QuarkChain: The new chain on the block [Review]

Quack... 🐣 ;) Pic from Quarkchain Whitepaper

Hi crypto community. I would like to give a short review of this project that its been widely covered around the web but regardless I would like to make my first steemit post as a review of this project that I'm very bullish on!! just for the record this is just my opinion and not financial advice.

Introduction

So basically Quarchain is a blockchain project that is aiming to solve the scalability issue of blockchain and deliver up to 100,000 on-chain TPS using PoW and sharding. Quite impressive proposition considering that currently PoW blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum can only deliver up to 10-20 TPS. See image below:

Pic from https://quarkchain.io/

As you can also see in the image, the centralized system to beat is Visa (every project seem to be using Visa as example) that claims to reach up to 45,000+ TPS.

Quarchain direct competitors are all the 3rd generation blockchain projects that are also working on solving the blockchain scalability limitations. Particularly Zilliqa and Ethereum that are also proposing sharding solutions.

So what is the advantage of Quarchain over Ethereum and Zilliqa?

1. Compared to Ethereum, they are building a blockchain from scratch. It might prove extremely difficult to implement sharding on an existing blockchain like Ethereum and the development might take more than estimated.

2. Compared to Zilliqa, Quarkchain is developing Turing complete smart contract and cross-sharding transactions. Also Quarkchain will be supporting Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM). this means that 'must' of Dapps running on Ethereum blockchain can also be migrated to the Quarkchain platform.

It seems that the Quarkchain team did their homework and are tackling some of their competitor disadvantages.

Technology

Blockchain

Picture from Quarkchain Whitepaper_

• It contains an elastic sharding blockchain layer, which contains a n minor blockchains (shards)
• I has a root blockchain (rootchain), that is in charge of confirming all blocks.

It will use the shards for processing subsets of transactions and the rootchain to confirm the blocks in all shards. This greatly reduce the confirmation time because the rootchain is only confirming blocks and not processing transactions.
Also, as the number of shards increases the system capacity increases proportionally. As a result shards can process more transactions concurrently.

Collaborative Mining

ASIC resistant PoW. This means you will be able to mine it with your GPU. Yea!

Miners will be able to choose to mine the rootchain or shards and enough incentives will be provided to ensure that all shards are mined evenly securing the scalability of shards. (I have to admit that this part is not very clear to me on how this model will work but they are proposing an open market economic model. I hope in time more information about this will be released).

Security, Descentralization and Scalability

Security is a major concern in blockchain projects and we have seen that many other propositions sacrifice security and decentralization (Ex: Proof of stake on NEO or EOS) in order to provide more scalability.

Scalability trilemma - Picture from Quarkchain Whitepaper

• Security; To perform a double spend attack is necessary the 25% of overall network. (Smaller than single-blockchains 50% but this include that the attacker has also to create the minor blocks in shards and also a root chain fork including the minor blocks headers). Also, since the quarkchain network is more descentralized is more harder to collect the 51% hash power.

• More descentralized; As you might know mining pools control more almost all the BTC network https://blockchain.info/pools. This also happens with the Ethereum network at a certain extent. The Quarchain network is designed to let weaker miners to join clusters inside the Quarkchain network to mine and collect incentives. This makes unnecessary to join mining pools (More on the below features section).

• Scalable; Sharding tech allows to improve the system capacity at a grater extent.

Features

Anti-centralized Horizontal Scalability Expansion

The Quarkchain network tackles the hash rate centralization issue (Mining pools, farms, etc) by allowing multiple weaker nodes to form a cluster run a full node. Therefore, each node in the cluster only validates a portion. So the analogy is like a mining pool inside the Quarkchain network were nodes collectively validates the blocks to get the rewards. This is great because is not required to have super expensive machine(s) to get rewards in the Quarkchain network.

Cross-Sharding transactions

• In-shards and cross-shards transactions. Like I mentioned before this is a competitive advantage over Zilliqa.

Simple account management

Sharding solutions require to manage hundreds of addresses. This is painful from the user perspective and is not feasible.
Quarkchain proposes a Smart Wallet where all addresses can be mapped to a single address and making it seamless to the user perspective.

Cross-chain transactions

Quarkchain will support cross-chain with other blockchains.

Smart contracts

Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM) support. Must of existing Dapps can run in the Quarchain network as well.

Some challenges

• There are some security concerns regarding the double spend attack. If they cannot manage to set the network distributed enough it can be possible for a single entity to get 51% of the network. But if they can manage to decentralize the network as described in their whitepaper using clusters and so, then it can become a very resilient and secure network.

• There are some things that are not clear in the whitepaper like how they are going to incentive miners to mine in both the rootchain and the shards and guaranty that all is mined evenly. I hope they can release more details as they advance with the project release schedule.

Conclusion

Quarchain is a promising project and there's no doubt that is until now the best ICO of 2018. If they can deliver their promises I can easily see this project in the top 5 in market cap. Their testnet is already running with 2279 TPS at the moment of writing this article. They are planning to release their mainet 1.0 by Q4 of 2018 and the 2.0 version with all the features by Q1 2019. Their team is very solid with Google and Facebook former engineers, PhDs and is growing in talent constantly. I'm very optimistic about this project.

Regarding the Token sale

You can find comprehensive information in https://steemit.com/@quarkchain

Reference:

Quarkchain - A High-Capacity Peer-to-Peer Transactional System
Official site https://quarkchain.io/

Quarkchain Whitepaper
Whitepaper

Quarkchain Telegram Group (English)
https://t.me/quarkchainio

Disclaimer: I was not paid to do this review but I hope to get into the ICO! and participate in the bounty program. Just aspirations though...