QuarkChain: A complete scalable Blockchain solution

Blockchain and cryptocurrency space has exponentially risen over the last couple of years with numerous exciting projects raising millions of dollars in ICO fund raisers promising to revolutionize the financial services industry via BlockChain – The Internet of Money. There are primarily 2 categories of projects (apart from exchanges off course) that raise money by offering utility and/or security tokens by laying out their whitepapers, MVPs and roadmaps to implement BlockChain solutions:

i. Infrastructure / Protocol players - determined to build the core foundation of BlockChain that can offer decentralized, fast, secure and scalable backbone for all financial service needs
ii. Decentralized app (Dapp) players - Services built on top of the existing infrastructure Blockchains to solve a specific use case or cater to a business need

Over the years, numerous infrastructure projects have been iterating on building the perfect all-purpose Blockchain which has thereby resulted in multiple silo solutions that require interoperability to survive and sustain in the coming years. Infrastructure space requires more focus than ever on interoperability along with catering to the core principles of blockchain in order to seamlessly operate with one another, and DApps built on top to plug to any blockchain protocol based on use case and integration needs.
Above all, the most immediate and relevant issue in the blockchain space is that of SCALABILITY. Without achieving scale, Blockchains will never be able to disrupt current centralized financial services systems, thereby not gaining enough adoption to succeed. Thereby, there is tremendous competition among Protocol and Infrastructure providers as they continue to innovate all techniques of consensus mechanisms, and block transaction speeds to achieve an optimal solution to scale.
Success in the scalability war can be achieved by a platform that applies robust consensus and decentralized principles of a long-sustaining proven ecosystem like Bitcoin, along with adopting the best technologies and techniques from the centralized world. One such winner that has been gaining immense traction among the Fintech and Blockchain community is QuarkChain!
QuarkChain is a two layer permisionless blockchain architecture, wherein the first layer of system contains shards, while the second layer is comprised of a root chain. The main focus of QuarkChain is to build a seamless scalable platform to support social media, high frequency trading, Internet of Things (IOT), gaming and financial payments by offering millions of TPS while maintaining security and decentralization.

What makes QuarkChain a WINNER?
QuarkChain is a project that is led by a team of industry practitioners with deep expertise in scaling solutions within the centralized database world and bring core experiences working for Google and Facebook in their scaling operations. The team have designed QuarkChain to be a robust platform with innovative techniques shown below to achieve speed, security and scalability

1. Reshardable two layered Blockchain: The concept of sharding in a distributed system has existed for a long time. In the simplest sense, sharding your database involves breaking up your big database into many, much smaller databases spread across multiple nodes. The goal of sharding is to move away from requiring 'full' nodes – those which store the full state of the network and every transaction that occurs. Quarkchain design includes the first layer which comprises of minor blockchains (shards) that process all the sub-transactions and records results, while the second layer called the root chain confirms the transactions by including the headers in the root block by maintaining the desired difficulty (POW) to avoid attackers and double spending
2. Clustering for horizontal scalability: It allows for multiple cheap nodes to form a cluster that replaces a super-full node thereby making it cheap and decentralized trustless design. Clustering miners allows for mini-nodes to work together in order to create a full node
3. Cross sharding & State sharding techniques: The speed of cross-shard transaction has a linear correlation with the number of shards and therefore larger the shards and the ecosystem, faster are the transactions. Also, state sharding provides more parallel processing capability than transaction sharding thereby further increasing the speed of the ecosystem
4. Smart Contracts via Ethereum EVM: They are seeking to bring crypto to wider mainstream audience and will support smart contracts with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This means developers will be able to easily port and deploy dApps built on Ethereum onto QuarkChain once their mainnet is live which could make QuarkChain a serious contender right out the gate
5. Secure Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus: Collaborative mining driven by game-theoretic incentives to ensure when miners mine for their own selfish benefit that this behavior aligns with what is best for the overall system. Mining difficulty algorithms are designed so that hash power is evenly distributed among sharded minor-Blockchains and the root Blockchain. Each Blockchain offers different rewards and difficulty levels so that weak miners can achieve similar levels of expected returns by mining solo when compared to joining a mining pool. This lessens the need for mining pools and results in less centralization

QuarkChain plans to achieve 1M TPS by implementing sharding and horizontal scaling techniques. This compare to Bitcoin and Ethereum that roughly offer 6 and 15 TPS respectively. Also, in the centralized world, Visa can handle 45,000 to 60,000 transactions per second during peak Christmas periods whereas AliPay is capable of a gigantic 200,000 transactions a second.

QuarkChain vs. Other Competitors:
The only true competition for QuarkChain in the current infrastructure players that are working to solve for a scalable Blockchain solution via sharding are Ethereum and Zilliqa.
Ethereum is currently working on a project called Plasma which attempts to implement sharding by splitting the entire state of the network into a bunch of partitions called shards that contain their own independent piece of state and transaction history. In this system, certain nodes would process transactions only for certain shards, allowing the throughput of transactions processed in total across all shards to be much higher than having a single shard do all the work as the mainchain does now.
Zilliqa on the other hand takes a different approach with sharding is that every single node will have a copy of the current state (the bank balances in our example) but then the transactions history will be split in pieces so that not everyone will have to have a full copy of it.
QuarkChain provides the best of both worlds wherein unlike Zilliqa where a shard is actually a group of nodes, in QuarkChain, a shard is an actual Blockchain. Each shard has its own independent smart contract system and if one becomes overloaded, others are on standby ready to take over. QuarkChain support both state and network sharding which makes it a unique blend of Ethereum and Zilliqa’s solutions. QuarkChain also supports Turing-complete smart contracts using the Ethereum EVM, a factor that enables apps that have been built on Ethereum to easily migrate to QuarkChain anytime.

Conclusion:
QuarkChain and Zilliqa seem to be the only two players who seem to use proven scaling techniques from the centralized world like Sharding to implement a fast and secure blockchain. Zilliqa recently released a testnet that runs close to 2500 TPS run on AWS EC2 instances using 6 shards and 3600 Nodes.
Zilliqa has a current market cap of $1.2 billion. Given that Quarkchain is only raising 20M during the ICO phase, it displays tremendous potential to rise in value and get closer to Zilliqa’s marketcap and also potentially exceed. Quarkchain is a potential Blockchain 3.0 project that is set to bring blockchain to mainstream adoption and we all from the crypto community wish them all the best of luck!
References
Website: https://quarkchain.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio
Medium: https://medium.com/@quarkchainquark
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain.io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Weibo: https://weibo.com/QuarkChain?is_hot=1
GitHub: https://github.com/QuarkChain

Disclaimer: Above article is my independent opinion and analysis on QuarkChain. The material is not influenced by any individual or entity and is definitely not financial advice. Please do you own research and use the above information as a tool for reference