Binance, Houbi, and OKEx have revealed that they will support Qtum’s new offline staking feature, enabling users of the world’s largest exchange to earn QTUM rewards simply for hodling.
Binance’s decision to support Qtum staking is a significant boost for the smart contract network as it embarks on a new phase in its development. In addition, Coinone, CoinDCX, and Gate.io will be among the exchanges supporting QTUM staking.
A wave of applications built on Qtum Chain is expected following a $1M DeFi developer program that was launched by the Qtum Foundation.
Qtum has been refining the specifics of its offline staking feature for several weeks, including an incentivized testnet program in which its community got involved.
Now, the feature is poised to go live on the Qtum mainnet, having been programmed to kick in at block height 680,000 on August 28. The upgrade to the Qtum mainnet is a boon for supporters of the blockchain project, who can now passively stake their QTUM with no technical knowledge required.
It’s also a positive move for exchanges, as it augments the digital assets they can offer for staking, at a time when crypto holders are frantically chasing yield.
Until now, it was only possible to stake QTUM and earn rewards by operating a full node. This limited the number of users with the capacity to participate in staking and incurred VPS costs.
The introduction of offline staking allows for participation from a broader cross-section of the community and distributes QTUM holdings to more people, which aligns with Qtum’s goal of supporting decentralized finance.
Coupled with an array of improvements to the Qtum platform, offline staking paves the way for DeFi dApps, platforms, and protocols that make use of the same EVM that powers Ethereum.
Following a relatively quiet 2019, Qtum has been reborn in 2020, helped by favorable winds borne by the decentralized finance movement, as well as high Ethereum fees that have made other chains look increasingly attractive.
According to CoinGecko, QTUM is up almost 60% in the past 30 days, as expectation grows for its mainnet hard fork when offline staking will be introduced. That alone doesn’t account for the price run, which can be attributed to a string of factors, including the absence of an Ethereum rival that can provide similar functionality but with greater scalability.
Qtum isn’t gunning to replace or displace Ethereum. Still, the two chains do have significant overlap: both support smart contracts written in Solidity, using the same EVM, although Qtum also supports a number of other programming languages and enables multiple virtual machines, including x86 VM. Technical concerns aside, Qtum’s suitability for housing decentralized finance can be gauged by the $1M developer fund launched by the Qtum Foundation for third party devs seeking to build dApps.
Networks ranging from Polkadot to Cosmos and Matic to Solana have been touted as the solution to Ethereum’s scaling problems, or at the very least a stopgap until Ethereum 2.0 launches. Qtum can now be added to that list. The platform is seeking to gain a foothold in the Asian market, where Qtum’s reputation, coupled with its localized knowledge, make it amongst likeliest chains to succeed in delivering DeFi.