QuarkChain was very honored to hold an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in EOT Community on Sep. 4, 2018. This is the summary for the AMA on Sep. 4. Through this joint AMA in the partner's community, our relationship has been further strengthened.
Part 1: Non-technical Questions
1. Introduction to QuarkChain core team members
(1). Anthurine Xiang
QuarkChain CMO
Finance, consulting and technology background
Six years of work experience in Wall Street and Silicon Valley
Worked in Argus, LinkedIn, Wish, etc.
(2). Qi Zhou
QuarkChain Founder and CEO
Ph.D. from Georgia Tech
Expert in high-performance systems
Worked at Google, Facebook and EMC
Fifteen years of experience in software development
(3). Ting Du
QuarkChain CBO
Expert in data and product management, a veteran in investment and business incubation
Worked in NHN China, UniDT and Liuhe Capital, focusing on blockchain ecosystem establishment and business application research
We also have many senior engineers from large companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber and Camera 360, and research scientists from top Chinese and American universities.
2. What are the daily operations of the team?
We have several teams with total 20+ members working in different areas including Engineering, Marketing, and Business Development, and each team has its own operational model. We are mainly based in Silicon Valley, but we also have offices in Korea and China.
3. What is QuarkChain? How is it different from other public chains?
QuarkChain, a decentralized, secure, scalable, and permissionless blockchain technology to deliver high on-chain TPS (more than 100K) by using horizontal scale technology. Unlike many other blockchain companies that try to improve the performance of one single chain, QuarkChain partitions the system ledger to multiple shards (or sharded blockchains), build consensus to drive the shards and allow scalable interoperations within shards.
(1). Decentralized - There are two aspects associated with decentralized:
a) From the miners perspective, a weak miner can produce a block in a shard with relatively low difficulty;
b) From the node perspective, QuarkChain allows multiple cheap nodes forming a cluster to replace a super-full node. Thus, QuarkChain can produce higher throughput. QuarkChain network also offers more shards which are relatively easier to mine or mint (via PoW or PoS).
(2). Secure - To enable security, QuarkChain builds a root-chain that a) with high hash power; b) protects all shards, and thus all transactions of all shards are protected by root-chain. Concretely, with our two-layered blockchain structure, the root-chain layer will confirm all blocks from sharded blockchains by PoW that secures all the shards (and thus all transactions in the shards) with a large portion of the hash power of the network.
(3). Scalable - Scalability is mainly by adding more shards in the network. There are two kinds of scale: Vertical Scale and Horizontal Scale. QuarkChain uses the latter one, which is widely used in large companies such as Google for years. Theoretically, whenever the capacity is not enough, the system can add more shards and more nodes, the capacity can be significantly scaled.
Thus, from the business perspective, QuarkChain can provide a more open, scalable, elastic and suitable ecosystem for business applications. When our mainnet launches in Q4 2018 / Q1 2019, the mainnet's TPS can be increased on-demand by adding more shards.
4. I knew that QuarkChain released its testnet in July. Congrats! What’s the performance of it?
(1). Here is the detailed article about testnet: https://medium.com/quarkchain-official/quarkchain-testnet-1-0-bottom-quark-2ee8665ce5b1
(2). Here is the demo of testnet:
(3). Testnet parameter overview
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.)
TPS: 10,000+ (peak TPS in the live demo: 14,000+)
Testnet：http://testnet.quarkchain.io/
5. QuarkChain also launched its first open-source client library. Did anyone use it?
Our engineering team has developed and open sourced our first client library for QuarkChain. The library provides similar interfaces as web3.js (the Ethereum client library) so that the existing Ethereum DApp developers can easily start building Apps on QuarkChain. We also integrated the client library and our testnet with MetaMask (the most popular hot wallet as a browser extension) which can be used to manage QuarkChain accounts and signing transactions. The library was used by several teams in the past hackathon two weeks ago. We welcome more developers to try it out and provide feedback. Feel free to email testnet@quarkchain.org for any question or feedback.
GitHub: https://github.com/QuarkChain/quarkchain-web3.js
npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/quarkchain-web3
Testnet (now supports MetaMask): https://testnet.quarkchain.io
Testnet JSON RPC endpoint: http://jrpc.testnet.quarkchain.io:38391
Developer guide: https://goo.gl/JzcXaU
In addition, we have opened QuarkChain’s official developer community on Discord. Please feel free to join us and discuss up-to-date blockchain technologies with hackers! Here is the invitation: https://discord.gg/gVYRazf
6. EOT is one of the strategic partners of QuarkChain. Could you name some other strategic partners? How EOT and QuarkChain will work together?
We have over 40 partners such as Ankr, Celer Network, CovalentChain, DREP and CertiK. For more information about our partners in the ecosystem, you could check here: https://medium.com/quarkchain-official/quarkchain-ecosystem-progress-report-no-1-9404d325cbae
Firstly, We will work together in the gaming field. We think our high TPS public chain will meet the requirement for blockchain games that EOT is trying to build. We feel gaming will most likely be the No.1 field where killer apps emerge. Moreover, EOT has extensive experiences in gaming, and we also believe gaming is one direction of the blockchain. Some games, such as CryptoKitties, have got much attention. EOT's CryptoAlpaca creates a new type of gaming. With the high TPS of QuarkChain, we believe we can incorporate more games to build a large user base. The combination of high TPS of QuarkChain and CryptoAlpaca of EOT will open a great opportunity in the market.
7. Recently, QuarkChain has announced Eco-fund. Could you please tell us more about it?
We are now raising the $50,000,000 Eco-fund to build a collaborative and open ecosystem of QuarkChain, as well as support the rapid development of the whole QuarkChain ecosystem. The reason why we do so is that we believe in the bear market, startups need more supports from us just like we did before. Generally, an Eco-fund is focusing more on the short-term and middle-term (1-2 years or 2-3 years) development of projects whereas our foundation will think more about long-term strategies. Right now, we have over 40 partners from various fields. We support not only DApps on layer2 (like most of other public chains) but also vertical public chains.
You can check more details about our Ecosystem at:
8. What are the next milestones of QuarkChain? And what are the QuarkChain next events with the community?
Our next milestones will be open source and testnet 2.0. When testnet 2.0 is launched, everyone is able to join the network and offer the hash power to produce blocks, which will further help us to verify our system and attract more community members to join us.
In terms of upcoming events, we do have lots of offline meetup plans in South Asia, South Korea, Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Europe in the coming months. We will also join a hackathon in Russia soon. Please stay tuned and follow our Telegram news channel (https://t.me/QuarkChain_News) and official twitter account if you can.
9. What are the challenges QuarkChain will face before the scheduled release of mainnet and how do you intend to address these challenges?
The major challenge is that for any new blockchain technology, it needs time to verify since the blockchain area is still an experimental technology. To clear uncertainties during the phase, we have to work extremely and have our community to work with us.
10. How do you see the future of blockchain industry?
Even though the blockchain industry is in its early stage and just a few people benefit from it now, we believe that the blockchain technology will become a tool for our daily life usage. For example, in the future people could use blockchain to make payment, to sign and storage housing purchasing contract, and even to vote. There are also possibilities for new business models that we never thought before, just like how YouTube, Facebook come into reality after the invention and prosperity of the Internet.
11. How do you see blockchain games?
We think blockchain games and blockchains can benefit from each other. On the one hand, blockchain games are a good way to educate people and spread the influence of blockchain; on the other hand, blockchains provide games with an ideal platform. We believe EOT has lots of advantages in this field.
Part 2: Technical Questions
1. Will QuarkChain has its own language in the future or will it be using Solidity?
QuarkChain is able to support different VMs and even different consensus algorithms in the future. Using new VMs shouldn't be difficult, and we may develop our own Smart Contract language if necessary. However, in the current case, using solidity makes it easier for our development.
2. For sharding, is it the only way of working as in getting scalability to work or can it work in various ways of sharding as Zilliqa and QuarkChain have different approaches to make sharding work?
For the first question, sharding is an idea rather than a single solution. For example, Google has Google's sharding solution whereas Facebook has Facebook's. Even different products may need different sharding solutions in centralized systems. Therefore, I believe sharding solution is not unique in the decentralized world.
For the second question, our technology is quite different from Zilliqa's as we enable state sharding by cluster, where a cheap node in a cluster would only need to store the local shard ledger. However, Zilliqa only offers transaction sharding, where all nodes must maintain the full ledger of the network. When TPS goes high, how to keep a large-sized ledger becomes a problem.
If you want to know more about our sharding technology, please refer to https://medium.com/quarkchain-official/quarkchain-explained-part-3-sharding-in-quarkchain-state-partitioning-bce9fdc86fcb for more details.
3. Your CEO, Qi Zhou talked about a new concept in blockchain industry - multi-native-token. What is it? How does it benefit projects?
You can refer to https://medium.com/quarkchain-official/supporting-multi-native-tokens-in-a-single-blockchain-686fc65f5931 for more details.
4. What do you think of the consensus mechanism of PoW / PoS? What's your strategy as a public chain? And do you think PoS will replace PoW in the future?
We think pure PoS has a lot of uncertainties compared to PoW. However, the mix of PoW/PoS could be a good solution. For example, I heard that ETH Casper is postponed because of these uncertainties recently.
In our case, we also have a plan to support PoW / PoS, where PoW is for the root chain to provide safety, while PoS is for each shard to provide high TPS. We are working on this hybrid consensus, and we have some good (and exciting) results.
FYI:
We just opened QuarkChain’s official developer community on Discord. Feel free to join us and discuss up-to-date blockchain technologies with other hackers!
Here is the link: https://discord.gg/gVYRazfThanks for the suggestions from community members, we have started a new post in our official Reddit account (https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/) to collect questions before each AMA. Please feel free to post your questions and suggestions there any time before AMA. (Every Saturday from 7 PM to 8 PM, PST)
We opened our official Facebook account now! Welcome to post there, give us your feedback and ask us questions at https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain/!
Thank you for reading this AMA summary! The QuarkChain community appreciates your support!
Website
https://www.quarkchain.io
Telegram
https://t.me/quarkchainio
Discord
https://discord.gg/gVYRazf
Twitter
https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Steemit
https://steemit.com/@quarkchain
Medium
https://medium.com/quarkchain-official
Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain/
Weibo
https://weibo.com/QuarkChain