Quarkchain Network; Aiming For Change

What exactly is QuarkChain?
QuarkChain is an innovative permissionless blockchain architecture that aims to meet the global-wise commercial standard. It provides a secure, decentralized, and scalable blockchain solution to deliver 100,000+ on-chain transaction per second. The main goal of their blockchain is to lengthen scalability as much as possible while maintaining the security and decentralization at an appropriate level.
They aim to deliver 1,000,000+ TPS by applying sharding technology. QuarkChain has a two-layered structure that encourages weak miners to mine directly without the need of joining mining pools. It further encourages decentralization by allowing multiple cheap nodes to form a cluster running as a super-full node.
We will get to the entire features of QuarkChain in a little bit.

The Three Main Challenges
Security, Decentralization and Scalability, these are three main challenges that a blockchain will have to face. So what are these challenges?
Security

• As a transactional platform, their first priority is, of course, security. A blockchain, as the name implies, is a chain of digitally connected or chained “blocks”. Blockchain was developed to provide the needs of security by doing a “decentralized ledger”. Even though blockchain has some inherent properties for security, there still exist vulnerabilities, malicious attacks, and ill intentions that needs consideration when one selects a platform.
  Decentralization
• Numerous decentralized platforms have been developed since 2013. Different from the centralized case, decentralized storage and trading allow for drastic contractions in pricing, so that any company or even person, not just the big ones, can leverage technology. As mentioned, decentralization also gives blockchain security. However, Decentralization is also being challenged nowadays.
  Scalability
  The existing approaches for scalability issues are:

Multiple Blockchains

• One approach to scaling is dividing many different transactions across numerous blockchains. But while this makes for lower transactional demands on each blockchain, it also means a lower hash operating each blockchain. On smaller chains, it is effortless for someone to obtain enough of the hash power to perform a double-spend attack. While it offers some degree of scalability, it sacrifices security for scalability and is not a long-term solution.
  Lightning Network
• Another approach to alleviate the scalability problem is by Lightning Network. The idea is to defer frequent transactions among a fixed group of parties until all parties are finalized with the transactions. Then one of the parties would just post the final result without acquiring multiple historical transactions on a chain.
  Sharding
• Originally, sharding technique from database means separating data in a large database into smaller parts. It’s probably one of the most commonly used ways in centralized systems to address the scalability problem.
  Tradeoffs
• Although security, decentralization, and scalability are all important for a blockchain, there are still some tradeoffs among them. If one wants to enhance the security or privacy, a larger amount of data is going to be needed for each transaction. This means lower transaction speed and a larger storage.

What are the features?
What differs QuarkChain from other blockchain platforms is that it has three new innovations:

• It is the first blockchain technology that supports State Sharding.
• It is also the first blockchain sharding technology that supports Turing-complete Smart Contracts (S/C)
• And lastly, it is the first blockchain network that supports clustering as peers.
  Unlike many possible techniques that attempt to address the scalability problem by improving existing systems, the QuarkChain Network is designed from scalability from the beginning – similar to its centralized counterpart. The QuarkChain Network is developed according to the following important values:
• Usability (fast/simple)
• Decentralization (public participation)
• Safety (reliable)
  These are the features of the QuarkChain Network:

Reshardable Two-layered Blockchain

• QuarkChain consists of two layers of blockchain. For the first layer, they apply elastic sharding blockchains (shards), and a root blockchain for the second layer that will confirm the blocks from the first layer. The first layer is flexible to be resharded as needed without altering the first layer.
  Guaranteed Security by Market-driven Collaborative Mining
• To assure the security of all transactions, a game-theoretic framework is designed for incentives, where at least 50% of overall hash powers are allocated to the root chain to avoid double spending attack on any transactions.
  Anti-Centralized Horizontal Scalability Expansion
• In any blockchain network with a high TPS, a super-full node can be extremely costly, which encourages centralization. In contrast, QuarkChain allows numerous cheap nodes forming a cluster to take over a super-full node.
  Efficient and Secure Cross-Shard Transaction
• ¬In QuarkChain, cross-shard transactions can be issued at any moment, and will be confirmed in minutes. The speed of cross-shard transactions increases linearly as the number of shards increases.
  Simple Account Management
• You only need one account for the entire blockchain (shards) in QuarkChain. All cryptocurrencies are stored in one smart wallet.
  Cross-Chain Transaction
• With these type of design architecture, cross-chain transaction becomes attainable. Since the QuarkChain Network only maintains a one root chain, the transaction from another blockchain can be achieved by converting the tokens by an adapter and then performing the transaction like a cross-shard transaction from the standpoint of the QuarkChain Network side. Another way is to accommodate the other chain as a subchain (or shard) so that cross-chain becomes cross-shard transaction.

Team
These are some of the brilliant people who developed QuarkChain:

Qi Zhou (Founder, Former Googler, Expert in High-Performance Systems) - Software engineer and an expert in high-performance systems; Former Googler and 15+ years development experience; PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Zhaoguang Wang (Software Engineer, Has Years of Experience at Facebook) - Expert in large-scale distributed systems with 6 years’ work experience at Facebook and Google. Master in computer science from the University of Michigan.

Xiaoli Ma (Research Scientist, Professor at Gatech and IEEE Fellow) - Full Professor at Georgia Tech; IEEE Fellow.

Arun G. Phadke (Advisor, Winner of Benjamin Franklin Medal) - University Distinguished Professor, Virginia Tech; Fellow of National Academy of Engineering, USA.

Bill Moore (Advisor, Former president of DSSD) - Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems; Co-led the ZFS team served as Chief Engineer for Storage at Sun Microsystems; Former president of DSSD / EMC Fellow.

QuarkChain, a High-Capacity Peer-to-Peer Transactional System is changing the world with revolutionary blockchain technology.

To keep track of their accomplished plans and also their future plans, check out their timeline at their official website. Visit ( https://www.quarkchain.io/ ) if you want a much more detailed explanation about QuarkChain.