What is QuarkChain, Why Do We Need It?

Over the past few months, we saw that so many new chains have appeared in the crypto world. But how many of them will succeed? Or simply how many of them will provide a better solution when scalability is the real problem when you think about 10 years later from now?

QuarkChain is one of the new blockchains “on the block” that aims to create a highly scalable and secure blockchain that can handle up to one million transactions per second using a two-layered blockchain system.

They are aiming to bring crypto to a wider mainstream audience and will support smart contracts via EVM which will known as Ethereum Virtual Machine.

What does it mean?

This means developers from the other projects will be able to deploy their dApps which is already built on top of Ethereum Blockchain to QuarkChain once their mainnet is live.

Which is also means that QuarkChain will be really big competitor to other blockchains. Especially to Ethereum.

QuarkChain achieves better scalability using a two layered structure.

The first layer offers elastic sharding, which is a type of database partitioning that separates very large databases into smaller, faster, and easily managed components called data shards. Data shards are a key part of the QuarkChain project.

The second layer is the Root layer. It will serve to confirm the blocks of the first one.

Using this design, QuarkChain aims to satisfy the tradeoff between the three pillars of a blockchain – decentralization, security, and scalability.

How About More Decentralization?

There will be Nodes and Clusters for mining on the QuarkChain platform. Clusters will be the multiple nodes and they will run as super-full nodes. This way, supernodes can be formed without them being run by supercomputers. This will provide smaller players a competitive edge in mining.

Perfect, right?

Here are some other cool features of the QuarkChain.

• QuarkChain will support GPU mining.
• They will support cross shard transactions.
• They also will support for cross chain transactions.
• When more nodes comes to play, the scalability will increase.
• QuarkChain is the ability to offer guaranteed security through market-driven collaborative mining. 50% or more of the hashpower will be dedicated to the root layer to prevent any double spending attacks.
• Like mentioned earlier, using EVM will give community and developers the ability to deploy their projects to QuarkChain blockchain.
• Users will interact with the QuarkChain blockchain through a simple account dashboard. That dashboard will allow you to view all cryptocurrencies from different blockchains – i.e. different shards – from one wallet screen. Plus, you can manage all addresses using a single private key. (Really loved this one)

How Do QuarkChain (QKC) Tokens Work?

The ticker for QuarkChain tokens is chosen as QKC. They will be working on the Ethereum Blockchain and will be ERC20 after the ICO. But when the team launches their mainnet in Q4 2018, there will be token swap and QKC tokens will start working on QuarkChain Blockchain.

How Will QKC Tokens Used?

QKC tokens will be used as paying transaction fees for transactions performed on QuarkChain. It will also be used as reward for miners. These value of QKC tokens should depend on the usage of QuarkChain. When more activities comes to the QuarkChain Blockchain, the tokens will be more valuable.

How About Roadmap?

This is the projected roadmap for the project:

Q2 2018 - TestNet 0.2 release which will support most of QuarkChain’s features such as smart contract, reshard, and so on.

Q4 2018 - QuarkChain Core 1.0 release, Mainnet 1.0, and Smart Wallet (aiming for ~100,000 TPS at this time).

Q2 2019 - QuarkChain Core 2.0 release, Smart Wallet 2.0, (aiming for ~1 million TPS with clustering at this time).

Who is Behind The Project?

Here are the team members who has brilliant minds to come up with the idea.

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

Qi Zhou (Founder) the founder of the QuarkChain, an expert in high-performance systems and a former Google employee with 15+ years of development experience, and also 5 years experience in engineering and software engineering with the most recent being with Facebook as a software engineer. He also holds a PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Zhaoguang Wang, Software Engineer – 7 years’ experience in software engineering with tech giants such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

Xiaoli Ma, Research Scientist – Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. PhD in electrical engineering and 7 years’ experience in the tech industry with the most recent being the CTO of Ratrix Technologies.

Yaodong Yang, Research Scientist – PhD in engineering, and a Tenure Track Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University, and co-founder of Demo++ Technological Incubator.

They also have 6 advisors including Bill Moore, Chief Engineer for Storage at Sun Microsystems, Arun G. Phadke, Virginia Tech Professor, Zhiyun Qian, cyber security expert, among others.

Let's Play Truth or Dare

• 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. (Good)

• Team is consists of a mix of academicians and engineers from the top universities and technology firms. Their network and credentials are good enough to comfort their investors. (Good)

• Their testnet is already alive! You can be volunteer for it.

• QuarkChain is a blockchain that aims to offer 1 million transactions per second. It solves various problems with today’s blockchains – including excessive centralization, poor scalability, and ssecurity risks – using a unique system of quarks, sub-chains, and root-chains. (Good)

• The team wants to wait until the blockchain demonstrates higher throughput before actively seeking projects to be built on the QuarkChain platform. It makes sense to prove they claim first. (Good)

What About The ICO?

Here are the token metrics for you.

• Token Name : QKC
• Hard Cap : 20 Million USD
• The QuarkChain token (QKC) will be an ERC-20 token until Mainnet 1.0 launches Q4 2018, the QKC (ERC-20) will then be converted to QuarkChain’s mainnet tokens.
• Crowdsale intended for end of May or start of June
• 2 year vesting period for the team with an extended vesting period for QuarkChain’s Foundation
• QKC will be used to pay for transaction fees and to reward community contributors that help improve QuarkChain’s system
• A significant amount of QKC will be dedicated to incentivizing developers to build dApps on QuarkChain’s platform

Note:
Do not hesitate to look at their whitepaper from here.
And do not hesitate to open their website and look around from here.