The QuarkChain Network is an innovative permissionless blockchain architecture that aims to meet global commercial standards. It provides a secure, decentralized, and scalable blockchain solution to deliver 100,000+ on-chain TPS.
The main features of the QuarkChain Network are reshardable two-layered blockchain, Guaranteed security by market-driven collaborative mining, Anti-centralized horizontal scalability, Efficient cross-shard transactions, Simple account management, and a Turing-complete smart contract platform
Hi Qi. Thanks for joining me today. Can you tell us more about yourself and Quarkchain?
Hi, thank you for having me, I am the founder and CEO of QuarkChain. I received my PhD from Georgia Tech, and have 15 years of experience in software development and expert in high-performance systems. I was a senior software engineer at Facebook in Infrastructure. Before joining Facebook, I was a key developer in a unicorn invested by Andy Bechtolsheim and Google.
QuarkChain is a flexible, scalable, and user-oriented blockchain infrastructure by applying blockchain sharding technology. It is one of the first public chains that successfully implemented state sharding technology for blockchain in the world. QuarkChain aims to deliver 100,000+ on-chain TPS. Currently, 14,000+ peak TPS has already been achieved by an early stage testnet. QuarkChain already has over 60 partners in its ecosystem.
With flexibility, scalability, and usability, QuarkChain is allowing everyone to enjoy blockchain technology at anytime and anywhere.
How did you first break into the world of cryptocurrency?
I
heard about Bitcoin long ago. Last year, I had several friends work in this field and I was interested in the underlying technology — blockchain. Therefore, I did some research on bitcoin, security model, and token economics. I discussed blockchain projects with friends in venture capital, and I deemed they were on the very early stage, especially in terms of scalability. I believed my previous experience can help to solve the problems that cryptocurrency society is facing.
Who do you see as people you look up to in the cryptocurrency world?
The first person I think is Satoshi. I was amazed by his whitepaper that he used a simple and elegant way to create a trustless payment system. Also, after reading a lot of articles written by Vitalik, he became of my peers. I was affected by his account-based blockchain model and the idea of smart contract, besides that, I also agree with the sharding solution for Ethereum.
One direction of solving blockchain scalability problem is sharding, which based on my experience in Google and Facebook, is the solution for the future of blockchain
What does a typical day in your life look like working with Quarkchain?
First, life in crypto is very stressful and challenging. I would like to thank all of our global team members. They give me great help. In general, I review codes, and discuss technology such as technology difficulties and improvements with engineer team. I also work with BD team to build partnerships around the world. In addition, I write a lot of technical articles and do some interviews to interact with community members. Some other stuff like legal, recruiting, etc. Anyway, I manage to have 8 hours sleep everyday to make sure that I have lots of energy to develop QuarkChain.
Where are your current team members located? How do they collaborate with each other?
QuarkChain have offices in Palo Alto in US, Beijing and Shanghai in Mainland China, and Korea.
We
use Google calendar to manage time slots. We have regular meetings such as bi-weekly team meeting, 1-on-1 meetings, and engineer team meetings. For development, we use Github to collaborate with engineers globally.
Tell us about how the Quarkchain idea originated.
Inspired by the horizontal scalability solution in Google and Facebook, I recognized that sharding is one of the right directions to solve the same problem in blockchain world. Sharding technology could scale blockchain to satisfy global users.
According to Wikipedia, Quark is a fundamental particle that constitutes the matters of the world. We hope QuarkChain will be the foundation of blockchain revolution and enable everyone to enjoy blockchain technology at anytime and anywhere.
In the current cryptocurrency ecosystem with all the advances made, why do you think there is a gap for Quarkchain to fill?
The existing blockchain systems still have a huge gap from the real application needs. On one hand, the mainstream blockchain trading system is slow to confirm, and it also faces scalability problems.
For example, Ethereum only supports 20 concurrent transactions per second (TPS). Once more people join the network at the same time, the number of transactions increases sharply, which will cause the network congestion.
In
addition, the existing public chain projects have different focuses. It is difficult to form a unified standard and the customization function is far from perfection. Generally speaking, any public chain is mainly composed of four modules: consensus mechanism, virtual machine, ledger and token economics. At present, each public chain is a fixed combination, which can meet some needs from one or several specific industrial areas rather than others. Some teams or individuals are trying to take advantage of the merits from their own projects and prepare to enter a vertical field to solve problems. If the existing projects fail to fulfill their needs due to limited TPS or other consensus mechanisms adoption, they need to re-design these four modules.
However, the difficulties and challenges also generate opportunities. If there is a new system based on strong transaction processing capabilities, it can easily incorporate new efficient consensus, better virtual machine and customized token economics. Thus, for those who are interested in achieving breakthroughs in the blockchain field, this will be a great opportunity.
QuarkChain 2.0 aims to build a flexible and scalable infrastructure based on sharding technology that could incorporate state-of-the-art blockchain innovations, and satisfy the needs from a variety of industries.
Therefore, we are building not only a high TPS blockchain, but also a flexible one. In QuarkChain 2.0, “flexibility” is highly emphasized. Based on sharding technology, QuarkChain can implement the customization of four core modules: consensus mechanism, virtual machine, programming language, and token economics. Different shards are able to adopt different elements, and the entire QuarkChain blockchain network is unaffected.
What do you think is the biggest problem Quarkchain Network will solve and why is the problem important to solve? How could Quarkchain’s blockchain meet the global-wise commercial standard?
On
one hand, in the Internet world, high TPS is a must for great user experiences, while in the blockchain world, it is still a big problem. QuarkChain is solving this big issue to bring blockchain to more users.
On the other hand, blockchain as an infrastructure layer of the applications, it should be flexible enough to satisfy different kinds of needs and requirements. QuarkChain 2.0 can easily incorporate current mainstream consensus algorithms, virtual machines and programming languages. Different shards are able to run different consensus algorithms. Developers can flexibly settle into shards according to their own needs. They can even realize the on-demand arrangement and flexible allocation of these elements by negotiating with the project parties. Developers only need to build their own environment as they wish, without having to make changes for different projects, so that they can get involved in real application development faster.
In the current cryptocurrency ecosystem with multiple projects now working on implementing sharding, why do you think Quarkchain stands out from the rest of the pack?
First of all, our team members have extensive experience in large scale systems. We have worked on and/or work with more than 10+ different sharding projects in big companies such as Google and Facebook in production. We have a lot of knowledge on how to implementing sharding correctly and avoid pitfalls. While other projects lack of sharding experience, we believe our experience can quickly implement our idea and plan rather than in researching space.
We also already have our Testnet running, as QuarkChain Testnet 1.0 was built based on standardized blockchain system requirements, which included network, wallet, browser, and virtual machine functionalities.
By enhancing the communication efficiency and security of the network, Testnet 2.0 further improves the openness of the network. In addition, Testnet 2.0 will allow community members to contribute directly to the network, i.e. running a full node and mining, and receive testnet tokens as rewards.
How long would it take an experienced developer to learn how to use Quarkchain? For those that don’t know, what is the incentive policy for developers?
EVM-compatible, solidity, immediately
Developers who have solid technology background can use QuarkChain immediately.
Comprehensive API and documentation can be found at https://developers.quarkchain.io/#introduction
We will have more incentive programs such as bounty program for different levels of developers, with details to be announced later. Please follow the QuarkChain main channel for the update.
Since the ICO launch earlier this year, what do you consider the biggest accomplishments with Quarkchain to date?
Since ICO, we have kept working hard and achieved several important milestones:
Testnet 1.0
No. of Shards: 256
No. of Clusters: 50
Cluster Structure: 1 root node, 128 shard nodes (root nodes are responsible for handling and storing of cross-shard transactions)
Total nodes in the network: 6450 = 129 x 50 (distributed amongst East/West America, Asia, Europe, etc.)
Peak TPS: 10,000+
Testnet：testnet.quarkchain.io
Open Source
With Open Source, you will get the chance to work on:
The first blockchain protocol that implements state sharding — distributing computation and storage onto different machines
The first blockchain cluster implementation dividing a full node into a cluster of sub-nodes.
Testnet 2.0
QuarkChain Testnet 2.0 will support multiple mining algorithms, including two typical algorithms Ethash, Double SHA256, and one unique algorithm called Qkchash, which is a customized CPU mining algorithm, exclusively proposed by QuarkChain. Mining is available both on root chain and shards due to QuarkChain’s two-layered blockchain structure. Miners can flexibly choose to mine on root chain with higher computing power requirements or on shards according to their own computing power levels.
qPocket
qPocket is the official smart light mobile wallet connected to QuarkChain. We aim to provide users with a simple, secure, and fully functional portal to QuarkChain
Congestion Free
QuarkChain’s latest trial run reached 14,000+ TPS. It enables qPocket to be congestion-free at most of the time.
Multi-Shard Wallet
Only one account is needed for all shards. Cross-shard transactions can be issued at any time and confirmed in a short time.
Enhanced Security
Encrypted Private Keys will be only stored securely in a device’s local sandbox system.
qPocket provides multiple wallet backup options to prevent asset loss or theft.
What are the benefits of holding and using the QKC token and can you tell us more about the use cases QKC will have?
First, Mainnet QKC will be utility token to pay the gas fee to run smart contract. Second, we are going to support more consensuses on shards such as POS and dPOS, and holding QKC will have the right to contribute the network and claim block reward.
QKC is the infra of all blockchain applications from different kinds of industries including but not limited to: gaming industries, finance industries, supply chain, and social network.
The cryptocurrency world has seen extraordinary growth in 2017 and 2018, what have you learned in the last year that will inform Quarkchain in the years ahead?
It reminds me the early stage of the Internet. When the bubble burst, many companies could not keep operating. However, those companies with strong technology and products still survived and grew much bigger than it was before bubble.
I feel Blockchain is experiencing similar situation now, and I hope QuarkChain can be one of those survivors and bring blockchain benefits to everybody in the world.
According to Quarkchain’s roadmap description, the Mainnet is scheduled to launch in Q1/Q2 of 2019, can you tell us some of the goals you’re looking forward to accomplishing the most with Quarkchain in the next year?
Technology
We are going to build more features on testnet and mainnet to support different industries since they have variety of needs to be fulfilled. We already have our own wallet app and we are going build more things on top of it to support more users around the world.
Business Development
We are actively growing our ecosystems now. In the next year, the cooperation with other companies is one of our focuses. We hope that those partnerships could actually bring some great decentralised applications for our community and users.
What do you think is the biggest challenge Quarkchain will have ahead of them? How do you plan to tackle that challenge?
One of the challenges is regulation uncertainty. QuarkChain will keep working together with lawyers to maximumly limit the possible harm from unstable elements.
T
he other challenge is competitors. Even blockchain is a new-born area, there are still lots of public chains we need to face and compete with. Although QuarkChain receives many competition from other companies, I believe scalability and flexibility — QuarkChain’s core characteristics can make QuarkChain shine in this fiercely competitive situation.
Can you give us any details on any new or upcoming partnerships with Quarkchain?
We already have more than 60 partners in our ecosystem and that number keeps growing. We have new partners joining our ecosystem recently:
KMSchain is expert in end to end encryption which will be much needed in public chain development, OSA DC is a Dapp optimizing retailer availability rate combing AI and blockchain technology, and Bitape is a tape with sensor of humidity temperature and pressure to track goods logistics status.
Coming off an ICO launch earlier in 2018, what are your thoughts on ICOs currently with the SEC recently cracking down on several, and how do you see ICOs standing in the current market, short-term and long-term?
ICO is served for investors and projects, and SEC or other departments is protecting investors. What we need to think about now is how to combine new technologies with existing regulations.
In short-term, ICO is risky, but regulated ICO may become one of the popular financial tools to serve investors and projects in long-term.
Where does you see the world of cryptocurrency being in years to come?
More and more people adopt crypto and blockchain technology, financial institutions will adopt blockchain technology to address different kinds of needs. Industry leaders will explore the user cases by utilizing blockchain tech and solve problems.
How will Quarkchain change the landscape of the cryptocurrency space in years to come?
I hope QuarkChain can make cryptocurrency and blockchain more popular in the world. There are 7.7 billions people in world, and suppose each person has 1 crypto tx per day, the TPS should be around 100K. With QuarkChain’s scalability technology, we are able to support this number of TPS so that everybody is able to use blockchain technology anytime anywhere.
Vitalik Buterin made statements earlier this year saying because large portions of the population have already heard of crypto, further growth of crypto must come from actual usage & people to shifting their efforts to real applications, and not bringing in more attention. Where do you and Quarkchain stand on that statement?
I believe a lot of people heard about Bitcoin and crypto, but that does not mean they fully understand or know exactly what crypto is, such as what is blockchain, what is smart contract, and what benefits they can get.
There is still a gap for them to understand its technology and the benefits to use it. This is a long way to go and improve
If people want to follow Quarkchain, where should they go?
Telegram:
https://t.me/quarkchainio
Website:
https://www.quarkchain.io
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Developer Community:
https://discord.gg/T5jvkMR
Medium:
https://medium.com/quarkchain-official
Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/