The bear is looking tamed in recent weeks and the market is showing signs of mercy. Now might be the time to dust yourself down and revisit the ICO market. Seek out the project promising to take blockchain technology mainstream and tackle 2018’s strongest headwind: Scalability.

One team out of Silicon Valley claim to have the solution— #QuarkChain.

What is QuarkChain?

A blockchain with the potential to achieve millions of transactions per second (TPS) and capacity to support high-throughput Decentralised Applications (dApps). It utilises a two-layered solution: The first applying a method of sharding, allowing for multiple nodes to verify huge volume of transactions in parallel. The second layer acts as the root-blockchain, responsible for confirming the blocks mined by the first layer.

Sharding is the Holy Grail of blockchain. Yet unattainable goal of Ethereum and only a few test-net solutions so far being released to the public by other select projects. Scalability is essential in order to open the flood gates to high transaction DAPPs (think Internet of Things) and allow blockchain technology to compete in the real world against centralised titans such as VISA and MasterCard.

QuarkChain Mainnet could see twice the throughput potential of Visa

How does QuarkChain work?

There are three fundamentals to creating the blockchain of our future:

1. Decentralisation
2. Scalability
3. Security

Choose any two from the above and you will have a plethora of blockchain solutions to choose from. Take Bitcoin for example; fully decentralised, no recorded security breach in nearly a decade, but woefully slow.

These fundamentals should be non-negotiable, but trying to achieve all three usually results in some compromise. So, how about QuarkChain? What trade-offs are they considering in order to achieve their extraordinary claims?

50% of the hash power is designated to maintaining the root-blockchain (the rest powers the shard layer), which means an attack can occur when just 25% of the network is compromised and influenced by a malicious entity. This is in contrast to the 50% control that secures the most established blockchains today (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum). Consider the BTC.com mining pool, which over the last 24 hours took 29.6% Bitcoin hashrate distribution. If this were the case for QuarkChain, that hash power could be manipulated to result in a double-spend attack.

But they’ve solved for this…

Mining Game-theory

QuarkChain’s consensus algorithm is based on proof-of-work (root-chain-first for each shard), requiring Miners to maintain the network. Their unique mining incentives (mining rewards) are designed to ensure hash power is evenly distributed among shards — maximising transaction throughput which increases linearly with the number of shards.

But more importantly, each shard can offer different incentives, allowing miners to choose based on the optimal price of their hash power and forcing an even . This creates an open market economic model, with each miner pursuing their own interests to maximise profit and, crucially, removing the appeal of mining as part of a collective pool — dramatically reducing the risk of an entity achieving considerable hashrate distribution, i.e. reduced risk of double-spend attack.

Why do we need QuarkChain?

Blockchain has proved itself in the form of a secure and reliable currency, but the opportunities go far beyond that. New projects are popping up everyday with promising dApps that utilise blockchain technology in new and innovative ways that will change every aspect of our lives.

However, adoption is picking up and blockchain platforms need to be ready for mainstream use. CryptoKitties on the Ethereum platform, and even the increasing Bitcoin fees, have shown us how important it is for projects to be able to deliver on 1000's of transactions per second.

QuarkChain are prepared for their mainstream audience by supporting Smart Contracts on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), meaning developers can simply import their existing Ethereum dApps directly into the QuarkChain platform and immediately reap the benefits of true Scalability.

2018 has kicked off an exciting year with some promising projects planning to release their main net soon. It will be interesting to see which platforms are favoured by developers.

QuarkChain’s Mainnet is planned for release in Q4 this year and Testnet is already being prodded by some experienced developers. Make sure to check out QuarkChain’s website and community channels to find out more.

QuarkChain road map

Disclaimer:

I am not a financial advisor. This is neither financial advice nor an invitation to partake in the QuarkChain token sale and I assume no liability for the development of the project.