Fiala's Quarkchain Review

Hello from Czechia. I will be covering interesting crypto projects. In my first one, I am covering Quarkchain.

Scalability Champion

Quarkchain is a new exciting project similar to Zilliqa. It aims to solve the scalability through sharding to prevent events such as clogging up the Ethereum network by a mere one popular dApp, such as Cryptokitties.

Main value added: high throughput, high decentralization

Here’s a comparison (full credit goes to Quarkchain, it is taken from their whitepaper accessible on https://quarkchain.io)

How does Quarkchain manage such throughput while staying decentralized, as opposed to platforms such as EOS, NEO which run on versions of dPOS, with only a few resource-intensive nodes?
The proposal is based on a two layer architecture, so called “divide and conquer” of the blockchain scalability problem:

1.Sharding layer — borrowing this concept from traditional databases, Quarkchain uses shards that process the transactions, can be added with no restrictions. Capacity is thus linear in amount of shards.

2.Rootchain layer — this layer grants the security as it includes all the block headers of the shards in its blocks, it is meant to be intensive in hashpower (at least 50% of the hashpower should be allocated here)

The main idea is that the root chain secures the shards, which is quite unique design. A possible drawback is of course that an attacker would only need >25% of the total hashpower to perform a majority attack, rather than >50% like e.g. in Bitcoin. However, this trade-off seems advantageous to me, given that Quarkchain has the potential to attract a large hashpower.

Some other advantages include

• master account for all the shards
• smart contract capability, to use the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)
• miners/validators in shards are fairly rewarded (unlike e.g. Stellar, IOTA, and many of the rather centralized high throughput alternatives)

Quarkchain main potential seems to be that many of the projects currently on Ethereum will move to Quarkchain given it can offer scalable performance much sooner than Ethereum can (full sharding is not expected soon on Ethereum).

Team

The team is led by Qi Zhou, who worked as a software engineer at Google, and Facebook. There are a number of scientists and relevant advisors, both with academia and VC background.
If the team can meet their promises with regards to their relatively ambitious roadmap, they seem to have a lot of potential.

Community and other resources

In terms of community, Quarkchain has been doing just great. Check out some of their pages:
Telegram
Website
Twitter
GitHub Note that GitHub is in closed mode just yet, but should be made public some time in Q2 2018.
Telegram

Some great resources I am recommending:
Blockchain Brad talks to the Founder Qi Zhou:

Video about the testnet

Conclusion

I am looking forward to Quarkchain mainnet scheduled to Q4 2014 at this time. Currently they perform 2k TPS, but if they manage to increase this while staying decentralized, the usecases are virtually unlimited.
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