Qtum is a decentralized and open-source smart contracts platform and value transfer protocol. Qtum uses proof-of-stake consensus, meaning node operators are rewarded for validating transactions. It is a DGP governed blockchain where community participants can vote to change certain network parameters. Qtum is built on a bitcoin core fork, but the foundation has created its own hybrid blockchain with the help of several key tools. The coin uses bitcoin’s chain because of its simple and stable nature, allowing the foundation to build upon it more easily. As the QTUM project is a hybrid of Bitcoin and Ethereum, its team comprises of members from both Bitcoin and Ethereum community. They also have team members who formerly worked with Tencent, Alibaba, Nasdaq etc. Apart from that, they are backed by some notable VCs and prominent people from the Blockchain community such as Patrick Dai (Project Co-Founder), Neil Mahi (Chief Blockchain Architect/Co-Founder) and Jordan Earls (Lead Developer/Co-Founder). Qtum provides a Turing-complete blockchain stack and is able to execute smart contracts and decentralised applications like the Ethereum blockchain. Qtum builds on Bitcoin's UTXO transaction model and uses the Proof-of-Stake algorithm. It is backed by some highly prominent members of the blockchain community such as Anthony Di Iorio, Xu Star, Bo Shen, David Lee, Jehan Chu and Roger Ver. Qtum sold over 10 million dollars’ worth of its tokens after only 90 minutes, eventually raising a total value of $15.7 million before stopping the campaign early after only 5 days. They raised a total amount of 11,156.766 bitcoins (BTC) and 77,081.031 ether (ETH) in exchange for the 51 million Qtum tokens being distributed to the public. In Qtum’s whitepaper, 51% of the coins were distributed to the public via the crowdfunding campaign. Of the remaining 49%, 29% of the coins would be allocated as community incentives, and the remaining 20% would be distributed to the early backers and development team.
Zilliqa (ZIL) is a token developed in the year 2017. Zilliqa is mainly based on the concept of Sharding and primarily aims at improving the scalability of the cryptocurrency networks as in case of Bitcoin or Ethereum. The white paper mentions that the transactions speed would be approximately a thousand times more than that of Ethereum network. Ziliqa is fast, secured and decentralized. Zilliqa’s high throughput means that you can focus on developing your ideas without worrying about network congestion, high transaction fees or security which are the key issues with legacy blockchain platforms. Zilliqa network uses a concept called Sharding where the transactions are grouped into smaller groups and divided among the miners for the parallel transactional verification. Developing smaller groups for transactional verification means the Consensus can be reached faster and hence a higher number of transactions can be processed in a given time frame. The capacity of the network linearly increases in other cryptocurrencies as the number of people joins the network, but in this case, the capacity is increased at a higher variable rate than the number of members joining the network. By incorporating the Sharding Technology, it can completely revolutionize the smart contract functionality too. Ziliqa has few pros as it has a great new technology. Zilliqa is the first platform to use sharding technology. This puts it ahead of the rest of the market. It’s a completely new kind of blockchain designed to solve the problem of scalability. Third-generation platforms like Zilliqa could be the big winners in the future of cryptocurrency. Ziliqa has a strong community. The platform has a lot of fans. The Zilliqa ICO only happened because there was so much demand for it. The Zilliqa ICO also shows that the crypto community is ready to see blockchain technology move to the next phase of its development.