In celebration of its first birthday, Qtum released its “most substantial update yet”, the 0.16 update which plans to scale their network to 50,000 transactions per second. The blockchain protocol also said that it’ll release the first public testnet with x86 smart contracts in Q2 of 2019.
Source: blog.qtum.org
The amalgamation of Ethereum Virtual Machine’s functionality and Bitcoin’s robust UTXO security measures, Qtum has become a reliable smart contract platform for businesses. And to speed up its working capabilities, the platform will now be using lightning networks, a number of tune-ups with faster synchronization of nodes, and SHA256 hashing efficiency improvements. The first public testnet for x86 smart contracts will also support languages like C, C++, Rust, Go and Python to bring the blockchain technology to the likes of the masses.
The official Qtum
blog read, “
We are continually working on the x86 virtual machine. The virtual machine improves the smart contract ecosystem by making smart contracts not only easier to write but also easier to make secure and audit. The most prominent feature, which affects all smart contract developers, is that it supports many mainstream programming languages.”
Source: blog.qtum.org
While the company has laid out plans for 2019 for x86 VM and Qtum lightning network, the announcements also featured QtumX, the enterprise version of Qtum which uses a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm. The “more user-friendly for enterprise users” QtumX is said to have vast improvements in stability and could potentially increase exchange efficiency and network safety.
Qtum also had multiple updates concerning various fields like Research, Community, its 2018 Global Hackathon and the Community Ambassadors program. You can read about that more on their.