QuarkChain Weekly Project Progress Report：May 7th-May 13th

Welcome to QuarkChain weekly report (published May 14, 2018). To keep the community updated, we summarize our latest progress and activities of the QuarkChain project here.

I. Market and Community 

1）Telegram Group 

We are deeply grateful to our community for their persistent support and thus we are releasing these reports to keep the community up-to-the-date on what we are doing. At the time of this article’s publication, the number of members in our Twitter group has soared to over 14,000 in merely two weeks and our Telegram groups in China, South Korea, Russia, and India have reached a combined total of over 90,000 members. 

by：@ToneeyICO

The Little Astronaut Logo Series of QuarkChain have triggered a whirlwind response on Twitter and we are glad to see the community is so engaged in our project. We are looking forward to seeing what creative designs the community comes up next.

QuarkChain team would like to remind everyone that a number of scams have tried to counterfeit QuarkChain, issue faked websites, or broadcast misleading information. Note that only information announced through our official accounts and website are reliable.

2） Weekly Q&A  

During the past weekend, we held our third weekly Q&A session in our WeChat Group and Chinese-English Telegram communities. A snapshot of one of the topics covered is as follows.

Community member: How many types of sharding-based decentralized systems do you predict will emerge? Do you foresee that a new approach may come in the near future?

Quark Chain: There are many approaches to designing a sharding-based decentralized system. Big companies such as Google and Facebook have their own unique sharding techniques. The key of sharding technology lies in how to design the system architecture, and this is highly related to the engineers’ expertise. Since our CEO and engineers have been involved in the field of data storage and distributed database for a long time, our design was based on their rich insights and experiences. In fact, the solution here is not a brand-new and untested invention, but a creation based on the practical requirements.

Community member: There are so many people working on public blockchains. What is the original motivation of QuarkChain? Will the source codes be open to the public soon? 

Quark Chain: The original motivation of QuarkChain is the fact that the majority of the current public blockchains fail to address the real pain points of this technology. Some of them sacrifice decentralization to make room for scalability. We hope to find a solution which lays down the foundation for a decentralized, secure blockchain that is scalable in the long term. We will publish our Testnet 1.0 and then open source codes. 

We encourage everyone to join in these Q&A sessions and hope they give you more insights about QuarkChain. 

3）Rankings 

According to data aggregated by TOP7ICO, QuarkChain is ranked No. 1 in nine major ICO rating systems around the world, which is improved from the last week. 

4）Blockchain Without Borders Summit 2018 

Thanks to all who attended our presentation at Blockchain Without Borders on May 12th where QuarkChain CMO Anthurine Xiang highlighted some major points about scaling. Throughout the history of scaling data storage, three companies have dominated the field: Sun, Oracle, and EMC. They’ve approached the issue with vertical scaling. However, there is a curvilinear relationship between vertical expansion and research costs. This means that past a certain point, scaling vertically begins to yield diminishing returns on storage. It becomes more expensive to upgrade to the necessary technology, with results being increasingly smaller gains in storage space. More recently, Google and Facebook appeared on the scene and approached the issue by horizontal scaling. In this approach, as data storage and computation demand increases, they simply add another machine to the system instead of upgrading to a more powerful one. 

In the blockchain world, most current chains expand capacity vertically, in the inefficient and archaic manner of Sun, Oracle, and EMC. The primary approaches are to minimize block time, increase block size, or create a new protocol in order to achieve a faster single-chain system. However, these gains in throughput are limited and temporary. QuarkChain focuses on horizontal expansion which, as established in the centralized systems, so far has not reached any limits in expanding storage and computation capacity. At its essence, QuarkChain is paramount to parallel regional blockchains where each chain is able to achieve a higher processing throughput. 

5）Whitepaper Updates

The Chinese/English version whitepapers have been updated to version 0.3.4. Please download the whitepaper on our official website to prepare for the test portion of the KYC process. 

6）Media Report

ICO Drops did an exclusive video interview with our founder and CEO, Dr. Qi Zhou. Please check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2119&v=YpdjaRAFDdg

深链财经 also did an interview with CEO Qi Zhou about his story. You can check it out at:  https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nZ0ahjz7xRv3K3gwtgUq8Q

7）KYC process

The KYC process has gone smoothly so far, and our Telegram KYC bot has performed excellently amidst a high volume of requests. After submitting the application, the applicants can chat with the bot for further information on the status and following steps. 

8）Testnet Volunteers

We have successfully recruited 100 volunteers for our testnet. During the process, there were more than 300 applicants(In fact more were coming after we closed the application) and we want to thank all the applicants for their passion to get involved with QuarkChain and help us on developing. 

II. Partnerships

QuarkChain and Segment Fault have become strategic partners. A series of activities aimed at getting the community involved will be launched soon, including a hackathon, the sharing of online development resources, and the establishment of a community of developers and personnel training.

III. Development Progress

1） The development team has implemented the logic to add transactions, create new blocks to mine and added their corresponding JSON RPCs. For load testing purpose we also added an interface to add an arbitrary number of  transactions into the network.

2）RPC framework has been improved by introducing virtual connection which abstracts away the connection details and allows a shard to communicate with its peer shard in a remote cluster as if there was a direct connection.

3）A cluster synchronizer was built to enable state synchronization of clusters to their peers whenever they are falling behind including when a new cluster joins the network and needs to download the complete history from peers.

Thanks for reading the third QuarkChain project weekly report. QuarkChain team appreciates the community’s continuous support and will keep you posted.