QuarkChain- A Short Review

A Quark is a type of elementary particle, a fundamental building block of matter which cannot be subdivided. They are the building blocks of protons and neutrons.
Similar to the quarks in particle physics, Quarkchain aims to be a project which would work to act as a fundamental building block for the future decentralized economy.
Lets dive deep into it.
What is Quarkchain?
Quarkchain aims to be a multilayered, high capacity peer to peer, turing complete transactional system achieving its goals through sharding. It plans to have 1 million TPS throughput once its mainnet 2.0 goes live. It is compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It consists of two layers, namely; Elastic sharding layer and the Root Chain.
Elastic Sharding Layer
A shard is a horizontal partitioning of data to break a database into smaller parts. In Quarkchain, elastic sharding layer is the first layer. It contains a list of minor blockchains (shards) which process a subset of all transactions independent of each other. As number of shards increase, more transactions can process concurrently, thus increasing the system capacity. The blocks formed off this layer are called Minor blocks. There is no lower limit of nodes required to run a shard.
Root Chain
The second layer of Quarkchain is called Root Chain. It validates the blocks from the elastic sharding layer. By design, atleast 50% of overall hash power of the system is allocated to the rootchain to prevent double spending attack on any transactions.
Consensus Mechanism
To construct a peer to peer network that is impervious to malicious attack, traditional blockchain technologies require every node to fully validate all blocks and reject any block that is invalid.
The Quarkchain platform has a different approach. It has nodes and clusters. A node is what achieves a consensus in a shard. The clusters are multiple nodes that form a cluster running as a Super-full node. This Super-full node validates all minor blocks and Rootchain blocks.
Special Features

1. Efficient Cross Shard Transactions: Cross shard transactions can be issued at any time. They are confirmed in minutes. Speed increases linearly as number of shards increase as the load balances automatically amongst the various shards.
2. Simple account management: Only one account is needed for entire blockchain, throughout the shards. All the balance from various shards are stored in one smart wallet. This wallet application provides an ability to perform cross shard as well as inshard transactions amongst all accounts; primary as well as secondaries.
3. Cross chain transactions: Transactions from another blockchain such as Ethereum can be implemented by converting tokens via an adapter and then performing a transaction like a cross shard transaction. This is made possible by accomodating the other blockchain as a sub chain.
4. Smart Contracts: Quarkchain supports smart contracts via Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and as it is compatible with EVM, most dApps built on EVM can be directly deployed on Quarkchain platform.
5. On Chain & Off Chain transactions: Some applications need off chain transactions. As there is no lower limit on the number of nodes required to run a shard, it practically acts an an off chain operation if the application is deployed on a shard running on a single node.
   Token
   QKC is the token of Quarkchain project and will be used as a fuel to run the system and as block rewards as well as fees to incentivize the miners.
   Conclusion
   Considering the project as a whole, one feels that it has been properly conceived. It would have certainly been more exciting for me had I had a chance to test the testnet, but I feel confident that if the project is executed in a way defined in the whitepaper, it can be considered one of the first true Blockchain 3.0 projects to go live on the testnet. Also, the team exudes confidence and so bringing Quarkchain to reality of being one of the best projects of 2018 doesn’t seem far fetched.
   P.S. This review has been written keeping the need for brevity in mind and so doesn’t explore many exciting intricacies regarding; but not limited to, mining, credentials of the team, token metrics et al.
   -Cryptorise