QuarkChain(QKC) ICO Review

Credits: https://twitter.com/VladZamfir/status/889232477503533057
As an old Chinese proverb says, “As in the Yangtze River, the waves behind drive on those before, so the new generation excels the old.” I think it best describes the technology industry, especially the emerging blockchain technologies. It has been about 9 years since Satoshi Nakamoto invented the very first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. For the first time, it is possible for two parties to transfer money directly, securely and globally to each other. The blockchain transfers ownership and records the transaction. Other than Bitcoin, we also have Litecoin and Monero, whose main purpose is moving value. We called them the first generation blockchains. The second generation blockchains are those like Ethereum, NEO, QTUM and WAVES. They introduce smart contracts which enforce the participants to keep their promises. Moreover, decentralized applications (dApps) can also be built on top of these blockchains.

The first and second generation of blockchains are perturbed by the problems of slow transactions, high network fees and high energy consumption. Here comes the third generation blockchains with higher Tps, lower fees and more energy-efficient. Some examples of blockchains that belong to this category are EOS, Zilliqa, Fusion, and of course, QuarkChain.

What is QuarkChain?

A blockchain can be defined by these three properties: scalability/speed, security and level of decentralization. Among them, security is the top priority. A better security will require storing a larger amount of data for each transaction, and thus lower the transaction speed. The level of decentralization comes next. A centralized system can have a very high Tps but blockchain revolution is all about decentralization. However, a high level of decentralization (too many nodes) will reduce the Tps. For the wide adoption of blockchain technologies, we need a highly scalable blockchain, which is secure and decentralized (have a proper number of nodes) at the same time. That is what QuarkChain is on the way to create. QuarkChain is a high-throughput peer-to-peer transactional system that aims to achieve ONE MILLION TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND, without compromising the security and the level of decentralization!

How does it work?

To achieve this ambitious objective, QuarkChain’s team has started the research last year. The technology behind the solution is sharding. It is a technique that split a data into smaller, faster and easily managed parts, called shards.

QuarkChain’s system will have two blockchain layers. The first layer is the elastic sharding layer. Each minor blockchain, or shard will process a sub-set of all transactions independently. As the number of shards increases, more transactions can be processed, thus increase the whole system capacity. The second layer is called Root chain. Its job is not to process any transaction, but to confirm the result of transactions from sharded blockchains. By separating the processing(ledger) and confirmation tasks to two layers, the network can work in a more efficient way.

Since there are two layers of blockchains, each blockchain will offer different rewards and difficulties. Miners will be able to choose between mining the shards or the Root chain according to their own interest. In order to make sure that both layers of blockchain are mined evenly, QuarkChain has designed an incentive mechanism, which will allocate 50% hash power to the Root chain. This 50% allocation will improve the network’s security while being high scalable.

Team

On the website, information about 9 team members and 6 advisors are available.

The founder, Qi Zhou has a very excellent background. He has two Master’s Degrees and a PhD from two top universities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Georgia Institute of Technology. He had also received award from Bill Gates for his works at university. He previously worked as a software engineer in Google and Facebook. He is now an expert in high-performance systems.

Zhaoguang Wang is the core engineer. He has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from University of Michigan. He also has around 7 years of experience in software engineering with Facebook, Instagram and Google.

At the marketing side, Anthurine Xiang has 6+ year of experiences in Wall Street and Silicon Valley. She was the marketing lead at LinkedIn and Beepi, a peer-to-peer used-car marketplace. She also worked as lead of product analytics at Chartboost, the largest mobile games-only ad platform, and lead of platform analytics at Wish, a mobile shopping app.

Overall, the development team members are all very experienced. Most of them have a PhD and are professor in university.

Now let’s look at their advisors. Bill Moore is the Managing Director at Walden International, a venture capital firm with over $1.6 billion in investments. He was the President at DellEMC and the Chief Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

Leo Wang is the Founder and CEO of PreAngel Fund, a 1-billion RMB fund focused on early stage internet startups. His portfolio includes NEO, Ontology, Bluzelle, Elastos, etc.

Mike Miller, a particle physicist with 100+ publications and an early leader in cloud computing. He co-founded Cloudant, which was acquired by IBM and becomes IBM Cloud Data Services. He is currently the founding partner at Liquid 2 Ventures, a seed stage fund.

Partnership

Other than the partnerships that you can see in the picture above, QuarkChain has partnered with Morpheus Labs. Morpheus Labs is an Oxford-based startup which aims to build an enterprise-grade blockchain platform as a service (BPaaS), that will simplify the blockchain application development. Together, they will share resources and explore cross-chain cooperation with other blockchain companies.

The details about the partnerships above have not been disclosed, but it will be after the ICO. To let you have some ideas about their collaborators, PMDaniu is a cloud-based collaboration platform for product managers and designers. Primas is the first enterprise in Singapore to apply blockchain to content value ecosystem, based on Distributed Trusted Content Protocol (DTCP). Yuanben Chain is a Chinese blockchain startup that is trying to build a trading platform for copyright. Chihuo is the most popular Chinese language food and lifestyle website in LA. SegmentFault is a Q&A website that enables programmers to solve problems in the IT field. Since its launch, SegmentFault has gathered 100K developers.

Token metrics

The private sale has already finished and the date of the public sale has not been announced yet. The whitelist and KYC process will start on 2018/05/07 00:00:01 am PST and will last for about two weeks.

Token: QKC
Type: ERC20. It will be swapped once the main net is released
Price: 1 ETH = 31533 QKCs (There were 25% discount during private sale)
Hard cap: $20M ($16M has been raised during the private sale, $4M are left for the public sale)
Total supply: 10B
Available for token sale: 2B (20%)
Market cap: around $40M (for 1 ETH = $700)

Summary

QuarkChain has gathered a lot of hype recently, especially when they promise 1 million Tps. We have seen the success of other blockchain projects from the “Million Tps Club”, such as Credits and Seele. The technologies used by QuarkChain are innovative and their testnet can already process more than 2000 transaction per second. Moreover, their codes have been reviewed by Andre Cronje and so far, QuarkChain is situated on the top of the list! QuarkChain is definitely a project that worths having your attention.

+ Innovative scaling solution to achieve 1 million tps
+ Experienced team with strong academic presence
+ Testnet already running with 2000+ tps
+ Partnerships already established
+ Vesting period of 2 years for the team, and 7 months for private sale’s investors
- Lack of details about the partnerships
- Strong competition from other high-throughput blockchains

Website: https://quarkchain.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio
Weibo: http://weibo.com/QuarkChain
Github: https://github.com/QuarkChain
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Medium: https://medium.com/@quark_30920
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain.quark.5
Whitepaper: https://quarkchain.io/QUARK%20CHAIN%20Public%20Version%200.3.2.pdf