Quantstamp is a Y Combinator backed safety firm that’s developing a new protocol for smart contract verification that aims to assist blockchain builders and projects world wide use its technology to carry out value-effective security audits on their contracts.
They also carry out manual smart contract audits, security consultations, and build safety instruments for the blockchain space.
Quantstamp was founded in June 2017 by Steven Stewart and Richard Ma. After experiencing his funds being stolen from the DAO hack, Ma was motivated to create a instrument (Quantstamp) to improve the security of smart contracts.
They boast a powerful customer resume together with Binance, OmiseGO, Wanchain, and Quoine.
Smart Contracts, Safety Considerations, and Quantstamp
With a purpose to understand the vision of Quantstamp, we first will need to have a basic understanding of smart contracts.
Smart contracts enable the exchange of value in an open, clear, trustless surroundings that removes the necessity for a fee-seeking middleman. This is achieved via code that performs predetermined actions primarily based on assumptions. If X circumstances are met, then Y transactions are performed.
What Problem is Quantstamp Attempting to Remedy?
The two biggest roadblocks stopping the proliferation of smart contracts are the „oracle problem” and maintaining safety of smart contracts.
Quantstamp goals to solve the smart contract safety problem. To date, over $250 million value of ETH has been stolen from the Ethereum networks as a consequence of vulnerabilities present in smart contracts. At the moment, the only option to safe smart contracts is through a handbook audit process which has proven to be ineffective in its present form.
To understand the contrarian perspective, I highly recommend reading Jimmy Tune’s critique: The Fact about Smart Contracts which addresses the „oracle problem” and why guaranteeing the safety of smart contracts is hard.
The larger smart contracts industry will eventually discover ways to overcome the „oracle problem” and corporations like Quantstamp will help improve the safety problem.
Investing in Quantstamp (QSP)
Make no mistakes about it, investing in Quantstamp is risky. This is a protracted shot with potentially massive upside which lends itself nicely to a small place size that’s held long term.
In a current difficulty of the Palm Beach Analysis Group Newsletter, Teeka Tiwari picked Quantstamp as a smart investment. Whether or not you trust Tiwari or the Palm Beach crew is a totally completely different question…
Under we’ll cover 5 reasons to consider investing in Quantstamp.
Nevertheless, as with most projects, there are some issues that ought to be examined earlier than considering investing. Let’s begin with the FUD.
Does the Current FUD Surrounding Quantstamp Have Benefit?
There has been some current concerns with Quanstamp which are worth mentioning.
Concern 1: Is Quantstamp following the original plan?
Apparently the company has been accepting ETH and USD for manual safety audits instead of the QSP token, which many neighborhood members assumed to be the unique plan.
This raises potential issues over the alignment of incentives shared between the company and the token holders. In other words, can the Quantstamp firm succeed financially with out the QSP token accumulating worth?
On the other hand, these handbook audits are revenues for the corporate which theoretically can be used to create a thriving ecosystem surrounding the QSP token. Not many tokenized projects have revenues, let alone a product-market fit.
Concern 2: Quantstamp is leveraging open supply software; what happened to the QSP protocol?
Most investors believed the staff was creating a decentralized platform (Quantstamp protocol) that facilitated the audit of smart contracts. But the crew has reportedly been using open supply software to perform audits. This raises the priority of what aggressive technological advantage does the team have, if any?
It’s essential to distinguish between Quantstamp’s current web companies and the Quanstamp protocol. The present providers are higher seen as a test setting for the long run decentralized protocol. The Quantstamp workforce definitely benefits by „seeing smart contracts in the wild,” as Co-Founder Steven Stewart said.
I’m not surprised the workforce has delayed the launch date of the Quantstamp protocol. Smart contracts are in their infancy, to not point out creating decentralized communities with aligned incentives is incredibly challenging.
The group launched an MVP version of the QSP protocol on testnet which you could look at here. At the moment they’re growing a more strong model of the protocol, and it will be released on the Ethereum essentialnet. However, at this point, the staff remains to be uncertain if the QSP protocol will stay an ERC-20 token or migrate to their own blockchain.
Concern three: What’s the purpose of the QSP token?
Related to the above level, there are some considerations regarding the QSP token—is it really needed?
With out actually understanding the proposed Quantstamp protocol, discerning whether the QSP token is actually required is challenging. On paper it sounds reasonable. However, as a group we positively should be more vigilant with the question: „Why does your project need a token?”