QuarkChain – finding the balance between scalability, decentralization and security.

Blockchain networks have three fundamentals - scalability, security and decentralization.
However, it is hard to have everything without sacrificing one or more of them. For example, when you “add” more privacy or security - you sacrifice scalability, when you “add” more scalability - decentralization and privacy decline.

How to have all of them?

QuarkChain is solving this puzzle via utilizing the “sharding mechanism” from database architecture – splitting large databases into smaller, faster and easily manageable pieces (shards).
By implementing two layers of blockchain – one for sharding and the other for confirming the blocks from the first – they solve the security problem.
Decentralization is achieved by allowing multiple small nodes to form a cluster which serves as a super-full node and by letting every miner to work without joining in a pool – everyone can choose what minor blockchain (shard) to mine,based on his own hash power.

I encourage you to read the White Paper for a detailed explanation of the project.

Team:

Qi Zhou (Founder): former Google and Facebook software engineer.
Zhaoguang Wang (Core Engineer): former Google and Facebook software engineer.
Xiaoli Ma (Research Scientist): Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Yaodong Yang (Research Scientist): Tenure track professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University
Wencen Wu (Research Scientist): Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Advisors:

Arun Phadke - University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech.
Bill Moore – Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Former President of DSSD / EMC fellow.
Mike Miller – Founder of Cloudant.
Zhiyun Qian – Expert in cyber security.

Do they have MVP?

Yes, their closed testnet achieved 2000 tx/s with just 18 nodes and 8 shards. As the number of shards increases, the system capacity increases.
They have GitHub ,which was reviewed by Crypto Briefing here

Other features that QuarkChain has:

Smart Contract support - existing dApps can easily migrate to the QuarkChain network.
Cross-Shard Transactions – cross-shard transactions can be issued at any time , and confirmed in minutes.
Wallet - allowing users to use only one account for all the shards and cross-shard transactions.
Collaborative Mining – the hash power of the miners is distributed evenly among the shards.

Roadmap:

Q2/18: Testnet 1.0 with Smart Contract support
Q4/18: QuarkChain Core 1.0,Mainnet 1.0 and Smart Wallet 1.0
Q2/19: QuarkChain Core 2.0,Mainnet 2.0 and Smart Wallet 2.0

Token Metrics:

Hard cap: $ 20,000,000 ($ 16 M private sale/$ 4M public sale)
Total supply: 10,000,000,000 QKC
ICO tokens: 2,000,000,000 QKC (20%)
ICO price: 1 ETH = 31533 QKC or 1 QKC = 0.0000317128 ETH
Private sale bonus: 25% (1 ETH = 39416 QKC)
Lockups: for private sale - tokens are released over 7 months; for public sale - no lockup; team and advisor tokens are locked up for 2 years.

Hype:

This is one of the most discussed projects right now. Telegram group expanded from less than 1000 people in mid-April to nearly 80000 as of 10th of May.

Personal Opinion:

I think that QuarkChain is a good project,which addresses the most important issues in blockchain world,and if the team deliver, it will have a remarkable impact on the development of products that already exist or are yet to come.
It's worth keeping an eye on QuarkChain.

Links:

QuarkChain Site: https://www.quarkchain.io/
White paper: https://www.quarkchain.io/QUARK%20CHAIN%20Public%20Version%200.3.4.pdf
GitHub: https://github.com/QuarkChain
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio