QuarkChain — Is This New Crypto Blockchain Pure Quackery or Pure Genius?

QuarkChain is one of the latest up and coming ICOs and has gathered a TON of momentum, hype, and interest behind it… and for good reason.

It’s attempting to solve one of the BIGGEST constraints that holds crypto and blockchain tech back from wider mainstream adoption.

And what’s that?

Scalability.

It’s the talk of the town and is what’s on every cryptoheads mind these days.

The likes of Zilliqa, Kadena, DFINITY, Thunder Token, Ethereum and even Bitcoin are ALL attempting to solve this problem.

So what exactly is scalability when it comes to crypto?

Well, you can think of it like the internet way back when internet speeds were as slow as a snail.

The current stage we’re in for crypto is akin to 56k internet dial-up speed - if you’re too young to know what 56k is then perhaps you’ve experienced something similar to it when your internet was capped or shaped to a slower speed because you went over your data limit.

Bring, bring… Bring, bring… mmm dat good ol’ 56k

Just think of the times when your internet was so slooooow that websites took god forbid, at least 10 to 30 seconds to load rather than mere seconds, or when you could only watch YouTube videos at 144p rather than 720p, and even at that rate it may have taken a few minutes for videos to load.

This is exactly the same deal when it comes to blockchains today.

Instead of internet speed though, think of it as transaction speed or transaction throughput.

The amount of transactions that blockchains can currently process is incredibly limited. When there are a LOT of transactions going through the networks, the whole system gets congested and slows down drastically.

CryptoKitties — the REAL Ethereum Killer

For example, Bitcoin right now supports roughly 7 transactions per second whilst Ethereum can only handle about 15.

This is miniscule compared to Visa’s 60,000 transactions per second at peak times.

GSP is not impressed.

Now you might be wondering… what are transactions?

Well, a transaction is simply when a user exchanges (or transacts) crypto to another crypto user.

A Visa transaction would be when you pay for anything in the real world with a debit or credit card such as buying your groceries, a meal from McDonald’s, or a bottle of chloroform for that girl who says you’re “just” friends.

What’s QuarkChain got to do with all of this?

Well, they claim to have a solution when it comes to blockchain scalability.

And not only that… They want to bring the number of transactions per second to go beyond the moon with not just 10,000, no, not even 100,000 but yes, 1 MILLION transactions per second!

*This is exactly when everyone’s bs spider senses start tingling.*

I remember the last time someone claimed 1 million transactions per second and as soon as they claimed that, they lost all street Credits.

But you know what?

Usually the few people who are crazy enough to make these claims are the ones who go out there and get it done!

Do you think people were impressed when Henry Ford said he was going to invent the first commercial automobile as everyone else was still galloping and trotting around on horses? No.

They thought he was crazy! Possibly stupid, asinine, or that he had lost the plot. They may have even laughed in his face and spat on his horse in front of him for all we know.

Henry Ford’s “Like a Boss” pose.

Do you know who else has been ridiculed for making similarly outrageous claims?

Elon Musk and Steve Jobs comes to mind as do many others.

Almost anyone who goes against the norm by shooting for the stars will be considered crazy or delusional by many, and that’s because the mere definition of crazy is:

appearing absurdly out of place or unlikely.

These wild claims and ideas is exactly what pushes the frontier of technology and innovation in any sector and gets us beyond our view of what is ‘possible’ into new realms of “reality” which are shaped and built by these so called ‘crazy’ people.

Do you know who this man is?

You probably have no idea but his name is Qi Zhou, he is the founder of QuarkChain — the mastermind behind the new blockchain.

He’s had over 15 years experience as a software engineer with experience in developing high-end performance systems for companies such as Google and Facebook.

He’s helped these companies in their centralized environments attain transaction speeds of up to millions as well as billions of transactions per second.

Now he’s looking to bring his expertise and knowledge into the decentralized world to help take crypto and blockchain to even greater heights.

The Blockchain Trilemma

The real challenge with blockchain scalability isn’t getting the number of transactions per second up, it’s doing this WHILST maintaining an acceptable level of decentralization and security forthe blockchain.

Marry one, kill One, and oh wait.. you can only pick two.

QuarkChain looks to solve this trilemma using a two layer blockchain:

1. The first layer has multiple elastic blockchains that act as “shards”; and
2. The second layer is a root blockchain that confirms the blocks (or more accurately, the block headers) from the first layer.

You can think of the second layer like the Mothership or the Queen Ant in a colony who all the ants must report to.

The first layer can be thought of as multiple Ethereums that are represented by each of the “sharded” blockchain as they each represent a separate EVM and smart contract system.

This first layer is considered elastic because the number of “sharded” blockchains in it can be increased or decreased as required.

Testnets All Day, Errday

In the current testnet for QuarkChain (yes, they have a testnet up and running!) these “shards” or mini-blockchains have been clocking in at 100 to 200 transactions per second (TPS). The overall network currently runs with a total of 8 sharded blockchains and can handle 1 to 1.3k TPS collectively.

The founder claimed in an interview with Blockchain Brad that QuarkChain can support up to 2 billion shards, however in the short term they’re focused on first making it viable with thousands of shards.

That’s a clear win for scalability, what about decentralization?

When it comes to decentralization, QuarkChain has implemented several innovative features such as an ASIC-resistant Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm so that QuarkChain essentially operates as a hybrid PoW blockchain.

Because of their two tiered structure their consensus mechanism differs for each layer. The second layer with the root blockchain performs PoW to confirm block headers received from the second layer that consists of the elastic blockchains, this ensures finality for all transactions conducted on this first layer.

QuarkChain will also be incorporating a “Collaborative Mining” incentive mechanism so that miners are encouraged to mine in accordance to their own selfish tendencies (such as how most people in the world currently operate), however the difference here is that this selfish reason will be game-theoretically aligned so that what they do is best for everyone involved in the network.

So what about Mining Pools?

The QuarkChain system has been designed specifically so that miners are able to select and mine directly to any of the sharded blockchains so there are little incentives for them to join mining pools, thus ensuring a greater level of decentralization.

Miners connecting to the root and shard chains. (look at those pretty diamonds)

Lastly, can they score a trifecta with security?

Unfortunately this is where QuarkChain exhibits some weakness as adversaries require only 25% of QuarkChain’s total hash power to launch an attack, as opposed to 51% of Bitcoin’s total hash power.

Because of the two layers of blockchains, QuarkChain has designed the network such that the total hash power for the root blockchain maintains roughly 50% of the total networks hash power at all times.

So if malicious miners are able to amass more than 25% of total hash power, they could potentially launch double spend attacks or other such malicious behavior.

Competitors…

When it comes to competitors there are many who are looking to solve scalability however they’re all still a work in progress.

The closest comparable is Zilliqa and only because Zilliqa uses sharding to achieve scalability, whereas QuarkChain uses a bit more of a novel innovative sharding method, it doesn’t necessarily fall under the “normal” definition of sharding.

However, QuarkChain already has a testnet up and running, as does Zilliqa, so it is now very much a race to see who can get their mainnet up and running first to gain the first mover’s advantage although I do see it‘s possible for both of them to thrive.

There’s 3 major differences between the two projects:

1. Zilliqa does not support Turing-complete smart contract systems as they are developing their own non-Turing complete smart contract system.
2. Zilliqa supports network sharding, however QuarkChain claims to support both network and state sharding.
3. QuarkChain offers cross-shard transactions (meaning its easy to send from one sharded blockchain to another sharded blockchain) whereas Zilliqa’s cross-sharding capabilities are apparently limited.

The major difference to point out here is that QuarkChain will be supporting and adopting Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contracting system. This has major implications…

If QuarkChain is able to provide a safe, secure, scalable blockchain before Ethereum solves their scalability woes — which is a possible likelihood — then this means dApps currently being built on Ethereum could easily port over their dApps to QuarkChain for the extra scalablility, thus driving up the usage and demand on QuarkChain’s network.

Vitalik Buterin, Founder of Ethereum

Cons. Cons. Cons.

As already mentioned, QuarkChain sacrifices some level of security to gain greater scalability and a higher level of decentralization.

Other potential issues and challenges they face however are as follows:

• Privacy — it is unclear whether they have any intentions to incorporate elements of privacy and anonymity into their blockchain. This is important as they intend to target enterprise level clients and users, which generally do not want their data flashed out in the open for everyone to see.
• Confirmation times — even with increased transaction throughput, if finality of transactions is delayed this could discourage wider adoption. It seems their rootchain confirms in minutes whereas the sharding layer confirms in seconds. Finality on the second sharding layer may not be sufficient enough for commercial means so this could mean that finality may take several minutes as the rootchain has to do it’s thing.
• Insane amounts of sharding blockchains — to really increase TPS this means more and more shards must be added, and this means more and more wallet and addresses must be managed by users. This could, excuse my french (as well as the pun), be a real clusterfuck to manage for end users. Even with their proposed smart wallet management features.

Confirmation times for the root and sharding layers

To wrap things up:

This is likely a project that you’ll want to watch moving forward. Their team currently comprises 6 full-time members with 3 part-timers however they’ve made strong progress over the past several months.

On paper the team and advisors look competent enough with relevant experience and expertise to achieve what they set out to do.

Zhou mentioned that they have been working through QuarkChain’s idea and design principles since 2017 and so they currently have a clear layout for what needs to be made. In essence, they just have to code it up now and this has allowed them to move at a rapid pace as the coding isn’t usually the timely aspect, it’s the design of the network.

QuarkChain’s crowdsale is slated for late May or early June. In the end, it seems that QuarkChain was much less quackery and leaned more towards being revolutionary.

I will definitely be keeping an eye on them to see how things progress.

If you want to learn more about them, check out their website.