About the project

QuarkChain introduces novel sharding to provide a high-capacity, peer-to-peer transaction system. QuackChain provides a unique solution to the scalability problems that have plagued blockchain technology. QuarkChain will consist of two main layers, the sharding layer and a root layer (rootchain). The sharding layer will allow for a high capacity by effectively distributing data. Each shard processes a sub-set of all transactions independently. As the number of shards increases, the shards can process more transactions concurrently. The root layer will confirm all the blocks from the sharded blockchains. The root layer does not process any of the transactions.

QuarkChains design is based on the following principles:

Enhancing the scalability whilst ensuring security and decentralisation
Enabling seamless cross-shard transaction for user quality of experience (QoE)
Simple account management for clients
Open standard to support various dApps(De-Centralised Applications)
Incentive-driven ecosystem

Below are some of the features of QuarkChain:

Two-layered blockchains, the shard layers and root later as discussed before.
Supports cross shard transactions, the throughput of cross-shard transaction increase linearly as the number of shards increases.
Market driven collaborative mining, there is at least 50% of the overall has power allocated to the rootchain to prevent double spending attacks.
Simple account management, all crypto-currencies from are stored within one smart wallet.
Nodes and clusters used for mining on the platform. Supdernodes can be formed without them being run by supercomputers.

Project roadmap

The project is still under development, and are currently looking to implement the test-net with smart contract support as of the Q2 around the time of the token sale event.

Q2 2018 - TestNet 0.2 release with smart contract support

Q4 2018 - QuarkChain Core 1.0 release, Main-net 1.0, Smart Wallet.

Q2 2019 - QuarkChain Core 2.0 release, Smart Wallet 2.0.

The Team

The team consists of 9 members with the following being the key members of the team

Qi Zhou / Founder.

Expert in high-performance systems, with 15+ years of development experience. Zhou is a former Google and Facebook engineer and has a PhD from Georgia Insitute of Technolgy.

ZhaoGuang Wang / Senior Software Engineer.

Expert in large scale distributed systems and is a former Google, Instagram and Facebook engineer. ZhaoGuang worked on systems that can process millions of querires per second

Xiaoli Ma / Research Scientist.

Full Professor at Georgia Tech, and has a PhD in Electrical Engineering and with 7+ years experience in the technolgy sector.

Yaodong Yang / Research Scientist.

Professor at Xianjio Tong University. Yaodong has a PhD in Engineering and is a co-founder of Demo++ Technogical Incubator

Token Economics

QKC coins are used as transaction fees for transactions performed on QuarkChain. QKC will also be rewarded to minders. The value of the QKC will increase as a result of more activites and transaction being made on the QuarkChain.

The initial tokens that will be released will be ERC-20, as a placeholder for the value of the actual coins that will be released with the main-net this is scheduled in Q4. At the time of the main-net release there will be a token swap.

The hardcap for the token sale event is $20 million.

Verdict

As Blockchain 3.0 projects go, QuarkChain looks to be a very exciting project. The test-net is already running at 2000 TPS, on just a few AWS nodes. As with more nodes be added to the test-net, higher scalability of TPS should be realised. QuarkChain has a smart way of dealing with scalability issues, if QuarkChain can achieve what they have outlined, the project will be very successful, and will undoubtably be rewarding to anyone who can get a stake in the project. The team looks strong and looks as thought they can carry this project to full realisation and deliver on the objectives and goals that they have set out. As for projects this year, this is the one that I am most excited about. QuarkChain and Zilliqa are the only projects that I am only aware of that is implementing sharding. Zilliqa has been hugely successful and currently holds a market cap of £1.2 billion. The $20 million hardcap makes QuarkChain look a little undervalued if we use Zilliqa as a benchmark.