure that the “deleteAddress” list is always cleared after execution. This was the cause of a major performance problem in testnet-1 where contract execution would get slower and slower the longer a Qtum node remained running

* [EVM/Consensus] Disallow the EVM CREATE opcode to be used to create a contract with coins. Contracts must first be created and then sent coins

In-progress work and soon to be fixed bugs:

* [misc] We are doing final testing and preparing to create the final testnet-2 network. It will be complete this week. Testnet-2 (Skynet) should behave as close as possible to the mainnet. We do not intend to add more consensus features and will only add non-consensus features (such as new GUI work etc) and bug fixes through this period.