Welcome to QuarkChain weekly report (published May 28, 2018). To keep the community updated, we summarize our latest progress and activities of the QuarkChain project here.

I. To the community

First, we would like to thank our community members and partners for supporting QuarkChain KYC process. There were around 57,000 people obtaining access codes and 43,000 of them joined KYC. Among the 34,000 accounts which have been approved in KYC, a total of 16,000 people from 169 countries worldwide had a total score above 60, i.e., having a chance to join the whitelist. The final whitelist with 5,000 people will be drawn from these 16,000 people. Here is our latest progress report on this week.

In the community, many members were complaining that the whitelist of QuarkChain is the hardest whitelist in history. People have questioned why QuarkChain has to design such a complicated process. Besides considering participants’ joining of time of the Telegram community and the contributions, there are also quiz and lottery; it seems more difficult than becoming a permanent resident in Shanghai. What we have always emphasized is that our original intention is not to make things difficult for everyone. We just want to provide a relatively fair environment so that more people can feel that their efforts are paid off.

Since our community grows fast, some of the statistical numbers are far exceeding our expectations. Currently our community groups have more than 100,000 members. If we allow everyone to join whitelist, everyone can only get no more than 0.1ETH allowance. In this case, no one will be happy. However, choosing 5000 people from so many people is really not an easy task. If randomly drawn, it will inevitably make everyone feel unfair. Therefore, the team came up with such an algorithm by taking into account for three aspects: the early supporters, the degree of understanding of the project, and the contribution to the community. These three factors have made efforts to pursue fairness.

During the whole process, QuarkChain team has worked day and night to solve the encountered problems so that the benefit of the community members can be protected as much as possible. We appreciate all members’ patience and accompany.

Note that whitelist is just a minor step of QuarkChain to pay back the community. In the long term, QuarkChain will keep continuously open-source collaboration.

More QuarkChain's ecology and technology developments are relying on our communities and partners. As QuarkChain grows, community members have more opportunities to join us. The future QuarkChain, does not belong to any single team, but belongs to all community members.

II. Media reports

This week, the public number "Xiaowei Commentary" published a sharp article "Consensus Conference on the depth of QuarkChain's Ten Questions." The QuarkChain official translated the article and posted it on steemit.

Steemit links: https://steemit.com/quarkchain/@quarkchain/10-chanllenging-questions-and-answers-from-quarkchain-in-new-york-consensus

III. Strategic cooperation

On May 24, QuarkChain CBO Du Ting and PlayTable formally announced establishing a long-term strategic partnership.

PlayTable is a platform developed by Blok.Party at San Francisco, USA, which will use blockchain technology on table games, a combination of video game consoles and desktop-size tablets. PlayTable can read information from physical game pieces or cards and then securely store this information online. Thus, every step the player makes will be saved and recorded. This allows individual pieces to be upgraded and changed over time and traded between players.

The establishment of this strategic partnership will help both parties to jointly develop new markets and promote major changes in public chains and operations. Through this cooperation, PlayTable will be based on QuarkChain's next-generation public-chain infrastructure system, to exploit applications including games, and to support and promote the real commercial applications of blockchains and the landing of scenes.

QuarkChain CBO Du Ting said: "We are very pleased to establish a long-term strategic partnership with PlayTable. By applying the QuarkChain public-chain infrastructure to establish an application ecosystem, we will work together to explore a broader market and promote the further development of the QuarkChain ecosystem. This collaboration also promotes the development of the global blockchain industry."

The person in charge of PlayTable stated: "We are very excited about the collaboration with QuarkChain, and we are very much looking forward to the future collaboration between the two parties. This will promote the efficiency of PlayTable. We believe that establishing a long-term strategic partnership with QuarkChain will help our business to grow exponentially."

IV. Development Progress

The team keeps improving the testnet to prepare for the volunteer test at the end of this month. A few major improvements include

1. Fixed a critical bug that caused data inconsistency after a server restarts;

2. Improved the root chain first consensus algorithm and fixed a few non-trivial bugs;

3. Reduced the monitoring latency by changing the data access model from pull to push;

4. Added support for checking status of pending transactions;

5. Fund a list of addresses for volunteer testing in genesis block;

6. Added user interface (UI) for both launching and monitoring load tests.

More details about the testnet are not listed here. We wish the test goes smooth and successful!

V. Important announcements

Be cautious about counterfeit telegram groups

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