A taste test on Quarkchain

Quarkchain is an upcoming ICO that has gotten the internet talking, some against but mostly for. It has garnered a great amount of support because of their vision to keep intact the three fundamental characteristics of the blockchain technology:

• Security: Thanks to the elimination of the middleman when maintaining your own ledger and the impossibility of generating currency out of nothing.

• Decentralization: Thanks to the elimination of the middleman as well as the fact that the network is powered by the public at large and not an entity with goals that could undermine and detract from others.

• Scalability: Thanks to the hash power generated by the public in the form of miners.

The blockchains of today seem to only be able to upkeep up to two of the fundamental characterisitcs; for example, Ethereum and Bitcoin are decentralized and secure, but their scalability is rather poor as they can only handle transactions per second at the double digits, barely. There are also plenty of successful private blockchains that companies are utilizing, but they are not decentralized at all and have no bearing on the general populace.

So how does Quarkchain do it?

They utilize a two layered blockchain system that efficiently utilizes hash power evenly divided by both of their blockchains. In summary, the team has decided upon using a rather complicated sharding system for one of their layers to achieve scalability without compromising on decentralization and security.

To ensure decentralization, Quarkchain has taken additional measures to prevent a few miners from taking a hold of the network due to pooling a significant amount of processing power. To do so they utilize effective incentives through their sharded blockchains to make sure that weak miners can achieve similar levels of expected returns by mining solo, not to mention that hash power is also evenly distributed between the two layers.

Currently, Quarkchain has managed to achieve 2000 transactions per seconds in their private testnet and claim that they are on their way to get 10,000 transactions per seconds as they increase the number of blockchain shards in their network. The plan is to finally reach 1 million+ transactions per second by Q2 of 2019.

Who can be ambitious and crazy enough to plan to take on the scalability issue by the horns? None other than Qi Zhou, a man who has allowed Facebook to reach 10 million transactions per second and Dell EMC to manage 10 million IOPS. If he can do the same for Quarkchain, he will probably earn the nickname the Million Man while he poetically earns millions.

Useful Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/quark_chain

Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/QuarkChain/

Website: https://quarkchain.io/

Github: https://github.com/QuarkChain

Code Review: https://cryptobriefing.com/quarkchain-code-review-deep-dive/

Whitepaper: https://quarkchain.io/QUARK%20CHAIN%20Public%20Version%200.3.4.pdf