The Qtum block spacing was recently changed from 128 seconds to 32 seconds. This means 4x more blocks are staked a day. You can delegate your coins to a super staker and stake offline. The rewards will halve around Dec 1st, 2021 when annual inflation drops to 0.5%

The Qtum team relies on the confidence of the community to accept the development updates. Anyone can validate transactions, they don’t require permission.  They only need a device and internet connection. They can’t turn off or pause their blockchain.  This is decentralization

Qtum brings together Bitcoin’s UTXO model and Ethereum’s EVM into one unique platform.

Patrick Dai, Founder of Qtum, Thinker and Doer, expressed:  “UTXO based Smart Contract System can scale more than Account based Smart Contract System. Qtum is the First UTXO based Smart Contract Platform. Stateless Vs State.”

Bitcoin makes use of Unspent Transaction Output or UTXO to continually track output transactions which have not yet been spent and it can be used to create new transactions. The beauty of this implementation is that the full nodes will be able to easily keep a copy of the UTXO set to validate transactions without scanning through the entire blockchain.

Reportedly, smart contracts in the UTXO model are complicated than the account model. Hybrid models like Qtum use AAL (Account Abstraction Layer) to translate between the UTXO model and account model to utilize the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to enable smart contracts in a UTXO-based system.

Also, Do you want to stake your Qtum from a hardware wallet while it’s turned off? No problem “Use the Qtum Electrum wallet for restoring addresses from hardware wallets to make offline staking address delegation transactions”

Recovering a hardware wallet address on Qtum Electrum uses the same approach hardware wallets use for backup, entering the 24 recovery words (seed words). Qtum Legacy addresses (beginning with a “Q” and SegWit addresses (beginning with an “M”) can be restored. SegWit addresses will not work with QRC20 tokens and offline staking address delegation.

Install Qtum Electrum for your desktop computer from GitHub.

With your hardware wallet safely tucked away, launch the Qtum Electrum wallet and configure it as 1) “Standard wallet”, 2) “I already have a seed”, and 3) carefully enter the 24 recovery words.

Finally after importing the hardware wallet and resyncing the headers you should see the addresses with their balances on Qtum Electrum. There are also Qtum specific stuff that can be done in Electrum.