Introduction
QuarkChain is a new blockchain project currently in the testnet phase. They are building highly scalable and secure blockchain and aims to handle up to one million transactions per second using a two-layered blockchain system. By using the EVM they will also support smart contracts and make developers able to deploy dApps originally built on Ethereum over to the QuarkChain blockchain when Mainnet is live in Q4 2018.
By reaching 1 M transactions per second, QuarkChain will surpass a lot of major blockchains in terms of speed. Bitcoin do 3-4 tps and Ethereum around 10-12 tps. This is a huge difference and will set those two blockchains under a pressure. Bitcoin are working on Lightning Network, and Ethereum on Sharding. Are they finishing it in time? That's the question.
Team + Advisors introduction
Qi Zhou — Founder
Qi Zhou achieved 10M tps as a member of the real time infrastructure team at Facebook Expert in scalability and was a key developer in achieving 10m IOPS with clustering for EMC 5+ years as a software engineer. Short stints with key roles at Facebook (1 year), Dell EMC (2.5 years), Google (9 months) and Ratrix Technologies (10 months). PHD from Georgia institute of Technology
Zhaoguang Wang — Software Engineer
Zhaouang has 6+ years experience as a system backend engineer working on large complex distributed systems Key roles at Facebook (1 year), Instagram (4 months), Google (5 years) PHD and Masters degree in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan
Xiaoli Ma — Research Scientist
Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology (Combined 7 years, 10 months) Previously CTO and Co Founder of Ratrix Technologies (6 years, 5 months)
Yaodong Yang — Research Scientist
Vice Chairman in Education at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Frontier Institute of Science and Technology Co-founder of Demo++ (Tech Incubator) Yaodong has authorized 50+ papers in peer reviewed journals and has over 600 citations in his name.
Wencen Wu — Research Scientist
Wencen has been a Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (4 years and 6 months). Has a MSC and PHD in Electrical and Computer Engineering Operations Team
Anturine Xiang — Marketing and Community
Anturine has 6+ years experience within finance and technology at Wall Street and Silicon Valley
Key Roles as Lead Platform Analytics at Wish, Business Development and Marketing at Beepi, Consumer Marketing and Analytics at LinkedIn Partners and Investors
Arun G. Phadke
Arun is a University Distinguished Professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Virginia Tech Fellow of National Academy of Engineering, USA
Bill Moore
Managing Director of Walden International (Global venture capital firm) Previously Chief Engineer Sun Microsystems who co-led the ZFS team, also Former President of DSSD/EMC (Dell)
Mike Miller
Mike is a PhD Physicist with 100+ publications Founder of Cloundant which was acquired by IBM in 2014
Kevin Hsu
Kevin is a serial investor in blockchain companies
Leo Wang
Leo is a recognised cryptocurrency fund manager who invested in blockchain projects. He is an Angel investor in NEO with over 17 years of field experience in mobile internet in China
Zhiyun Qian
Cybersecurity expert who discovered serious vulnerabilities in Linux, Android and TCP/IP Assistant Professor at University of California Riverside
Technology explained
QuarkChain is using sharding to provide a high capacity P2P transactional system. The blockchain is built with two main layers – a sharding layer, which makes it possible with high throughput by effectively distributing data, and a Root layer, which serves to confirm the blocks of the sharding layer.
QuarkChain aims to satisfy the tradeoff between the three pillars of a blockchain – decentralization, security, and scalability. I am explaining more about the technology below.
Two-layered blockchains
The QuarkChain consists of two layers of blockchains. We apply elastic sharding blockchains (shards) as the first layer, and a root blockchain that confirms the blocks from the shards as the second layer.
Cross-shard transactions
Cross-shard transactions can be issued at any time, and confirmed in minutes. The throughput of cross-shard transactions increases linearly as the number of shards increases.
Market driven collaborative mining
We designed a game theoretic framework for incentives, where hash powers are incentivized to distribute evenly among shards. There are at least 50% of overall hash power allocated to the root chain to prevent double spending attack.
Simple account management
There is only one account needed for all shards. All cryptocurrencies from different shards are stored in one smart wallet.
Horizontal scalability
Because a super-full node can be extremely expensive when TPS goes high, we allow multiple honest nodes forming a cluster running as a super-full node.
Prototype and testnet
QuarkChain has a finished prototype and has runned a live testnet demo on an AMA with the YouTube channel "Decentralized Chain" where they had five nodes and a speed of more than 1300 transactions per second. That's very impressive and beats most of the competitors already. But they are not stopping there. With more nodes coming up and improvement of the product they aim to reach incredible 1 M transactions per second. No blockchains on the market right now is not even close to those numbers. Even EOS which launches their Mainnet in June has 10 times less than QuarkChain in terms of speed with its 100 000 tps.
The wallet they demonstrated looks very user friendly already at this point and if you have used other blockchains before you will easily understand this wallet.
Sources
QuarkChain Website
QuarkChain Whitepaper
LinkedIn