Blockchain technology is innovative and groundbreaking, and as its applications in real life get more popular, we start facing issues in making it better and more efficient than traditional known technologies. Decentralization, transparency, and resistance to tampering all make these ledgers incredible tools for the financial technology sector. However, one of the problems facing blockchains is scalability. In fact they are slow and expensive – it can sometimes take hours to transfer quantities of Bitcoin from one person to another.
The Problem of Scalability?
The problem of scalability refers to the limits on the amount of transactions the blockchain systems can process. One of the approaches used today in solving the scaling problem is splitting up different transactions across multiple blockchains. Another approach is to defer frequent transactions among a fixed group of parties until all parties are finalized with the transactions. The third method used is called sharding. Sharding means partitioning data in a large database into smaller parts. For the current blockchain technology used today, there are two basic functionalities in each blocks within the chains:
Ledger: This performs transactions and records results. To be data-intensive is the key property of a ledger, both current ledger and transactions details including source, destination, amount and execution code needs to be maintained. The limited size of data that can be packed into a block is one of the bottleneck of current blockchains.
Confirmation: These confirms the result of the transactions from ledger and then mines the block to reach desired difficulty. It ensures an attacker is inefficient to revert a transaction by mining another fork.
While most of these solutions offers some degree of scalability, it sacrifices security for scalability and it is not a long-term solution.
The Solution to the Problem:
So where does Quarkchain Network come in? The Quarkchain network introduces a novel sharding – based blockchain architecture that aims to meet the global commercial standard. The technology behind the Quarkchain network was inspired by the team’s extensive experience in developing large – scale distributed systems in the centralized world that can handle billions of transactions per second. The mechanisms from these experience have been applied to blockchain to create a unique solution to its scalability problem. This approach aims to greatly expand the usability of blockchain technology without sacrificing its core features of security and decentralization.
The Quarkchain network adopts the divide –and-conquer idea to separate the two main functions in two layers and thus enhance the scalability while quaranteeing the security. The Quarkchain networks contains an elastic sharding blockchain layer which contains a list of minor blockchains or shards. Each shard processes a sub-set transactions independently. Therefore as the number of shards increases, shards can process more transactions concurrently. As a result the system capacity increases as the number of shards increases.
The Quarkchain network has a root blockchain that confirms all blocks from sharded blockchains. The root blockchain does not process any transactions since it is not economically efficient, but its block has sufficiently strong difficulty so that reverting any transactions in root blockchains is not not economically efficient. The Quarkchain network is also designed to support additional shards in an active network. Adding more shards is easy and fast, while users barely sense it. The users may feel faster processing of transactions if the network is congested before adding shards. Using this approach, it aims to satisfy the trade off between the three pillars of a blockchain – decentralization, security, and scalability.
The following are the reasons why you need to invest and use the Quarkchain network:
1: The 50% hash power allocation on the root chain of the Quarkchain network enhances system securities besides scalability. In addition, the Quarkchain network is more decentralized than single – blockchain systems so that the Quarkchain network is also secure.
2: Advance sharding technologies have been used to improve the system capacity and could easily increase system capacity to process more transactions per second as needed.
3 : More decentralized than single-blockchain network. The Quarkchain network is designed to be more decentralized because a weaker miner does not need to join a mining pool to collect its reward.
Features Of Quarkchain technology
Unlike many existing approaches that attempt to solve the scalability problem by enhancing the existing systems. Quarkchain is designed for scalabilty from the beginning.
Below are some of the basic features of Quarkchain
Reshardable two-layered blockchain-Quarkchain consists of 2 layers. The first one offers elastic sharding (a type of database partitioning that separates very large databases the into smaller, faster and easily managed parts called data shards). The second layer-also known as root blockchain- confirms the transactions (blocks) of the first layer. The second layer can also be resharded as needed without changing the root layer.
Guaranteed security by market- driven collaborative mining-basically, to ensure the security of all transactions at least 50% of the overall hash power is allocated to the root blockchain preventing double spending attacks. This means that there will be collaborative mining (incentive mechanism) included.
Anti-centralized horizontal scalability- Quarkchain allows multiple cheap nodes that form a cluster to replace a super full node (that can be very pricey).
Efficient cross-shard transactions. Two types of transactions: in-shard and cross-shard. In-shard transactions -when the input and the output addresses of the transaction are in the same shard. Cross-shard-when the input and output addresses are in different shards. The cross-shard transactions can be issued at any given moment and confirmed within minutes. The speed of the cross-shard transaction increases as the number of shards increases.
Simple account management- only 1 account needed for the all the blockchains(shards) in Quarkchain. All cryptocurrencies from different shards are stored in one smart wallet. A user will be able to manage all addresses in all shards via a single private key.
Quarkchain will support smart contracts via EVM. Most of the existing DApps that are built on top of EVM can be directly deployed on Quarckchain. To utilize high-scalability, Quarkchain will provide additional scalability-aware interface.
Roadmap:
This is the projected roadmap for the project starting from 2018:
Q1 2018 - Delivered a version of white paper and developed verification code 0.1 which mainly serves as proof of concept. Released Testnet 0.1 with wallet 0.1. Testnet 0.1 supports basic transactions including both in-shard and cross-shard transactions.
Q2 2018 - TestNet 1.0 release which will support most of QuarkChain’s features such as smart contract, reshard, and so on.
Q4 2018 — QuarkChain Core 1.0 release, Mainnet 1.0, and Smart Wallet (aiming for ~100,000 TPS at this time).
Q2 2019 — QuarkChain Core 2.0 , Mainnet 2.0, and Smart Wallet 2.0 release (aiming for ~1 million TPS with clustering at this time).
The initial token for the project is ERC20 which will later be swap to the actual coin once the mainet is released by the quarter of 2018.
The Coin will be used for transactions on Quarkchain Blockchain and also for paying miners, so as the platform get more popular , the value of it will continue to improve.
Team Behind Quarkchain
The team comprise of experts who have worked with Google, Facebook and many more.
Below are the basic details of core team members:
Qi Zhou, Founder — Expert in high performance systems. PhD from Georgia institute of technology. Former Googler and have 15+ years development experience.
Zhaoguang Wang, Software Engineer — Expert in large scale distributed systems with 6 years work.Experience in software engineering with tech giants such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Build systems capable of processing millions of queries per second.
Xiaoli Ma, Research Scientist — Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. PhD in electrical engineering. Expert in signal processing for wireless system, big data, and IoT.
Yaodong Yang, Research Scientist — Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University, and partner of Demo++ Technological Incubator. Dedicated on blockchain development and research.
The project has 6 reputable advisors which include Bill Moore, Chief Engineer for Storage at Sun Microsystems, Arun G. Phadke, Virginia Tech Professor, Zhiyun Qian, cyber security expert, among others.
FOR MORE DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT QUARKCHAIN, PLEASE VISIT THE FOLLOWING:
Website: https://quarkchain.io
White paper: https://quarkchain.io/quark.pdf
Steemit: https://steemit.com/quarkchain
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quark_chain
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchain (EN)
Telegram: https://t.me/QuarkChain_ZE (CN)
Medium: https://medium.com/@quark_30920
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain.quark.5
There is really no limit to the number of transactions that can exist in the QuarkChain network. Infact, the more transactions there are, the more it is routed quickly from one person to another, thereby speeding up every transactions. Invest in QuarkChain network because of its high Scalability.