Smart-Contract Value-Transfer Protocols On A Distributed Mobile Application Platform
Blockchain-enabled smart contracts that employ proof-ofstake validation for transactions, promise significant performance advantages compared to proof-of-work solutions. For broad industry adoption, other important requirements must be met in addition. For example, stable backwards-compatible smart-contract systems must automate cross-organizational information-logistics orchestration with lite mobile wallets that support simple payment verification (SPV) techniques. The currently leading smart-contract solution Ethereum, uses computationally expensive proof-of-work validation, is expected to hard-fork multiple times in the future and requires downloading the entire blockchain. Consequently, Ethereum smart contracts have limited utility and lack formal semantics, which is a security issue. This whitepaper fills the gap in the state of the art by presenting the Qtum smart-contract framework that aims for sociotechnical application suitability, the adoption of formalsemantics language expressiveness, and the provision of smart-contract template libraries for rapid best-practice industry deployment. We discuss the Qtum utility advantages compared to the Ethereum alternative and present Qtum smart-contract future development plans for industrycases applications.