Base Layer Episode 053 - Patrick Dai (Qtum)

Patrick, the Founder of Qtum ($300M Market Cap), joins us on Base Layer and there's a lot to unpack on this one. Qtum wants to harness the best attributes of the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains to create a decentralized, well-governed smart contracts platform with the potential to iterate on existing consensus mechanisms and other protocol parameters. Qtum believes proof-of-work blockchain protocols like suffer from categorical scaling limitations such that proof-of-stake is if only by default a viable consensus model. Qtum plans to build the first robust proof-of-stake UTXO-based smart-contract network. They also have a Decentralized Governance Protocol which we discussed in addition to their full node count and more insight into their x86 Virtual Machine which aims to support C, C++, Rust, Python and other widely used programming languages, facilitating mainstream adoption of smart contract development.