QuarkChain ICO, a layman investor/non-technical person’s analysis

As a non-technical person who knows no coding skills, I invest in ICO with a more general than specific understanding of how the proposed system works.

As I see it, QuarkChain attempts to tackle two problems that plague most existing decentralized payment systems: (1) scalability and (2) security. These two often go inversely proportional to each other such that when we try to make a system so scalable, security can be compromised and vice versa.

QuarkChain’s solution is to implement the following blockchain world buzz words: sharding and a root chain layer. As we are non-technicals, we can grasp the idea of sharding through this illustration: the more transactions people make, the faster the system gets. So, it is entirely opposite our late experience of transacting through Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.

The root chain layer, on the other hand, will be responsible for securing the system against malicious attacks. Hence, through the use these two layers, we get a scalable (fast) and secure blockchain.

QuarkChain aims to be able to process 1 million transactions per second (TPS). Once they achieve it, they will be the fastest payment processing system in the world, much faster than the centralized Visa (56,000 TPS)and Alipay (200,000 TPS), and significantly faster than the current decentralized Ethereum Network (15 TPS).

As we are cryptomarket traders and investors, we could assign QuarkChain as a closely similar project and potential competitor to Zilliqa, which is another scalable and secure blockchain. From an ICO price of 0.0038 USD, Zilliqa has grown 45x to 0.17 USD at present. Given the former’s technological advantages mentioned above, its reliable and capable team, and its strong community support, we could predict that QuarkChain’s price will resemble Zilliqa’s performance initially.

Other than the price expectation, I am optimistic that QuarkChain might pave the way for cryptocurrency mass adoption, at least in the payment processing sector. The development team is implementing fast. At present it has already built a test framework. Once it has achieved a 1 million TPS processing speed — which is very likely at this point — it will be several folds superior to using fiat and it will be a first-mover in the adoption of sharding in decentralized systems, much earlier than the Ethereum Network itself. It aims to be the largest decentralized payment network in terms of speed and volume.

If all things go in positive direction, initial investors will be amply rewarded because QuarkChain clients will need to buy QKC coins from the open market in order to transact in the network.

There are several weaknesses though on how the team conducts its ICO. It has disclosed the members of its team on its website, however, other than the information stated in their LinkedIn profiles, we don’t know much about the industry records of these founders. Also, it has received angel investment fundings—I know this happened as I learned about this ICO from Astronaut Capital, but it has yet disclosed the VC firms who participated in the seed funding.

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Here are a few more details about QuarkChain ICO.

1. It has KYC process which runs for 2 weeks starting May 15, 2018. You need to join its Telegram group to participate in KYC.
2. Crowdsale date is TBD, but projected in May or early June.
3. Token price is 31,533 QKC per ETH. At current price, each QKC costs 0.0229 USD.
4. QuarkChain seeks to raise 20 million USD. Total supply is 2 billion QKC, of which only 2 billion is to be sold in ICO.