Quantstamp - Under the radar

Quantstamp. Your friend's grandma wearing a bikini.

Both aren't immediately sexy to think about. But what if I told you, it -is- sexy? You just need to rework how you perceive them. Come with me on a fantastic journey using your imagination. Maybe at least by the end, you will find your friend's grandma smoking hot.

Quantstamp holds a heavy hand in my portfolio. I often have discussions with my friends on the future of blockchain but we will always disagree on many points. One of these is Quantstamp. While I have done some convincing, there will always be those few who just do not hold the same sentiment. And that is fine, but I think they are missing out on something that is crucial for this technology to succeed and to find mainstream adoption.

In my last post, I linked to a TED talk about blockchain technology being used to redefine how trust in businesses function. While I am not nuanced and smart enough to elaborate on the specifics, presented in that video, I did tease out one important point. Right now, we just don't trust business. And this distrust pervades our policies and process when interfacing with businesses. Buy a home? - Title company. Buy a car? - Carfax.

If we think of blockchain as a tool to improve trust, how then does it actively do so?

To oversimplify, trust directly correlates with improvements in accuracy and efficiency. How accurate is the information? Can we trust it? How is it delivered? And what can we do with it?

Recently there was an ICO debacle concerning Bread. When trying to send funds to the contract address, the entirety of the thousands of transactions that hit the contract failed. The contract broke. Everyone was confused and everyone kept sending in tx after tx. This is a clear failure in trust. We expect things to go smoothly when transacting with a business, and it erodes when things go wrong.

This is where Quantstamp evolves how trust can be refined and improved. If we imagine smart contracts as being tools of a blockchain to facilitate business, Quantstamp acts as the whetstone to refine the contract. All of the hammering should have been done by the team's devs. But before it gets released, we should know the sword can cut.

Imagine as the swordsmith, you gave a katana to a warrior going out to battle. He comes back in pieces wrapped in cloth. What was supposed to have been a sharp sword, was a dull dud. Oops?

Quantstamp in a nutshell, is currently working to create an automated protocol to audit smart contracts across multiple blockchain platforms. Currently, auditing involves pouring tons of human resources into verifying that contracts are without bugs before deployment. But as you may have seen with the above ICO contract deploy failure with Bread among many other contract failures in the space (more recently concerning Parity), we have learned that even companies we expect to be on point, can fail, and in some cases lead to huge financial loss.

I am holding Quantstamp for these reasons:

1. Current environment surrounding proliferation of blockchain tech seems to be veering towards more regulation worldwide as more interest and money flows into this space.
2. As more users enter the space, security and protection becomes exponentially more important. Preserving value and trust will be paramount moving forward.
3. As more money pours in, unscrupulous actors are more incentived to devote resources to phishing and hacking. Refer to Parity and the recent Ether Delta hack among a myriad of disastrous stories. Businesses dealing in or working in conjunction with security will be invaluable.
4. Quantstamp is the only (to my knowledge) known player in the space to work towards an automated protocol system for auditing smart contracts.
5. Quantstamp has built out strong partnerships and has great support, building a solid foundation moving forward. Notable investors include Y Combinator and Kenetic Capital.
6. Their incentivization structure concerning token holding is solid. Token burns and air drops add value to holding tokens while preserving value over time through scarcity and use.
7. Quantstamp has already lined up ~40 audits, one of which was recently revealed to be Ink Protocol, another Y Combinator backed company (Quanstamp notably also audited Request Network, a fellow YC alumni).

Quantstamp
Ticker: QSP
MCAP: ~$100M

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