Qtum Chain Foundation, a secure, open-source smart contract platform built on blockchain distributed ledger technology, today announced a partnership with Google LLC that will bring the company’s developer tools to Google Cloud.

By way of the partnership, free-to-use tools will enable developers and nontechnical users to design and deploy nodes on the Qtum blockchain as well as produce apps that use its platform.

Blockchain technology creates a distributed ledger that secures itself with advanced cryptography and multiparty consensus so stored transactional data cannot be easily tampered with. The same technology can be used to provide trustworthy historical data, enable and disable permissions for access and provide trust audits to third parties that can maintain the confidentiality of data attached to the chain.

In the case of Qtum’s tools, developers can use yet another capability of blockchains: smart contracts, or rules-based transactions that rely on a set of conditions to complete.

When a smart contract is put into place on a blockchain, a cryptographic key is put into escrow until such time that the two or more parties of the contract agree that the contract conditions have been completed. This can be done with an escrow supervisor completing the agreement or it can be completely automated with a computer program verifying the conditions and releasing the escrow, or returning it to its originator.

“Where launching a node was once an intensive and complex process, Qtum’s new developer suite introduces helpful shortcuts and tools to make it faster and easier,” said Qtum Chief Information Officer Miguel Palencia. “With a more accessible technology, we hope to open up and expand the Qtum community to include people with a broader range of experience — from experts to the everyday user.”

Blockchains and smart contracts at the low level require a lot of highly technical training and research. As a result, Qtum designed its tools to automate as much of the lower-level programming as possible so that business users — those with little technical expertise — can turn simple business logic into smart contracts, use the Qtum platform to turn them into code, and deploy and execute them without the need for technical training.

The suite of tools launched on Google Cloud are available via the Qtum compute engine. Anyone can launch a full developer environment on Qtum with access to everything a developer needs to launch nodes, develop distributed apps, known as dApps, test and deploy.

Previously, developers needed to download, install and deploy the Qtum codebase as well as the necessary tools. Now, all of this exists in the Google Cloud. Because of the cloud nature of the tools and environment it will always stay up-to-date with the most recent version updates and security fixes from Qtum automatically, so developers do not need to download and reinstall code.

“Google Cloud is the perfect partner to help us make the blockchain ecosystem simpler and more intuitive,“ Palencia said.

The Qtum developer toolkit on Google Cloud contains all the source needed to launch dApps, an editor, code compiler for blockchain, a smart contracts deployment tool called Solar and numerous other libraries needed to complete blockchain projects. Qtum-Core is now generally available for anyone to launch on Google Cloud with access to developer tools and codebase.

Image: Qtum