QuarkChain Review - Heading to a decentralized and secure blockchain network handling 1 million TPS
Disclaimer: I am not a professional financial advisor and this is not financial advice. Do your due diligence and never invest more then you can afford to lose.
What is QuarkChain?
The QuarkChain project’s target is to establish a blockchain network focused on scalability and security - which are the fillars that many former blockchain network projects had to trade off to achieve 2 out of 3
Talking to the cost of confidentiality, technologies that improve on the privacy of bitcoin always require storing a larger amount of data and of course lower transaction speed.
Which problems and how do Quarkchain solve?
Scalability: The popularity of CryptoKitties resulting congestion on the Ethereum network lays bare the central challenge for blockchain architects: make these decentralized platforms deliver the speed and scale to people's expectation of the most popular internet applications. Unfortunately, Blockchains like bitcoin are struggling to scale. As transactional capacity increases, the size of the blockchain grows, leading to larger requirements for storage, bandwidth, and computing power.
Security: 1 of the greatest factors when mentioning the blockchain technology is security. The type of malicious attack is addressed here is the 51% hash power double spending attack which can certainly be a security issue for smaller blockchains.
Decentralization: the initial and core value of Bitcoin and many other blockchains were designed to be totally decentralized - permissionless, with every node having one vote, and no single central party controlling all the nodes. Ironically, the use of that decentralization model is being exploited with formation of mining pools and other collective groups, organizing nodes into voting blocks, eliminating the decentralized nature of cryptocurrency.
Sounds like a trilemma? Yes it is.
So how does the QuarkChain project achieve all 3 points of the trilemma?
Scalability
The team dramatically scale the throughtput of the network to achieve the 1 million tx/s goal by using the Sharding 2 layers concept:
The first layer working as ledger contains all small blockchains/shards processing a sub-set of all transactions independently so that the network can still meet the demand as the number of shards increases.
The second layer of QuarkChain is the root chain with the fundamental function is to confirm all blocks from the sharded chains, but does not process transactions itself.
By seperating the work that a conventional block would do, the QuarkChain can adapt more transactions per second compared to other networks and congestion won’t take place here.
The ability to conduct cross-shard transactions is an outstanding feature with which QuarkChain provide us. In the QuarkChain network, there are two types of transactions- in-shard and cross-shard. (In-shard transactions occur between addresses on the same shard, Cross-shard is the opposite).The throughput of the cross-shard transactions system will scale linearly as the number of shards increases.
Moreover, the network increases its accessibility for small-sized validators by allowing mutiple nodes forming a cluster running as a super-full node, which is currently expensive for active networks when tps goes higher.
Security:
With the 50% hash power allocation on the root chain while maintaing the other 50% evenly allocated to all the sharded blockchains in the first layer, the QuarkChain system’s security is enhenced. Therefore, a malicious hackers looking to attack QuarkChain requires at least 50%*50% = 25% of the network’s total hash power - less than the 51% required for Bitcoin
Decentralization:
The QuarkChain project claims to be more decentralized than single-blockchain network, which is true enough to me. Obviously with what they got:
- Collaborative mining driven by game-theoretic incentives so that even validators mine their own individual benefit, it also aligns with what is good for the overall system.
-The hash power is equally allocated among the sharded minor blockchains and the root chain thanks to the mining difficulty algorithms: Each blockchain offers different rewards and difficulties and miners could choose any of them with an optimal price of their hash power, establishing an open market economic model where the blockchain sells the block rewards as goods while miners purchase that rewards by offering their hash power. With that model, weak miners can achieve similar levels of expected returns by mining solo when compared to joining a mining pool, so there would be no more formation of mining pools and other collective groups, organizing nodes into voting blocks, protecting the decentralization value of cryptocurrency.
In practice:
In Feb, 2018 they got their Verification Code 0.1 and Whitepaper released.
Recently, on Mar 2018, they released verification Code 0.2 and launched their Testnet version 0.1 together with the Wallet 0.1 supporting basic transactions including both in-shard and cross-shard. Their testnet result is positve with a randomly shown data one their website of 2279.37 tx/s
So far, the Quarkchain project development progress has been positive and promising
The IT team has deployed most of the intra-cluster RPCs used to synchronize the blockchain states among the master and the branch nodes in a cluster, enabling a financially achievable full node in the network as mentioned.
A test framework has been built for testing cluster code, ensuring their code is well-tested before going into production.
A HTTP based JSON RPC server has also been implemented. Via these RPCs and the ones to be added, the developers can build wallet, explorer, create and run smart contract on QuarkChain Network.
If you are experienced with code and blockchain technology, you can participate in the testnet testing and do it yourself while getting rewards in return. 1 stone 2 birds huh? (Read here for more information: https://steemit.com/quarkchain/@quarkchain/bounty-program)
And if you are not, yet still willing to examine it in the best way you can, have a look at this deep code review by Andre Cronje here (https://cryptobriefing.com/quarkchain-code-review-deep-dive/)
QKS token functionality
QuarkChain ICO tokens (QKC) are ERC-20 built on the Ethereum blockchain. With their mainnet launch taking place in Q4 2018, the QKC tokens will be swapped to the mainnet by pre-mining. Any QKC produced after that is mined by validators.
QKC’s essential role is to be the QuarkChain value carrier. Besides, just like any other network fuel, QKC is used to pay for transaction fee on the QuarkChain platform and supply rewards for miners.
Use case scenarios
There are 5 targeted use cases in their whitepaper yet I do like the first 4 since it's practical and relatable to me so I'll not mention the last one here
- Mobile dApp (decentralized applications)
I consider this as a wise move. It's like lap area between the so-called “in the future" (like 10 years) technology - Blockchain and practical implication with huge market - Mobile application. For your information, the number of smartphone users worldwide in 2018 is estimated to be 2.53 billion (Source: Statista) and still in an uptrend
That’s the huge demand. Meanwhile, the current supply of mobile based dApps are limited due to the poor capacity of mobile network when it comes to blockchain data flow processing. QuarkChain deliberately design their infrastructure to be mobile-oriented for that reason. Moreover, for easy and smooth adaption, they planned to develop tools for Android programmers to work on in an effortless mean. Hence, an amount of QKCs is reserved to incentive them to do so, so why not? - Minimum Viable Products with onchain Fast Evolution
By utilizing the power of high transaction processing capability, developers can deploy, examine their products on the QuarkChain network and get quick feedbacks, which is useful and practical to me. As a person who already has experienced in the startup life, one thing I got from it is that startup companies have a huge advantage of their mobility - fast moving of building, measuring and learning since giant techs have dozens of heavyass procedures taking so much time of the humanity.
- Authentication
The currently existing conventional authentication solutions are full of drawbacks and economically inefficient. Why? Yes I meant to say economically inefficient since it's not that there is no efficient solution. In fact there are serveral of them, but the point here is that those services are too expensive for Small and medium-sized enterprises companies (SMEs) to adopt (Do not underestimate this market segmentation. For your information: SMEs represent 99% of all businesses in the EU (Source: European Commision - http://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/business-friendly-environment/sme-definition_en). Once 1 million tx/s goal of the QuarkChain project is achieved, dApp authenication solution providers would increase tremendously.
- QuarkChain for Internet of Things (IoT)
According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype, linking the physical and digital worlds could generate up to $11.1 trillion a year in economic value by 2025, if policy makers and businesses get it right, revealing another huge market right there. Yet, together with its enormous size, this one comes with quite long-term of return on investment.
When talking about IoT, we talk about micro-transactions, and when it comes to micro-transactions, the large amout of transactions is challenging while the transaction fees must be minimal to maintain the continuous operation (or else we are spending ten of thousands of dollars every second on it once deployed). And the QuarkChain network can provide us with that. Besides, self-executing smart contracts are also an useful application for those bots. - QuarkChain for Ai and Big Data (have a look at their whitepaper section 7.2 Business Development)
For the early stage, the team claims to focus on fintech and game industries whose demands of daily transaction capacity are enormous. Besides, one of their collaborators is Chihuo, a content-based social media that
Roadmap
Past:
Their development progress actually started in 2017 Q2 - when they did research about blockchain scalabity problem (I think what the CryptoKitties did with the Ethereum network was a useful source of information on this for them to widen their knowledge before coming up with all-in-one network solution like QuarkChain).
In the last quarter of 2017 they got their draft version of whitepaper
Present (mentioned above already)
Future
Q3 2018 – Release Testnet 0.2 and Wallet 0.2 supporting further features such as smart contracts, reshard, etc.
Q4 2018 – Release of QuarkChain Core 1.0, Mainnet 1.0, together with Smart Wallet 1.0 providing fundamental functionalities and optimization (e.g. GPU support) for QuarkChain.
Q2 2019 – Release of QuarkChain Core 2.0, Mainnet 2.0, together with Smart Wallet 2.0 further optimizing Core 1.0 and enabling mini-nodes to form a cluster running as a full node.
Token Sale
Token : QKC
ICO:
Price: 1 ETH = 31533 QKC
Platform : Ethereum
Accepting : ETH
Token Supply : 10,000,000,000 QKC
Distributed in Token sale : 20%
Hard Cap : $20,000,000
Whitelist/KYC : KYC & Whitelist (with strict process) - Open now, check here: https://steemit.com/quarkchain/@quarkchain/quarkchain-whitelisting-kyc-process)
ICO BONUS DETAILS : No more available.
Personal Cap: there is a personal cap, more detail here (https://www.quarkchain.io/QuarkChain-Token-Sale-Terms[EN-ZH].pdf)
Token allocation:
20%: Token sale (Private sale Lookup and Public sale no lockup)
15%: Team (Lockup in 2 years)
15%: Foundation (Lockup in 2 years)
5%: Advisor (Lockup in 2 years)
45%: Mining, community and Marketing
All lock-ups are programmed into self-executing smart contracts
Personal assessment
One feature from this project I consider as a strong application point: QuarkChain supports EVM smart contracts. This ensure the project's valuation, in my opinion, no matter what result their mainnet turns out because once QuarkChain can provide a secure scalable blockchain before Ethereum solves its scalability issues, there would be tens of thousands of dApps in need of scalability to migrate to QuarkChain leading to a greater number of network participants.
Besides, as you can see, only 20% of the total supply is for sale while a proportion of 45% is reserved for Mining, community and marketing, which means a mining prone is prepared to minor future inflation, I do like their well-planned strategy on this issue since there were too many projects with high potential yet brought down due to manipulations by whales.
More info:
Website: https://www.quarkchain.io/
White paper: https://www.quarkchain.io/QUARK%20CHAIN%20Public%20Version%200.3.2.pdf
ANN :https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3587645.0
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Weibo: http://weibo.com/QuarkChain
Github: https://github.com/QuarkChain
Citation:
https://qz.com/1145833/cryptokitties-is-causing-ethereum-network-congestion/
Author's information