Quarkchain: The final answer to major problems of blockchain.

  Overview: 

Ever since the genesis of world’s first cryptocurrcy i.e. Bitcoin (2009-01-03 18:15:05), we entered an era of new Peer to peer electronic transaction system termed as “Blockchain”. This system offered secure and quick transactions with the benefit of decentralisation, as instead of centralised financial institutions as middlemen, it involved a type of workers known as “miners” to validate the transactions. Further with the launch platforms like Ethereum, smart contracts and dapps was introduced in to blockchain, which offered real world solutions for various fields like content distribution, supply chain, insurance, identity verification, gaming, payment and many more. 

The increased adoption of blockchain technology worldwide, lead to increased volume of transactions and thus exposing a major limitation of the current blockchains i.e “scalability”. As the transaction per second capacity of the present blockchains is very low (4-7 tps of BTC and 10-20 tps of ETH), their networks got congested, resulting in transactions being stuck, higher fee and thus limiting their use for the extensive applications. Another aspect of blockchain “decentralisation” is also being challenged these days due to increase in hash rate. Miners with lesser hash power have to join mining pools in order to collect their incentives in a timely manner. This encourages centralisation, which is a major threat to the “security” of a POW based blockchain system, as decentralisation is necessary to prevent a double spending attack. This necessitates the need of a highly scalable network which is not only secure but also decentralised. 

Introduction:

Quarkhain is a highly scalable two layered blockchain which aims to achieve millions of transactions per second while maintaining the decentralisation and security. The first layer is elastic in nature and consists of multiple minor blockchains called “shards” to process the transactions independently, and a root blockchain which finally confirms the block headers from first layer. Hash powers are evenly distributed between shards and as the number of shards increases, the capacity to process number of transactions also increases. Below are main the features of Quarkchain network. 

Decentralisation with “sharding” 

Due to the presence of multiple sharding blockchains along with root chain, a weak miner may not need to join any mining pool to get timely block mining rewards. Miners can choose any blockchain at an optimal price of their hash power. 

Horizontal scalability 

In order to process blocks of both minor and root blockchain with high throughput, Quarkchain network allows multiple honest nodes in a cluster to run as super-full node. Each node in the cluster validates a sub-set of chains and such sub-sets validated by all the nodes of a cluster, collectively cover both root blockchain and miner blockchain. In this way whole blockchain can be fully validated without any expensive equipment. Otherwise running such a super-full node individually demands high bandwidth and data capacity, only affordable by companies with large workstations. 

Security 

The root chain has sufficiently strong difficulty in order to prevent any malicious attempt of reverting any transaction, with at least 50% of the hash power allocated to the root chain. To perform a double spending attack an attacker will require at least 25% (50%*50%) hash power. Moreover collecting a 51% of the hash power in more decentralised network like Quarkchain will be harder when compared to a single blockchain system. 

In shard and cross shard transactions 

In shard transactions are simple since a shard already contains complete ledger information of the shard. Cross shard transactions require synchronisation between two shards, still any user can issue any cross shard transaction any time, which gets confirmed within minutes. 

Simple account management 

Unlike other sharding systems, a single account is required to manage the addresses on all the shards. All crypto currencies from different shards are stored in one smart wallet. 

Smart wallet 

The “smart wallet” automatically handles both in shard and cross shard transactions for the simple token transfer as well as the smart contract transactions. The users need not to be aware of the underlying details. 

On chain and off chain transactions 

Quartkchain can accomodate both on-chain and off-chain transaction, specially for the applications which require both on-chain and off-chain data. 

Cross chain transactions 

Quarkchain can accomplish cross chain transactions either by converting other tokens by an adaptor and then executing the transaction or by accommodating the other chain as sub-chain. 

Smart contracts 

In order to support smart contracts, Quarkchain utilises Ethereum virtual machine (EVM). Most of the existing dapps built on EVM can be directly deployed on Quarkchain. 

Minimum viable product with on-chain fast evolution 

Develepers can deploy their test product directly on the main net, to get a quick feedback. This can help shorten the development period of a product. 

Comparison with zillica 

There are 4 main differences between the two projects: 

(i) Zillica does not support turing-complete smart contract systems as they are developing their own non-touring smart contract system. 

(ii) Zillica supports network sharding, however Quarkchain aims to support both network and state sharding. 

(iii) Quarkchain offers cross-shard transactions(meaning its easy to send from one sharded blockchain to another sharded blockchain), whereas Zillica’s cross-sharding capabilities are appearently limited. 

(iv) Quarkchain will provide support for and integrate the Ethereum virtual machine for smart contracts, as it is the most commonly used execution engine. 

Roadmap:

The project is still under development, though they secured ~2,000 transactions per second (TPS) on their early closed test. The team is recruiting volunteers to try the testnet, which should go live around the same time as the crowdsale.
 

This is the projected roadmap for the project:
 

Q2 2018 - TestNet 0.2 release which will support most of QuarkChain’s features such as smart contract, reshard, and so on.
 

Q4 2018 - QuarkChain Core 1.0 release, Mainnet 1.0, and Smart Wallet (aiming for ~100,000 TPS at this time).
 

Q2 2019 - QuarkChain Core 2.0 release, Smart Wallet 2.0, (aiming for ~1 million TPS with clustering at this time). 

Token Metrics

Ticker: QKC 

Token price: 0.00003 ETH 

Total tokens: 10,000,000,000 

Token distribution: 

20% token sale – lockup for private sale, no lockup for public sale. 15% 

Team – lockup for 2 years. 15% 

Foundation – lockup for 2 years. 5% advisor – lockup for 2 years. 45% mining, community and marketing. 

Team

The team consists of 9 members; the key members are as below: 

Qi Zhou, Founder – PhD in Electric and Computer engineering with 5 years’ experience in engineering and software engineering with the most recent being with Facebook as a software engineer. 

Zhaoguang Wang, Software Engineer – 7 years’ experience in software engineering with tech giants such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google. 

Xiaoli Ma,Research Scientist – Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. PhD in electrical engineering and 7 years’ experience in the tech industry with the most recent being the CTO of Ratrix Technologies. 

Yaodong Yang, Research Scientist – PhD in engineering, and a Tenure Track Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University, and co-founder of Demo++ Technological Incubator. 

They also have 6 advisors including Bill Moore, Chief Engineer for Storage at Sun Microsystems, Arun G. Phadke, Virginia Tech Professor, Zhiyun Qian, cyber security expert, among others.  

KYC and whitelist procedure

 In order to do kyc, you have to register on telegram with @quark_kyc_bot. Below are the steps:

(i) Start kyc bot.

(ii) Type the word “access code”. 

(iii) Use the access code and link to submit your details.

After the kyc, proper whitelist lottery will conclude. All the participants will get a score out 100%, on the basis of a proper criteria and will be alloted ‘n’ number of tickets according to their score. Minimum requirements to enter the lottery is 60%. Below are the three criteria to evaluate participants. 

(i) How early you became a supporter (30%) The earlier you joined the following telegram groups, higher the points you get. The last time to get qualified for these points was May 4th 11:59:59 AM PST.   https://t.me/quarkchainio https://t.me/QuarkChain_ZH https://t.me/QuarkChain_News   

(ii) Your contribution to the project (20%) For this the participants need to contribute to the bounty program with good quality, original content in the form of a blog, video etc and provide the link to [email protected] before 15 May.   

(iii) You understanding of the project (50%) There will be quiz and telegram bot will notify you ahead of time. If you want to learn more about Quarkchain, they have recommended going through following: 

(a) Whitepaper (English or Chinese)   https://quarkchain.io/QUARK%20CHAIN%20Public%20Version%200.3.4.pdf https://quarkchain.io/20180510QuarkChain%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%99%BD%E7%9A%AE%E4%B9%A63.4.pdf  

 (b) Crypto Briefing – Andre Cronje’s code review: https://cryptobriefing.com/quarkchain-code-review-deep-dive/   

(c) Crush Crypto review: https://crushcrypto.com/quarkchain-ico-review/   

(d) Live testnet demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkIYvI93UQg 

Conclusion: 

The Quarkchain project seems good for long term and short term. However flipping it does not seem the best option, if we compare the 20 Million initial cap with the market cap of its main competitor Zillica (about 1.1 Billion), Quarkchain represents only 1.8% of its market cap. Moreover, Quarkchain’s advanced sharding technology along with decentralisation and security can gain the confidence of the crypto community and we may soon see a large number of dapps on Quarkchain netwok with QKC in the list of top coins on coinmarketcap. 

For more information about the ICO, please visit the following links: 

Website:
https://quarkchain.io/ 

Whitepaper: https://quarkchain.io/quark.pdf Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio 

Github: https://github.com/QuarkChain 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain