QuarkChain AMA with OhHeyMatty transcript

Hello, this is a full transcript of the Matty's AMA with QuarkChain team, I have found it quite enlightening, given all the FUD around the project, I feel like the video explains many things lots of people on the forums seem to be worried about. It sure has helped me understand some things about the project better and made me more interested in it.

I prefer to read so I made the transcript, you can find the original video at the end.

Marketing Questions

Q: How much is circulating supply? It looks very small on CoinMarketCap?

A: The CoinMarketCap hasn’t been updated yet. When we got listed on Binance (early June), there were only public sale tokens and all private sale tokens were locked up. We will have private sale released on a monthly base. This is the schedule: https://support.binance.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004471832-Binance-To-Open-Trading-For-QuarkChain-QKC-and-Risk-Warning.
The reason we design this way is that it’s bear market now, and we want to protect our public sale participants. Considering we want to have private sale participants with us for a long term, we decide to release our private sale gradually in a monthly base.
We sell 20% of the tokens for both public and private sales, and 40% for mining. Taking these into account, our sale amount/percentage is not small.

Q: What’s the next roadmap?

A: Development
The first thing we need to do is to make sure our testnet is stable and optimize our systems. We have found there are many places, not only in scalability part, but also in virtual machine and storage part, that we can improve in the following several months. We are also preparing articles of our technical details for open source several months later. We want to encourage community members to participate in our project and make our project not only our own project, but also the community’s project. Another big thing we are focusing on currently is our mainnet which will be launched in several months.

Marketing
Currently, we only separate our market into Chinese-speaking and English-speaking parts. We will have more strategies for different markets including Japan, Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Singapore, India and Europe. We will do more local stuff and enlarge our local community. Moreover, with the launch of testnet, we will build developer communities. At the beginning of August, we are going to hold the biggest hackathon in Bay Area with Google ABC. There are only three projects to be selected and we are very honored to be one of them. At that time, there will be many programmers from big companies such as Google, Facebook and Linkedin building dApps on top of us on this two-day hackathon. We also have our 50 million eco-fund to establish an open and collaborative ecosystem of QuarkChain and 30 partners just one month on exchange. Nine of them have adopted QKC in their ICOs, which was generally done in ETH in the past.

Korean Marketing
We recently had the signing ceremony with a very strong insurance company in Korea who has revenue of 20 million per year and decides to go blockchain and global. We also have several contracts ready including a leading AI company and leading financial institution in Korea. You will hear more news from Korean marketing very soon.

Q: How is your testnet performance going and what type of feedback do you get from people utilize it currently?

A: The testnet 1.0 is based on our first internal testnet three month ago, and the peak TPS during the live demo is about 14k transactions per second. This is obtained by our load test, which generates 3 million transactions and floods this 3 million transactions to the network. According to our records, it will only take us roughly 6 minutes to finish the 3 million transactions. However, it will take Ethereum several days to process these 3 million transactions. You are welcome to give a try to our testnet at https://testnet.quarkchain.io/
Except for the transaction speed, another thing we want to mention is that we have 6450 nodes. They are not just in one area but all over the world including US West, US East, Europe and Asia. We want to make the test environment as real as possible. With these nodes, we have achieved 14k TPS, which is the highest TPS on record in public testnet. Here is the testnet demo that demonstrate it.

Another thing we need to emphasize is that we are the first project which gives a live demo in front of 300 people instead of just giving some screenshots and articles like other projects do. The recorded live demo video can be found in the Youtube channel

Q: How can people get the testnet tokens?

A: There are two ways to get the testnet tokens. The first one is for people who participated in ICOs by converting their ICO scores to testnet tokens directly. The other way is to follow us on social media such as Twitter, Reddit and telegram, and make transactions with other people. Except for this starting point, we also have a game on our testnet and you can win more testnet tokens in by participating in this game. To encourage people to trade with each other, we build a lottery system which is based on the balance in one’s wallet and the number of transactions one has made. The more transactions you make, the more chance you will win the real QKC. We also want to encourage the interactions among users and let them see how fast our system can be. (The event is closed now)

Technical Questions

Q: How do you achieve such a high TPS in comparison to your competitors like Ethereum? Is there any change in consensus algorithm?

A: The core technology behind our scalability is called sharding, which is also a core solution for horizontal scalability. Actually, sharding itself has been used in the centralized world for decades and it’s also a very popular solution to address the internet service in Google and Facebook to support requests from global internet users. This is called Horizontal Scale. We use this idea in our project to have many different shards and one shard represents one single blockchain. All these shards will process transactions at the same time to reach scalability. More shards will be added to process more transactions at the same time. One great aspect of this design is that QuarkChain system supports multiple blockchains and makes each blockchain even faster. So far, we consider proof of work (PoW) for root chain’s consensus algorithm, but sub-chains/shards can adopt different consensus algorithms in QuarkChain system. Currently, we are performing research for consensus algorithm fitting better to QuarkChain.

Q: What happens if one shard grows over the limit and clogs the network?

A: This is a general problem which is also faced by Facebook and Google. One solution is to try to upload the balances of all the physical transactions to different shards. This solution is called load balance. We have discussed in our posts regarding resizing the load, how to reshard and which data to be partitioned. We suggest to follow these posts and we will provide more feedbacks.

Q: Can you talk about how QuarkChain handles security and why that’s may be a better strategy than Zilliqa?

A: In terms of security, there are several aspects, such as security during transactions and security in Smart Contract. We ensure our Smart Contract security by working closely with other Smart Contract audit companies such as Certik and educating our partners to using some better practice in Smart Contract.
There are several major differences between us and Zilliqa. Firstly, Zilliqa is not Turing-complete but QuarkChain is Turing-complete. Therefore, our whole system can have more flexible business logics inside the dApps. Secondly, we use state sharding and Zilliqa uses transactional sharding. Thus, we keep our system secure by always remaining 50% of the hash power in the root chain, but Zilliqa achieves security by keeping 600 nodes in each shards. Moreover, currently our root chain uses PoW consensus algorithm which can protect the security of all transactions, but the sub-chains can employ their own consensus algorithms. We will discuss more technical details in our social media later.

Q: How much space in the entire network when it runs 14K TPS?

A: We have more than 6000 nodes spread in the whole world and every node stores the data generated by the shard running on the node. This means once we reach the storage limit of the used machines, we can increase the system storage capacity by partitioning existing ledgers to more fine-grain sub-ledgers. It is just like adding more shards to the system. Since QuarkChain is still in an early stage right now, for the testnet it only generates several millions of transactions, which only consume several gigabytes of the storage for all ledgers/shards. However, with the increase of the traffic and the launch of testnet event several days ago, we have more users in our testnet and we are expecting to see these ledgers will grow larger. Currently, Ethereum’s day file is more than 1TB and it is hard for them to further partition ledgers when they grow larger. However, QuarkChain is able to further partition this 1TB ledger to a more fine-grained sub-ledger in the network.

Q: In terms of QuarkChain network and Smart Wallet, what is the differences between version 1.0 and version 2.0? Do you support Smart Contract?

A: Basically, our mainnet will be built on our testnet 1.0 including the Smart Wallet 1.0. However, there are several significant improvements we want to make. Firstly, we are going to support more shards by dynamically adding more shards in our network and support one-to-one coin swap. Secondly, we will make some improvements to the P2P protocol to scale network capacity. Thirdly, in terms of Smart Wallet, we will improve user experience in our new version by collecting users’ statistical data from Smart Wallet 1.0 under their agreement. Lastly, we have a plan to have more direct supports to our network by using online wallets, such as MyWallet, to directly access the treasure via the API and sign the arbitrary Ethereum-based cryptographic algorithm messages. To the Smart Contract perspective, we already support EVM-compatible Smart Contract and any code that can be compiled by Solidity and other Smart Contract languages built on the top of EVM can be directly deployed on us. In addition, all the IDEs and debug tools can still be applied.

I welcome any on point discussion :) Here is the link to the original video: