And will QuarkChain ever be able to build the blockchain they are promising?
QuarkChain is claiming to build a blockchain solution which will eventually reach a gazillion transactions per second and will solve the scalability issues for forever. They have recently completed their crowdsale. In this article we will discuss if they have actually met their promises related to their crowdsale.
The Whitelisting Procedure and the lottery (as planned)
During the whitelisting, QuarkChain used three main aspects to determine the scores of interested crowdsale participants.
a. Timestamp of Telegram join
b. Your understanding of the product
c. Your contribution to the project
QuarkChain also explained their lottery system in a steemit article. Following is a part of their lottery system explanation:
Before the lottery
Prior to their whitelisting, they uploaded their lottery code on github. However, a majority of the QuarkChain community does not have a programming background and did not try the code or anticipated the issue.
However, what the community actually did was creating a large amount of quality content in hope to increase their scores and improve their odds of winning the lottery. They created videos, blogs, participated in forum discussions and actively participated in the telegram conversations.
This was one of the reasons that QuarkChain was highly hyped around the time of Initial coin offering and release of the tokens. Following is the google trends chart of QuarkChain during this period.
Lottery Results
Let’s see if contributors and long time community supporters were rewarded by giving their high scores a high chance of lottery winning. Following is a graph showing percentage of people who actually won the lottery and their scores.
It can be seen that there is almost no relation of winners and their scores. It can even be noticed that a participant who scored 81 had a lower chance of winning the lottery than a participant with a score of 63. File with the data analysis can be downloaded from here https://drive.google.com/open?id=1N5Z6gH9DyWihUbu89RlS1TYbgO9xwkOr
Worse of all, QuarkChain developers could easily simulate their code on actual data and analyze their code prior to the lottery date, however, it was never done. This could be a signal of either incompetence of the development team or lake of care for their promises made during the token sale period.
Even though, it is very clear from the data that the scores were not given any value during the lottery, QuarkChain’s team is still denying this fact.
The most important questions to ask yourself now are:
- Will QuarkChain team continue to argue that they have given high scorers a higher chance of winning the lottery? Or will they accept the fact and apologize?
- QuarkChain is planning to airdrop the contributors and possibly people with a high scores in the lottery. Will they be able to compensate these people sufficiently (Not just a few dollars)?
(An interesting fact: A person who participated fully in the crowdsale (bought 87409 QKC) and sold QuarkChain at ATH will has made a profit of USD 28,285) - Is QuarkChain develpers’ team good enough to develop an advanced blockchain, while they can’t even develop a simple lottery in python?
(It is important to note that, until now there is no code of the project itself made available on github to be assessed by public, whitelist.py is the only available code on QuarkChain’s github)
Conclusion
Developing a lottery and providing the participants a chance on the bases of their scores is a relatively simple to program. However, developing a blockchain with unlimited number of shards with extremely high tps is far more complicated. It is clear to see that they failed to program the lottery.
It is also important to note that the only piece of code which QuarkChain has made available to public on their github is this lottery. Rest of their MVP code is not visible to public. Their activity on github could be generated by bots. Also, their MVP demonstration was barely a view of a frontend application generating wallet addresses and numbers. Any beginner developer can make a demonstration like that in a matter of hours.
Finally, their testnet is being tested by selected 100 participants. It is unknow if those 100 participants have access to their code or only access to a frontend application generating some random numbers and wallet addresses.
At this stage, QuarkChain price may be ranging between 10x-20x of the ico price. It seems like they will not be able to fulfill their promises as they did with their lottery.