QuarkChain Weekly Project Progress Report: May 28 - June 11
Welcome to the 6th QuarkChain Weekly Report! We apologize for missing last week’s report because of public sale and listing on exchanges. In this report, we cover that past two weeks. We will continue keeping you updated every week from now on.
I. Great News on QuarkChain
a. Finishing public sale smoothly
First, we want to express our deep appreciation on the community’s continuous support! We finished public sale on June 4th, in which community members from more than 169 countries participated. During the process, we have avoided gas war as much as possible by implementing an innovative mode, and eventually financed 6930.61ETH.
b. Listing on exchanges
QuarkChain has debut listed on Binance on June 4th and finished the first goal. As known to all, it is hard to get listed on Binance, not to mention debut listing. Only projects with solid technology can pass the complicated checking process. After carefully reviewing our codes in Github, Binance has agreed with the prospect of QuarkChain project and approved to list QKC. After debut listing on Binance, we have been listed on many other exchanges successively. This makes our first milestone and we will keep moving forward.
c. Announcing investors and advisors
QuarkChain has not announced its investors because of the unwillingness to get unnecessary attention during public sale. Finally we formally announced our international investors and advisors on June 11th. On one hand, investors decided to finance us after carefully reviewing our codes and testnet; on the other hand, as a team consisting of former employees of Google, Facebook and Uber and professors in Chinese and American universities, many funds showed their interests to work with us. After thoroughly investigating all potential funds with their long and strategic supports, we carefully selected the listed investors. Together with our partners, QuarkChain will create a new fundamental public chain to support future business applications and a closed ecosystem linking real-world business scenes.
We appreciate all investors and advisors for their choice to be with QuarkChain.
II. Community and Marketing
a. Online Activities
We resume our weekly AMA which has been stopped by public sale for one week. Community members from all over the world asked a lot of questions in one hour, which have been summarized in an article on Steemit
https://steemit.com/quarkchain/@quarkchain/quarkchain-weekly-ama-summary-06-09-2018
b. Offline Activities
On May 28th, QuarkChain scientist, Yaodong Yang delivered a speech titled “Achieve a High Performance Blockchain of TPS in VISA Level with Extreme Sharding” in Xi’an, China in the event held by Mars Finance. He said TPS is not a problem if not in blockchain because current internet can achieve high TPS. Therefore, the “trilemma” of blockchain cannot be solved unless combined with real business applications. He also said sharding is the main solution to solve scalability problem in decentralized system. Based on that, QuarkChain starts from sharding and integrating with points suitable for blockchain.
On the morning of June 9, SegmentFault Blockchain Hackathon sponsored by QuarkChain was successfully held in Beijing, China and a joint meetup was held at the same day afternoon.
On the same day (June 9), Qi Zhou, CEO of QuarkChain talked to Google ABC team about blockchain technologies. We are looking forward sharing our technology with more teams and promote development of blockchain together. https://steemit.com/quarkchain/@quarkchain/google-abc-q-and-a
c. Media report
Several media have reported QuakrChain’s debut listing on Binance.
Several media have reported QuarkChain’s announcement of investors.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/quarkchain-partners-with-international-strategic-investors-to-build-public-blockchain-ecosystem-300665227.html
III. Strategic Partnership
a. QuarkChain will collaborate with Drep Fund strategically to broaden the applications of blockchain.
QuarkChain has signed an official agreement with DREP Fund. Both sides will work closely on main problems of blockchain and find out joint solutions to concurrency and interactivity. Two teams will exploit possible techniques, including sharding and using side chains, to increasing concurrency together.
DREP Fund aims to seek a solution to link isolated islands in blockchain to release reputations of internet platform. At the same time, DREP wishes to help online platforms to fight against fudders, which highly depends on the capability of message transmissions among blockchains.
In addition, QuarkChain and DREP will share protocol architecture to boost the communications between blockchain and internet to achieve the quantitativeness, monetization and reputation sharing of internet circulation.
b. Charter and QuarkChain have agreed with a strategic cooperation.
Charter aims to provide solutions to multi-token of blockchain for distributed operations and organization mode of traditional business. From overseas standards of issuing equity to the standards of issuing mult-applicable token, Charter is providing applicable entrance for new business models by small but deployable explorations and experiments.
The establishment of this strategic partnership will help both sides to develop new market and promote huge revolutions in public chain. QuarkChain said it was an honor to partner with Charter and establish ecosystem based on QuarkChain together. They will stimulate the development of global blockchain together.
Charter said they felt very excited to work with QuarkChain and also expected more collaborations in the future, which is helpful for Charter to increase the efficiency of ecosystem. They believe that working with QuarkChain would increase their business exponentially.
IV. New faces introduction
An experienced Uber software engineer, Junjia He, and the famous senior advisor of Crypto Fund Pantera, Paul Veradittakit, joined QuarkChain recently!
Paul Veradittakit is the partner of Pantera, a famous blockchain fund in Silicon Valley, and also an experienced advisor for many well-known blockchain projects. He thinks QuarkChain team members have valuable experience of sharding, which helps to build more scalable blockchains needed in the future.
Junjia He received his Bachelor of Science (BS) Degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University majoring in Computer Science, and then he joined Carnegie Mellon University and got his master degree. He started working at Uber since 2016, where he built scalable realtime systems handling ~10k QPS.
CEO Qi Zhou said QuarkChain always welcomes experts of marketing, business development, product design to build a new blockchain ecosystem with QuarkChain together.
V. Development Progress
We have successfully opened our testnet to the 100 selected volunteers at the end of May with features including wallet, explorer, and on-demand loadtest. We gathered a few valuable bug reports and a lot of feedbacks regarding the user experience. To show our appreciation for the hard work of our volunteers we have rewarded volunteers with QKC accordingly.
We are planning to open a few JSON RPCs to our volunteers in the next phase of testing to help them test the blockchain network directly. Meanwhile our team is working hard on P2P integration, smart contract integration and UI, cluster deployment automation. With all these efforts we are going to deliver a much larger and more powerful public testnet than the current one in the next month.
Code wise we have made the following major improvements:
- Optimized the memory usage of shard server and fixed the bug causing OOM in testnet;
- Optimized the state recovery after server restart reducing the startup time from tens of minutes to seconds;
- Optimized the block synchronizer by batching the intra-cluster RPCs and improved the block downloading speed; and
- Made many improvements on the testnet UI as suggested by our volunteers.
Thanks for reading the sixth QuarkChain project weekly report. QuarkChain Team appreciates the community’s continuous support and will keep you posted.