Thank you for your interest in the Qtum project. It’s been a while since the last development roadmap has been published, but 2024 is looking to be active. One issue we solved in the last two years was building a core infrastructure that will allow us to proceed with the ecosystem development items. This year will mark the start of our 8th year in active development, and we start this year off with a fresh roadmap that walks through some of our development goals.

Some prior improvements were activating Taproot and increasing the throughput of Qtum to a 32-second block target. After we delivered the November 2023 hard fork, we’re now ready to focus harder on our core mission: Attracting developers to build on our blockchain. 

The purpose of this short-term roadmap is to promise functionality and deliver it in a relatively short period of time. Items that will take longer to deliver will be added to the development plan later. We’re certain we can deliver the items listed below by May 2024, and we will begin to add many of the other items we’re researching for the future to the roadmap once we have a better understanding of the time involved to build and test. Expect to see more items added later in the year.

With this said, let’s explore what Qtum is working on in early 2024:

Qtum Bridge and USDC

TL;DR: Wrapped USDC coming to Qtum with a bridge, possible native integration. Possible to bridge other ERC-20 assets to Qtum and back. Certik audit in process. Estimated ETA March 15th-22nd, 2024 for Mainnet launch, longer if audit suggests improvements. Earlier for Qtum test network.

Our goal in 2024 is to deploy the infrastructure that’s needed for developers to build or integrate Web3 utilities. At the time of this blog post, we’re implementing a bridge that will allow users to wrap and transfer tokens from Ethereum to Qtum and back. 

At the time of writing this document, the bridge is currently awaiting a Certik audit. We expect this audit to criticize the lack of community governance and democracy, but we plan to add those features later. The emphasis right now is a secure method of moving Ethereum ERC-20 assets back and forth between Qtum, namely Circle’s USDC stablecoin.

We’re deploying the USDC “Bridged Stablecoin Standard” set of contracts on Qtum and Ethereum, which will bring wrapped USDC to Qtum and also allow Circle to decide whether they want to convert those wrapped tokens into native USDC at a later date. 

That decision is theirs alone, and if they choose not to do it, USDC will still be wrapped on Qtum. There will also be the option to bridge any wrapped Ethereum asset to Qtum and back.

For more information on this initiative, please see Circle’s blog post:

Bridged USDC Standard | Circle

The DeFi opportunities that come with a stablecoin are too obvious to mention. What is worth mentioning is the fact that there’s no Qtum/stablecoin liquidity pool on any chain, which gives us the first-mover advantage.

The wallet we will use to launch the bridge won’t be feature-rich by any means, but in a few months, expect to see a “MetaMask Snap” integration that should tidy things up.

NFTs have been possible on Qtum for some time, but there hasn’t been much traction without a stablecoin. 

Because Qtum is capable of deploying token standards available to UTXO chains, there may be a possibility for Ordinal inscriptions to co-exist in a DeFi environment on a hybrid UTXO/EVM chain like Qtum, which isn’t something the non-UTXO smart contract chains can do without token wrapping. We plan to research and update the roadmap on this topic later in the year.

Qtum Bridge testing Interface

BRC-20 and Ordinals Support

TL;DR: Ordinals and BRC20-like token standard are coming to Qtum because of Taproot integration. Estimated ETA April 2024 on Mainnet, earlier on Testnet. Enhanced functionality later in 2024.

It has always been possible to mint NFTs on Qtum because we support the established token standards like ERC-721 and ERC-1155 on the smart contract EVM layer. The Qtum base layer is a clone of Bitcoin Core, which means we are a UTXO blockchain that supports the latest Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. 

In the case of Ordinals, Taproot makes this possible. In 2024, we will build a set of tools to support a Qtum implementation of BRC-20 tokens and Ordinals. We currently have this working in a testnet environment using the “QORD” wallet. 

Expect to see an indexer and blockchain explorer that can interact with Ordinals in early 2024. There will also be a web based frontend that makes it easier for users to inscribe without having to use a command line interface in a wallet.

We’re working with a third-party partner to onboard a more user-friendly wallet to make it easier to interface with the indexer and block explorer.

The ecosystem will see rapid changes as the Ordinals protocol gets developed for Bitcoin. Once the Qtum implementation is completed, we will begin exploring ways to modify and improve it so that Qtum has features that Ordinals on Bitcoin does not offer. Further research is required and we will provide updates in later 2024.

Qtum Core

TL;DR: Qtum will continue to stay upstream with Bitcoin and EVM releases. Qtum Core has the best features of Bitcoin and Ethereum, but with native features we’ve developed over the years that make the blockchain fast and cheap to use.

Qtum Core is the base layer of the protocol. It incorporates the blockchain, which is a clone of Bitcoin that uses a modified Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. A middleware interpretation layer called the “Account Abstraction Layer” allows the EVM to co-exist with a UTXO blockchain. 

Like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Qtum is permissionless, as anyone can run a node and validate transactions without owning coins. To prevent spam transactions that can bring down the network, gas is required for every activity on Qtum. 

The gas price is calculated in the same way Bitcoin does. Still, the community can modify this price to keep transactions affordable while protecting the network from malicious actors. 

Qtum Core has seen over 40 updates since the main network launched in September 2017. These updates are typically “upstream,” meaning they are merged updates provided by the Bitcoin and Ethereum teams. The benefit of this is not having to duplicate code to achieve the same results.

In 2024, the Qtum team will stick to this strategy. Once future Bitcoin and EVM updates are published, we will begin work to merge these into Qtum Core. 

There are five pages of software updates found on the Qtum Github repository found here:

Releases · qtumproject/qtum (github.com)

Some notable past releases include functionality:

Taproot / Schnoor Signatures / Tapscript support

• EVM Shanghai Update

• Offline Staking

• “Fast Lane” 32 second transactions

• Segregated Witness

You can read more about the past “Qtum Improvement Proposals” here:

Issues · qtumproject/qips · GitHub

Summary

Qtum will deliver an audited bridge to Ethereum and back in order to provide infrastructure for DeFi and other Web3 activity. The UTXO model that Qtum Core is based on allows us to go further and expand into Ordinals technology and another token standard on Qtum based on BRC-20. This roadmap is short and direct because we wanted to deliver much overdue functionality quickly to stimulate the ecosystem and have the infrastructure in place for the next roadmap. Behind the scenes, we have a lot of irons in the fire, and these deliverables are necessary to move forward. We know we fell behind in 2021 and 2022 while building out Janus, Qnode, and activating Taproot. Those tools were important but difficult to get excited about, so we’re focusing all our efforts in 2024 on building partnerships and an ecosystem again. Thank you, and stay tuned.

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