QuarkChain is a blockchain that utilizes sharding to provide a high-capacity peer-to-peer transactional system. It will consist of two main layers – the sharding layer, which allows for high throughput by effectively distributing data, and the Root layer, which serves to confirm the blocks of the first. Using this design, QuarkChain aims to satisfy the tradeoff between the three pillars of a blockchain – decentralization, security, and scalability.
There will be Nodes and Clusters for mining on the QuarkChain platform. Clusters are multiple nodes forming a cluster running as a super-full node. This way, supernodes can be formed without them being run by supercomputers. This will provide smaller players a competitive edge in mining.
Quarkchain is been led by Qi Zhou —as the Founder of quarkchain
• Qi Zhou achieved 10M tps as a member of the real time infrastructure team at Facebook
• Expert in scalability and was a key developer in achieving 10m input/Output Operations Per Second with clustering for EMC he obtained PHD from Georgia institute of Technology And has 5+ years as a software engineer. Short stints with key roles at Facebook for 1 year, Dell EMC for 2.5 years , Google (9 months) and Ratrix Technologies (10 months).
#1: Use of the QKC
QKC coins are used as transaction fees for transactions performed on QuarkChain. It will also be used as reward for miners. These value of QKC coins should depend on the usage of QuarkChain. The more activities and transactions being made on QuarkChain, the more valuable QKC coins should be.
The initial tokens released will be ERC-20, and a placeholder for the value of the actual coins which will be released with the mainnet that is scheduled in Q4 2018. At time of mainnet release, there will be a token swap.
#2: QuarkChain Layers
Scalability and security do not go always hand-in-hand when it comes to blockchain technology. QuarkChain have set out to find a solution that balances both these needs through by separating the two main functions of the chain into separate layers.
The first layer contains all minor blockchains, or shards, which process a sub-set of all transactions independently. As the number of shards increase, so does the number of transactions which can be processed concurrently.
The second layer of QuarkChain is the root chain. The primary function of the root chain is to confirm all blocks from the sharded chains, but does not process transactions itself.
QuarkChain allows for two types of transactions- in-shard and cross-shard. In-shard transactions occur between addresses on the same shard. However, setting the QuarkChain ICO apart from other high-throughput solutions is the ability to conduct cross-shard transactions. The throughput of the cross-shard transactions system will scale linearly as the number of shards increases.
To simplify the user experience of the cross-shard system, QuarkChain is developing a Smart Wallet. All addresses owned by the user in any shard are accessible via a single private key. Theoretically, a user may have many addresses associated with disparate shards. To address this issue, QuarkChain employ both a primary and secondary account within the wallet. The primary account contains the address of the user’s default shard, while the secondary manages the remaining addresses in other shards.
To simplify management of funds, any transaction executed in a secondary account will revert the remaining balance back into the primary account. The user balance will then remain in the primary account, eliminating the confusion caused by multiple balances across multiple shards.
#3: QuarkChain ICO Weaknesses and Threats
Competition for a high-throughput solution is fierce. The first name that comes to mind at the mention of high-throughput scaling is of course, Zilliqa. There is also Fusion, aiming for a Testnet release in Q2, and of course Ethereum. As always, adoption of the protocol is the crucial piece of the puzzle here when it comes to which chain end up at the top.
At the moment, QuarkChain have yet to establish official partnerships, though they’ve indicated efforts are underway. In their whitepaper, QuarkChain point to several target industries that could benefit from deployment of the product – one such market is the development of decentralized mobile applications. In an effort to foster adoption for this use case, QuarkChain are creating on-chain developer tools for use on Android devices.
A share of QKC is also reserved to incentivize developers who build dApps on QuarkChain. While such strategies indicate the team are moving in the right direction, we’ll be on the lookout for any partnership agreements with enterprise clients as a sign of which market and use case scenarios QuarkChain go after.
#4:USE CASE OF THE QUARKCGHAIN
• The closed testnet is already demonstrating a TPS of 2,000 using just a few AWS nodes, which puts it ahead of most other blockchain 3.0 projects with much higher valuation. As more nodes are being used in the testnet, higher scalability should be achieved.
• QuarkChain integrates with Solidity, which is by far the most popular language used to program dApps. For those dApps built on Ethereum that need a high throughput, it will be easy to port over to QuarkChain, providing a low barrier of entry to adapt the platform.
• The team consists of a mix of academicians and engineers at reputable tech companies and universities. Their credentials provide comfort as to the execution ability of the team.
The QuarkChain ICO is using an evolved 2-layer architecture to create blockchain scalability using sharding technology. We have witnessed their Testnet achieve 2,000 transactions per second and their current goal is 10,000 TPS. While other projects are aiming for similar scaling, QuarkChain's technology may become viable before some competitors - a focus which may have been at the expense of developing a community and partnerships to actually use it.
#5: QuarkChain’s 2 Layered Blockchain System
QuarkChain separates out these two primary functions with the use of a 2 layered system that allows for greater scalability:
The first layer consists of “elastic sharded” blockchains; and
The second layer has a root blockchain.
The first layer with “elastic sharded” blockchains can be broken down as follows:
• Elastic: the sharded (minor) blockchains on this layer are elastic because the amount can be increased or decreased as required.
• Sharded — each sharded minor-blockchain only processes a small subset of all the transactions that occur so they are considered “sharded” as they represent a small fragment of all the transactions occurring throughout the network. (This is what enables QuarkChain’s scalability.)
• Blockchains — the minor-blockchains keep track of the current state of the ledger by processing and recording relevant data such as user accounts and the transactions made between accounts.
The Second Layer and the Root Blockchain
The second layer serves the function of confirming the transactions that take place throughout the network. This is done by sending the block headers of the minor blockchains that contain all the transactions to the root blockchain, the root blockchain then confirms these transactions by creating a new block with all of the block headers.
QuarkChain’s 2nd layer system offers a higher amount of transactions per second whilst accounting for bottlenecks that occur from increased throughput such as computing power, data storage, and internet bandwidth.
#6: Smart Contracts
QuarkChain supports smart contracts with the use of Ethereum Virtual Machine, sharded blockchains therefore run their own smart contracts local to their blockchain via Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Sharded blockchains can be thought of as mini-Ethereum’s or clones of Ethereum running simultaneously and parallel to one another with unique individual wallets associated to them.
So for sharded blockchain 1, you will also have wallet 1, and on sharded blockchain 2 there is wallet 2, and so forth… As you can imagine it would be a hassle to keep track of these wallets, especially if there are a hundred or even thousands of these sharded blockchains, which is why QuarkChain offers the following two features:
- Simple Account Management
- Smart Wallet
In QuarkChain users are able to use a single “Primary Account” where the majority of the user’s funds will be parked for them to manage all other wallets. When a user wants to send funds to a different sharded blockchain the user simply sends it from their Primary Account.
Primary account sending transactions to wallets located in other sharded blockchains
The Primary Account is combined with a “Smart Wallet” to automatically handle “cross”-shard transactions, these “cross”-shared transactions can be made anytime and are confirmed within minutes.
(A cross-shard transaction is a transaction that is made from one sharded blockchain to another sharded blockchain, e.g. sending funds from Wallet 1 to Wallet 2 would constitute a cross-shard transaction, whereas a transaction made from one wallet to another wallet within the same shard, e.g. Shard 1, is considered an “in-shard” transaction.)
#7: Collaborative Mining
QuarkChain is a hybrid Proof-of-Work blockchain that uses an ASIC-resistant Proof-of-Work. The rootchain reaches consensus via Proof-of-Work with each sharded blockchain following a “rootchain first” consensus to deal with forks.
Due to the two-layered system an advisor would need to first revert transactions or block headers on the root+chain in the second layer before they can attempt to revert transactions made on the sharded blockchain level. In an early prototype, QuarkChain sharded blockchains were able to confirm blocks in 10 seconds and the rootchain confirmed blocks within 2.5 minutes.
#8: Hash Power
As each blockchain in the network offers a different level of mining reward and difficulty, this allows miners to choose which blockchain to mine to achieve the best level of returns given their hash power.
This creates an open market for mining where the blockchains act as sellers touting block rewards, with miners buying block rewards with hashing+ power as their currency.
QuarkChain’s mining difficulty algorithms are designed so there is at least 50% of total hash power allocated to the root blockchain at all times with the remaining 50% being evenly distributed among sharded blockchains.
50% of total hash power from miners is allocated to the root blockchain with the remaining 50% evenly distributed between the sharded blockchains. A malicious user looking to attack QuarkChain requires at least 25% of the network’s total hash power, which is less than the 51% required for Bitcoin.
#9: Clustering
Recording and keeping track of ALL transactions for a blockchain is resource intensive; doing this for a high-throughput blockchain is even more so.
Unfortunately this is how most blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum function with miners who take on the role of “full nodes”.
For a high-throughput blockchain performing 500,000 transactions per second, these transactions would add up to requiring 10 terabytes of data to be stored each day by miners and an internet bandwidth of at least 1GB per second.
Miners capable of such demanding requirements would likely only be commercially ran mining operations and so the high amount of throughput would lead to the centralization of miners with the smaller miners taking their hashing power elsewhere.
This is why QuarkChain incorporates the concept of “clustering” miners so that mini-nodes are able to work together in order to create a full node.
Each mini-node within a cluster works to validate a subset of blockchains and then bands together to share what they’ve validated to form the complete picture of all transactions that have occurred throughout the network.
Jumping back to our banking account analogy, a full node can be considered as having the complete picture of all bank accounts held by a bank including all the transactions that have been made for each account.
A mini-node however only has a snapshot of the first hundred bank accounts and their related transactions, with a second mini-node covering the next hundred and so forth.
In order for mini-nodes to understand what’s happening in ALL bank accounts, they have to come together and share what they know to form the complete picture and make up a full node.
You can imagine just how difficult it would be for one accountant to keep track of all the different bank accounts and the transactions happening throughout. Splitting up the accounts and spreading them out over several accountants however makes the task a lot more manageable.
In the case of miners, this means the total amount of data that a miner has to store is far less than what they would be required to store if they had to operate as a full node.
QuarkChain currently has a private testnet live that is operating with 8 sharded blockchains with each shard performing 100 to 200 transactions per second. The total TPS for the network currently ranges from 1000 to 2000+ transactions per second.
#10. Potential Considerations
•QuarkChain supports EVM smart contracts and this should not be understated. If QuarkChain can provide a secure scalable blockchain before Ethereum solves their scalability issues we may see dApps that require scalability to migrate to QuarkChain resulting in greater amounts of users and developers.
•There are many competitors proposing a solution to blockchain scalability including the likes of Rchain, Zilliqa, Thunder Token, Algorand, Ethereum, Bitcoin and more. It is unlikely one blockchain will rule them all, however it is also just as unlikely that all of these projects achieve widespread adoption.
•The open transparency of transactions could stifle potential partnerships as commercial entities may not want transactions to be publicly available.
•25% of total hashing power is required to launch an attack on QuarkChain’s network. This percentage is far less than other blockchains and is a serious cause for concern, as a successful attack would greatly corrode the value and confidence in the network.
Ok as we are heading to the end of the video lets talk about the Downsite and the upside of quarkchain
######UPSIDES
• .CEO and dev team have experience with sharding and clustering
• .Novel solution that balances need for throughput with security and decentralization
• .Testnet already running ahead of schedule at desired capacity.
######DOWNSIDES
• To date no enterprise partnerships have been announced
• Serious competition in race for scalability
• Low level visibility and community hype
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