In a time not so long ago, a dApp by the name of Cryptokitties struck the Cryptosphere like Thor’s hammer, sending transaction speeds to a crawl and skyrocketing transaction fees. People waited several hours, even days, just to have a transaction go through.
Quarkchain promises that a repeat of that incident will never happen on their platform, which supports dApps and smart contracts thanks to the EVM.
You may think that they must be going for a centralized network, but in fact, they intend to keep the three most important characteristics of a blockchain completely intact, and that makes me particularly happy.
Why?
Well, what are blockchains if not secure, decentralized and scalable enough for all to use without having to wait until Judgement Day for a transaction to go through.
Ironically, most blockchains are not all three at once, even Bitcoin and Ethereum sacrifice scalability for the sake of decentralization and private blockchains sacrifice decentralization for scalability and security.
Quarkchain wants the scalability everyone wants, without compromising on either security or decentralization.
How?
Let’s take a look at DECENTRALIZATION:
Quarkchain uses its miners in a unique and interesting way. Multiple miners will form a full node while individuals will form mini-nodes. This will ensure that even weak miners have a part to play. Hash power that comes from mining complicated algorithms within the blockchain will be distributed evenly between two blockchains that Quarkchain utilizes, which we will come to later. If that wasn’t enough, Quarkchain incentivizes behavior that is good for the system as a whole instead of individualistic desires through different rewards, difficulty levels and incentives. Through these means, a few miners will find it difficult to form a mining pool and centralize all the power.
Now let’s take a look at SECURITY:
Blockchains are inherently very secure, large public ones more so than most, and Quarkchain aims to be one. A large amount of hash power is needed to be able to compromise the security of a blockchain, with 51% of Bitcoin’s entire hash power needed to be able to perform a malicious attack on the network, and that’s basically near impossible; however, due to the nature of Quarkchain’s blockchain, only 25% of the network’s hash power is needed.
This won’t be a problem in the future when Quarkchain grows to the size it intends to become after incorporating enough “shards” into its blockchain network.
What are shards?
To answer that question, which you may have already answered yourself, we must first take a look at SCALABILITY:
This is the most important characteristic for blockchains at the moment, simply because it is sorely lacking and the hardest to attain. To achieve scalability, Quarkchain uses sharding technology to reduce loads on a blockchain and increase transaction speeds.
The Quarkchain is basically composed of two layers, an elastic sharded blockchain and a root blockchain. The shards are responsible for dealing with small subsets of transactions, processing and sending them over to the root blockchain as necessary. The root blockchain confirms these transactions and allows the user’s smart wallet to reflect the transaction on its primary account. As mentioned before, hash power is divided evenly between them though the shards can distribute the hash power according to load.
In conclusion, Quarkchain may have sacrificed a bit of security as compared to most other blockchains out there, but they have attained a means to never let the disaster of Cryptokitties ever befall the people again, a small cost to pay if they ever achieve over a million transactions per second by Q2 2019 as they promise in their roadmap.
Resources:
Whitepaper: https://quarkchain.io/QUARK%20CHAIN%20Public%20Version%200.3.4.pdf
Twitter: https://twitter.com/quark_chain
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio
Github: https://github.com/QuarkChain
Website: https://quarkchain.io/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain/