When deciding on attention-grabbing blockchain/crypto projects to comply with, I always follow my mantra „Focus on projects that deliver value to society”. Simple sufficient, proper? Judging by the amount of effort many investors have spent making an attempt to quantify this, clearly it is a very tough assertion to evaluate. It’s a obscure sentence, and will be interpreted many ways. What is value and how can we measure it? This could be an article in and of itself, however I like to easily define a worth adding product or project as something that solves a problem for society.
In my inaugural medium put up I wish to talk about one among my favourite projects, Quantstamp. I have been an active neighborhood member and token holder since shortly after their ICO, so due to this fact plenty of this submit will simply be compiled data from their whitepaper, website, blogposts, and AMA’s along with my analysis and opinion. I’ll attempt to maintain this article as non-technical as doable, but it surely does assume you will have at the very least a bit background knowledge of the blockchain space.
Why Quantstamp? Compared to some of my other favorites, Quantstamp isn’t discussed much locally and when it’s, there are a variety of questions and FUD. In this submit I will focus on: a short history of related events, problems with smart contracts, proposed solutions from Quantstamp, the worth mannequin of the QSP token, Quantstamp’s business strategy, and finally criticism the staff has received. The purpose of this article is to present an summary of Quantstamp and demonstrate why I think it is a sleeping big in a space where safety is more essential than ever.
One of the first major smart contract hacks happenred in 2016; the notorious „DAO Hack”. There are lots of great articles describing this hack, (see right here for an instance), so I won’t go into detail here. This was the event that would encourage Quantstamp co-founders Richard Ma and Steven Stewart to begin creating multiple decentralized protocols to help safe smart contracts on a blockchain. Richard himself misplaced money 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 price of smart contract hacks to that date.
Since the DAO hack, the occasion has always been used as an argument towards the usefulness of smart contracts; from bitcoin „maximalists” to blockchain skeptics. However no system is totally secure and flawless; not smart contracts, centralized applications, bitcoin, or probably the most robust cryptography. We just make trade-offs by altering totally different parameters while hopefully lowering the magnitude of those trade-offs as technology evolves. It then stands to reason that we should capable of increasing the safety of smart contracts while working to minimize the impact to decentralization. Enter Quantstamp.
The more decentralized auditing protocol will allow users to easily submit code, or a contract’s address, pay in QSP tokens (with value set by the audit nodes), and have a scan completed by as many audit nodes as desired. The outcomes of this scan can then be stored within the blockchain as bytecode for anyone to verify, or stored private to the team. The key right here is that the audit is completed in a decentralized method, and the code might 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 anybody to make use of and interpret; the significance of this can’t be understated.
I think an important results of this is that any common consumer can use this protocol to simply check if a smart contract is safe as an preliminary check. As an example, Bob isn’t a super technical programmer, and is utilizing a dapp for the primary time. Possibly the dapp is from someone who arrange a easy 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 ends in lots of red flags. If so, it will be higher to attend until the problems are addressed. If there aren’t quite a lot of red flags, Bob feels slightly safer and has completed just one a part of the entire due diligence process to make sure the contract is safe.