Hello Quarkchain, bye bye scalability problem?

Scalability is Achilles hell of existing popular blockchain technologies. Bitcoin can reach only 5–7 TPS (Transactions Per Second), which is clearly not enough for a wide adoption. Etherium and other projects significantly improve on bitcoin’s throughput, but is it high enough? Some will argue that the bottleneck for cryptocurrency adoption is not its throughput, which I agree to, but if you have a choice to make between different blockchain infrastructures, you will probably take throughput into consideration. I do not know if throughput is the most important vector for a project, but it certainly started a TPS race. This reminds me pixel race with photo cameras, everyone wanted to deliver more pixels, not because it mattered, but because it was important for a marketing and everyone loves comparing projects or brands based on only one number (pixels, TPS or whatever). Out of the large-cap cryptocurrencies Ripple stands out with 10K TPS, but it does so by compromising in decentralization. Pretty much all other projects in the crypto-space claiming to have solved the scalability, compromises either in decentralization, security or both. Now there is a new kid in the block Quarkchain, it promises whooping 1 million TPS.

Quarkchain

Quarkchain puts in place two good-old familiar technologies blockchain and sharding. Sharding is coming from the boring world of relational databases and essentially it does horizontal partitioning of data into multiple instances and allows its parallel processing. Quarkchain’s view on blockchain/sharding cocktail consists of two tiers:

1. Shards, are blockchains which are dynamically added to the network as demand for higher throughput increases. Shards are responsible for processing transactions and make Quarkchain network scalable.

2. The root chain, confirms blocks of shards. It does not process transactions, but it confirms blocks in all shards. Root chain makes network more secure and allows cross-shard transactions.
   
   Transactions within shard (sender and receiver are allocated to the same shard) are processed in seconds. Cross-shard transactions will have to go through the Root chain and it lasts several minutes.

Quarkchain will support Etherim Virtual Machine (EVM), this makes it compatible with all other EVM powered projects, if they decide to mov to the Quarkchain.

Mining

The goal is to have hashing power evenly distributed between different shards. Miners will be free to choose which shard or root chain they want to mine. This creates sort of open market for miners, where they can choose which shard is more profitable for them.

Mining nodes which validate both minor and root chain blocks are called super-full node. Running super-full node is extremely resource-intensive, but weaker miners can form a cluster which acts as a super-full node.

Smart-wallet

Each shard is a separate blockchain on its own. Typically, if you want to make a transaction on a blockchain, you need an address on that blockchain. Quarckchain consists of multiple shards (blockchains), does it mean you will require a separate address for every single of them? Fortunately, not! Quackchain addresses it with a smart-wallet, it maintains two kinds of accounts:

1. Primary account, is account created in your default shard
2. Secondary account, is account for all other shards

Smart-wallet will be doing all the dirty job maintaining your balances between primary/secondary accounts, as well as assisting execution of smart contracts.

QKC Token

During ICO ERC-20 tokens will be distributed and eventually migrated to Quarkchain, when Quarkchain mainnet will be launched. QKC is essentially a utility token and it will be used as a value carrier in Quarkchain network. You can use QKC to pay for transactions or other services offered by the network.

Conclusion

All in all, Quarkchain is a promising project, taking blockchain technology to a new level. This kind of blockchain project is facing a lot of competition in the market. Zilliqa is probably coming closest to Quarkchain, not to forget ICON, Neo, Wanchain … and of course Etherium.