When choosing fascinating blockchain/crypto projects to observe, I always observe my mantra „Deal with projects that deliver worth to society”. Simple sufficient, right? Judging by the quantity of effort many traders have spent attempting to quantify this, clearly it’s a very tough statement to evaluate. It is a obscure sentence, and could be interpreted many ways. What’s value and how can we measure it? This could possibly be an article in and of itself, but I like to simply define a worth adding product or project as something that solves a problem for society.
In my inaugural medium submit I want to talk about certainly one of my favorite projects, Quantstamp. I’ve been an active neighborhood member and token holder since shortly after their ICO, so therefore lots of this submit will merely be compiled data from their whitepaper, website, blogposts, and AMA’s along with my analysis and opinion. I will try to keep this article as non-technical as possible, nevertheless it does assume you may have at the very least just a little background data of the blockchain space.
Why Quantstamp? Compared to a few of my different favorites, Quantstamp isn’t mentioned much in the neighborhood and when it is, there are a number of questions and FUD. In this put up I’ll focus on: a short history of relevant occasions, problems with smart contracts, proposed solutions from Quantstamp, the worth model of the QSP token, Quantstamp’s enterprise strategy, and finally criticism the group has received. The purpose of this article is to offer an summary of Quantstamp and demonstrate why I think it is a sleeping large in an area the place security is more essential than ever.
One of many first major smart contract hacks occurred in 2016; the infamous „DAO Hack”. There are quite a lot of nice articles describing this hack, (see here for an example), so I won’t go into element here. This was the event that might motivate Quantstamp co-founders Richard Ma and Steven Stewart to begin creating a number of decentralized protocols to help safe smart contracts on a blockchain. Richard himself misplaced cash within the hack, making it a very personal sore spot in his crypto experience. Presenting at Hong Kong Blockchain week in March 2019, Richard Ma reported that there was an estimated $334 million dollars value of smart contract hacks to that date.
For the reason that DAO hack, the occasion has constantly been used as an argument against the usefulness of smart contracts; from bitcoin „maximalists” to blockchain skeptics. But no system is totally secure and flawless; not smart contracts, centralized applications, bitcoin, or probably the most strong cryptography. We just make trade-offs by altering different parameters while hopefully reducing the magnitude of these trade-offs as technology evolves. It then stands to reason that we should capable of increasing the safety of smart contracts while working to attenuate the impact to decentralization. Enter Quantstamp.
The more decentralized auditing protocol will permit customers to simply submit code, or a contract’s address, pay in QSP tokens (with worth set by the audit nodes), and have a scan achieved by as many audit nodes as desired. The outcomes of this scan can then be stored within the blockchain as bytecode for anyone to confirm, or kept private to the team. The important thing right here is that the audit is accomplished in a decentralized manner, and the code can be submitted by anybody (given the code is open sourced to the general public). The workforce can also be working extensively on making the UI/UX intuitive and easy for anyone to make use of and interpret; the significance of this can’t be understated.
I think an essential result of this is that any regular person can use this protocol to simply check if a smart contract is safe as an initial check. As an example, Bob isn’t a super technical programmer, and is using a dapp for the primary time. Perhaps the dapp is from somebody who arrange a simple shop on the Ethereum blockchain, and the code is open sourced. Bob can then obtain that code, or submit its contract address, to see if the scan results in loads of red flags. If so, it might be better to wait until the issues are addressed. If there aren’t a variety of red flags, Bob feels a little safer and has completed just one a part of the entire due diligence process to make sure the contract is safe.