Qtum is a decentralized blockchain project built on Bitcoin's UTXO model, with support for Ethereum Virtual Machine based smart contracts, and secured by a proof of stake consensus model. It achieves this through the revolutionary Account Abstraction Layer which allows the EVM to communicate with Qtum's Bitcoin-like UTXO blockchain. For more general information about Qtum as well as links to join our community, go to https://qtum.org
For an immediately usable, binary version of the Bitcoin Core software, see https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/.
Further information about Bitcoin Core is available in the doc folder.
The major features of the Qtum network include:
For more information read the original Bitcoin whitepaper.
Qtum is GPLv3 licensed.
The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be
completely stable. Tags are created
regularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Qtum.
The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.md.
Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money.
Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to
submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
(assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: make check. Further details on running
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.
There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: test/functional/test_runner.py
The CI (Continuous Integration) systems make sure that every pull request is built for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and that unit/sanity tests are run automatically.
Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is not straightforward.
Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.
Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the translation process for details on how this works.
Important: We do not accept translation changes as GitHub pull requests because the next pull from Transifex would automatically overwrite them again.