Today I am going to try to answer the BIG question that everyone has been asking and speculating on the past few weeks, Is QuarkChain a Zilliqa Killer? Ever since QuarkChain came on the scene about three months ago the talk has been centered around how QuarkChain was going to be a Zilliqa killer in that it would be able to outperform Zilliqa in one of the “Holy Grails” of blockchain TSP.
Before we declare anyone a winner or loser here we first need to clearly identify the key features of both of these potential giants in what is really important when it comes to being a viable solution for blockchain developers. You will find hundreds of articles written about the blockchain and they all idenify four key factors when talking about the blockchain: Scalability, Security, Decentralization, and Costs, with the focus mainly for the first three.
When Zilliqa arrived in late 2017, it was hailed as the savior of the cryptocurrency world, it would solve all four of the key problems and become one of the giants of the crypto world. At the time there was little competition in this sector, but now we have multiple entries with QuarkChain being the newest to join the club.
Scalability
So, let’s get to it. First up we will tackle that scalability problem that has been holding back the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies. When we look at Zilliqa and QuarkChain we see that both are making promises of huge gains in the all important transactions per second. If we look at the current situation in the market we see that the real leader is Visa, for now.
When you look at the variety of cryptos and how they compare to the real world we see that Visa still dominates, with Ripple the only crypto with a real world use lagging far behind. The key problem with Visa and PayPal are they are centralized platforms, making it difficult to scale. Blockchains are focused on decentralized platforms, making them much more likely to be scalable.
So how are Zilliqa and QuarkChain doing? Well they are slightly better that Ripple in both their published testnets, but still far behind Visa.
We see that both are running somewhere over 2k tsp on their respective testnets. While that may seem underwhelming, we have to realize these are just small scale tests. As both Zilliqa and QuarkChain start to increase their test size, we may see more significant gains. But when compared their resutls to Ethereum and Bitcoin, they are light years ahead of them.
But now comes the “it” factor, sharding! Zilliqa was the first to introduce us to this concept and term, in fact it was the Zilliqa team that developed the concept of sharding for the blockchain. In recent months, however, literally a dozen or more other platforms are now using sharding, including Ethereum with its new Casper protocol. I talked about sharding in one of my earlier articles about QuarkChain, the process of dividing up the tasks amongst several miners (shards) in the system all reporting back to a central node with their results. This is the most important feature for scaling to tsp speeds.
When we look at how both QuarkChain and Zilliqa are planning to conquer the tsp dilemma we see something should be expected.
First we have Zilliqa’s scheme taken from their whitepapers in 2017:
Now we have QuarkChain’s scheme taken from their whitepapers 2018:
If you look at both of these info-graphics you see that they are basically the same structure. Both have a main node where the shards (miners) must report their data too. QuarkChain shows them as shard layers, and Zilliqa shows them as shard groups. So far we cannot see much difference between the two platforms.
But one would expect the basic structure of sharding to be the same, it is like DNA, over 90% of our DNA is the same, but each of us has some variations that separate us from each other. I could even show the graphics for Sharder or Creidits, the other popular sharding ICOs that have promised 1 million tsp, and we would see the same architecture at work.
So what is the difference between Zilliqa an QuarkChain then when it comes to sharding and scalability? Now that comes down to the details of how the shards come to a consensus and verify the transaction.
In traditional blockchains, verification is complete by the providing a PoW or Proof of Work protocol. This is a very slow and tedious process which creates a lot of data costing time and money to for storage. PoS or Proof of Stake, is much faster, and requires less data, so it can be mined much faster by the miners. So when we look at QuarkChain, PoW will be the primary mode of verification used by the shards to report to the root chain. This may hamper their ability to increase speed and provide a much needed boost to scalability. QuarkChain does mention in their whitepaper that they are looking at PoS, which if implemented, could be a game changer.
Zilliqa also uses PoW, but only for part of the transaction. It uses PoW to establish mining identiies and to defend against Sybil attacks. The PoW identifies the miners and distributes the tasks once confirmed or as it is called “sharding”. Zilliqa does not use PoW consensus when confirmin a node like QuarkChain, so this speeds up the process. In addition Zilliqa only performs PoW on large intervals, not on every miner on every block. As a result, they need less time and energy.
For the major part of the confirmation process Zilliqa uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (pBFT) protocol consensus. By using pBFT as a consensus protocol Zilliqa consumes less energy as less data computations are needed. It allows smaller consensus groups than PoW thus reducing time, and it creates a much faster confirmation process as it only requires a consensus, where PoW requires at least 6 confirmations to confirm a block.
Additionally, Zilliqa has set an upper and lower bound for the number of shards, with the lower being 600 for security reason, and the upper bound that will help to avoid bottlenecks. At the time of this writing, the upper bound was still being tested. QuarkChain did not mention anything in their whitepapers about limitations on the number of shards they would allow in their system. But both Zilliqa and QuarkChain did talk about there being a linear relationship between increasing the number of shards and tsp.
Below is the info-graph from Zilliqa
And this is from QuarkChain:
Both Zilliqa and QuarkChain are on the right track for increasing tsp and making blockchains more viable for mainstream businesses. This will in turn reduce the costs and lower transaction fees in the process. But it is clear from the two underlying project formats that Zilliqa is a more likely to be able to scale tsp to stratospheric levels needed for the blockchains of the future.
QuarkChains’ use of PoW for creating a consensus protocol is the safe way to go, it provides that layer of security that we all desire in a platform/token. But to use this antiquated technology is akin to the 1980’s when Beta Max was a superior technology for videos, but the VCR tape was cheaper and more popular to use, so the Beta lost out. PoS could be used instead as it would be faster, or as Zilliqa has done, a using a pBFT protocol would be more efficient. While a PoW based system may be reliable as far as maintaining consensus is concerned, it is unfortunately not energy efficient and slows down tsp. So Zilliqa is in the lead at the moment, but stay tuned as I said earlier, QuarkChain is looking into PoS.
Decentralization
Now for decentralization to work, you would need to create a system that would attract thousands of miners to create the nodes. Miners join a mining pool or shard for one reason, profits. So the system would need incentives to attract more miners to increase the nodes (shards) and thus speed. When we look at QuarkChain we clearly see that the underlying design of the platform is to create an environment where miners will be attracted to join in on the shard pools to create these massive super-full nodes needed to scale up the tsp.
By creating incentives for miners to join the cluster pools, QuarkChain wil be able to create a growing network of nodes that will help to increase its’ ability to get even faster tsp. Unlike traditional centralized networks where every block has to be verified, QuarkChains’ decentralized platform can operate by having multiple honest nodes run a super-full node, the could validate the whole traction even if one of the nodes fails. Thus decentralization will increase dramatically under the QuarkChain platform.
But when we look at Zilliqa we see a very similar process at work. It is creating a similar network, providing incentives for miners to join the pools, but with some limitations. As we mentioned earlier, Zilliqa has a lower and upper bound for its node network. By setting these bounds it may be limiting the ability to decentralize its’ network. In addition, Zilliqa is also using its’ own language inside the network called Scilla. By using this protocol language it may be limiting the ability of nodes to communicate and thus making its’ network more “centralized”, but more secure.
So in this part of our analysis we have to conclude that QuarkChain will provide more opportunity for decentralization and scalability as the entry of a new node (miner) does not require it to use a system specific language.
Security
Our final analysis is concerned with security. With all the news lately of attacks on the ERC20 tokens on exchanges and elsewhere, we clearly understand that security must be one of the pillars of any successful platform.
When looking at QuarkChain we can see that they are definitely focused on creating an platform where transactions can be executed with the upmost level of security. By using the PoW protocol for verification of nodes, it is protecting its’ environment from malicious attacks. By having 50% of the hash power concentrated within the super-full node, it means that a malicious miner (shard/node) will never be able to execute a Sybil attack as they cannot accumulate a 51% stake.
For Zilliqa, security is also of primary concern in their platform design. As discussed earlier, they incorporate PoW in the identifying of miner node, and then switch to a native language, Scilla, inside the network to further increase security. This gives it a double layer of security that other blockchains currently do not have. So mark one up for Zilliqa.
What do the Krypto Kitties think????
For scalability there is no question that creating more node clusters and attracting more miners to your network is going vastly increase your ability to scale your platform. QuarkChain has more potential to reach higher levels of scalability if its’ platform incentives are able to attract the miners needed to scale. More nodes in the network do yield better decentralization, QuarkChain is clearly the best here. But a larger network in existing blockchain designs leads to a larger wastage in terms of electricity consumed per transaction by the network, so the costs of tsp may be higher. For security, we saw that while PoW is a viable and secure way of completing transactions, it may not provide the best security, as it can still encounter a Sybil attack. Zilliqa has addressed that issue in their platform by only allowing PoW to be a small part of its’ verification process, and adding second layer of security in its’ native language Scilla.
With sharding technology, QuarkChain and Zilliqa can make the most of a large decentralized network while keeping the cost of processing a transaction to a low constant value. Cryptocurrency miners will flock to both of these platforms as they both provide incentives to create mining opportunities. Zilliqa will harness the security that comes from PoW and yet will reduce the associated energy footprint and make mining more profitable by using a less rigorous consensus protocoal.
So the verdict depends on which of the three major pillars you want in a cryptocurrency, Scalability, Decentralization or Security. QuarkChain would be your choice on the first two, but Zilliqa appears to be the favorite for security.
For either one to make the jump to mainstream usage, they are going to have to provide a product that meets the needs and wants of businesses: fast tsp at a low cost, with superior security. As of right now, both are a work-in-progress. Zilliqa is further along, but QuarkChain is right behind them and with some time and effort, QuarkChain will have a competitive platform that is sure to change the crypto-world. Only time will tell.
As we were writing this article I read many other reviews and analysis from other crypto writers, just want to give a thank you to Elleen C. Ang, Pearl Lee, Ben Krypto, David Muita, Bennett Garner and Nabeel Malik for the information we were able to use in making this analysis.
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Relyn and Dean Kruger, Crypto Enthusiast