Jimmy He: Hi everybody, I’m Jimmy He, a rater of blockchain projects. Today it’s a great pleasure to have QuarkChain CMO, Ms. Xiang with us here. Ms. Xiang, we have prepared ten very challenging questions for you today, and some of them are very sharp, and we look forward to hearing your answers. Before we start, can you please briefly introduce QuarkChain for us?
Authurine Xiang: Hi everybody! We are now in the New York Consensus. This is the most famous blockchain conference that people all over the world would come to participate. As the representative of QuarkChain, I’m here to communicate with our friends from all over the globe, and we are very optimistic about our QuarkChain project. Thank you all very much for your support.
1
Jimmy: People are saying that QuarkChain’s ICO is the most difficult one in the history. Besides considering participants’ joining of time of the Telegram community, there’s also quiz and lottery; it seems more difficult than becoming a permanent resident in Shanghai (China). Why is there such a difficult setting? Who came up with these ideas? What is the actual participation rate of ICO in the community?
Anthurine: Many people complained about this. People asked us why we designed such a complicated process. But I want to emphasize that our original intention is not to make it tough to anybody but to provide a fair environment in which everybody’s effort can pay back. As we all know that our English Telegram community has more than 80,000 members and Chinese community has more than 6,000 members, there are so many people who want to join in KYC and whitelist, but the whitelist will end up with no more than 5,000 people.
It’s meaningless if we let everybody join in and get 0.0001ETH per person. However, it’s unfair if the lottery is the only way to generate participants. Therefore, we came up with the idea of combining the three aspects, including the early supporter, quiz that may benefit thoes know better about our project, and contribution to our community. Our original intention is to create a fair environment that everybody’s contribution to the community pays off.
As for "who came up with these ideas," it was not my idea, but ideas decided together by our core team. "How many people are involved," all of these numbers will be announced after our public offering.
2
Jimmy: I read from some recent news that the description about QuarkChain’s TPS has been changing, from the initial 1,000,000 TPS to 100,000 TPS on the official website, and more recently an article mentioned that QuarkChain would exceed visa’s TPS (approx. 50,000 TPS). This seems to be a huge difference, why there is a change like this？
Anthurine: Our initial advertising was indeed 1,000,000 TPS, Transactions per Second. But people would think it unrealistic based on prior methods and see this project as a fibbing project that only absorbs fortune from its investors, and get frightened by this number. Thus, nobody will be interested in having a more in-depth understanding of the method we are using or the technology itself.
We have a Q&A section on our website to explain how we calculated TPS in detail. In theory, we could reach more than 1,000,000 TPS to as high as 1,700,000 TPS. To fulfill the expectation of our community members, we lower this number for now in our promotion and achieve the higher numbers step-by-step.
You will be surprised if we end up exceeding a lot than what you expected. But if you start by setting the expectation high, people will think it’s normal and indifferent even if you can achieve it. From the psychology perspective, overdeliver is way better than underdeliver. Second, I want to point out that 1 million TPS can’t be delivered in one day. People questioned why you advertise it as 1 million while the test network is only 2,000 TPS.
We explained in our roadmap that we need some time to achieve this final goal. For example, our TPS will be way higher than 2,000 TPS in the online public testing in June. We will reach a new milestone at the end of the year when we launch our main net. It is a step-by-step process to achieve 1 million TPS within a year.
Thus, we are adjusting our current goal to set people’s expectation. We will bring more surprises to you next and hope our community members have more faith to our program.
3
Jimmy: To be honest, it’s not easy for a decentralized system to achieve the transaction speed of Visa. QuarkChain is very successful in creating its community. There’re currently more than 80,000 members in the English telegram group and they are all natural members, I’m curious how you guys did it, can you summarize your experiences?
Anthurine: Many people have asked us this question, not only you, but also many of our peers, and even our investors asked us how we did it. We are distinctive from many other projects that are very popular within China but become mediocre in the oversea’s market. Since our whole team is in Silicon Valley in the U.S., we are familiar with the foreign market, and we promote from overseas to the Chinese market.
We didn’t have much promotion in China before, and that’s something we’ll be working on next. We’ve been adhering to technology in the overseas market. Many people keep asking me that how much airdrop I spent to attract more than 80,000 people. Actually, we never did any airdrops till today, and we even shut down Telegram group for a couple of days since we thought there were too many people. That made them upset and hoped we could reopen the group.
So how did we attract more than 80,000 people? It’s the technical interviews and third-party videos, in which third-party assessors gained an in-depth understanding of our project by seeing our codes and test network and made a fair assessment. Since they are all very reputable rating agencies, their assessment is persuasive as people know that there’s no way to bride raters in the overseas market. We are grateful for their high recognition of our project and technology.
We became known by more rating agencies through these assessments. There’s a spreadsheet that contains 17 most popular lists of oversea rating agencies. We made just 1 or 2 lists at the very beginning, and our ranking wasn’t high, but as we got more attention on our test network and codes, we appeared on almost all of the lists and ranked top 1 on ten lists.
For the oversea rankings, they are only convinced by perfect technology and complete product, which are quite different from some rankings in China. People trust us since we had a test network but not just a whitepaper. We made a breakthrough by our actual product to enhance the reputation of our program.
4
Jimmy: Although QuarkChain community is super popular, the number of the final project participants is after all limited. Once ICO is over, and those people who lost the chance to participate might turn their eyes on other projects, and what would you do next to maintain the community’s popularity?
Anthurine: First, our project will be on the exchange within 3 to 4 weeks after ICO, so we won’t let everybody wait too long. Second, during the waiting period, we will start roadshows in Europe and Asia. People will know us better through the roadshows. Our team stays in the U.S. all the time, and there were limited chance to visit China. Therefore, we would like to seek the opportunity to communicate with people in China. There are more activities after we are on the exchange.
These activities are not limited to technical personnel but open to everybody. There will be not only a reward but also a way to reveal our technology step-by-step. Different from the traditional methods of translating or writing articles, these events will be unprecedented. I need to keep it low for now.
5
Jimmy: I know that some people questioned if QuarkChain copies technology from LightChain and Zilliqa, and it seems there’s not much response from your team. Why would you ignore it? Will you respond in the future?
Anthurine: We didn’t take too many actions since we believe that a clean hand needs no washing and there’s no need to explain. Especially after we publish our test network and codes in June, people will realize this is an entirely different project, and rumors will go away. But let me point one thing out today, besides us, many projects are using two-layer structure. What’s important is that how to design the two-layer structure and what the functions of the first and second layers are, what the consensus algorithm is, how to guarantee safety, and how to set up the incentive system. All these combined are the core of our project, which makes QuarkChain unique. There’s limited innovation in double tier structure, and many projects are using it.
Zilliqa is an excellent project and seems trendy recently. Zilliqa is using Sharding same as we do, and people would ask why we are doing the same thing to solve Scalability.
I think there’s misunderstanding about Sharding, and it’s not anything brand new. In the centralized world, Sharding has been used by Google and Facebook for many years. Also, Sharding is a general name that contains hundreds of thousands of different methods. For instance, Google and Facebook both have their Sharding methods.
Although both our project and Zilliqa is using Sharding, we are entirely different in our Sharding methods. For example, Zilliqa is using Transactional Sharding while we are using State Sharding. Plus Zilliqa’s consensus is PBFT while ours is POW with Rootchain-First. Zilliqa needs at least 600 nodes in each Sharding to ensure its safety while we are enhancing our security by the 50% computing power on our rootchain. Thus our design and structure are very different from Zilliqa.
If you ask me which project is better, it’s too early to answer this question right now, since every project is developing in different dimensions and devoted to achieving their goals. We will only know the answer after the goals are accomplished. We are also in the process to fully develop our product. Next, I would like to explain about the Sharding technology.
As I mentioned earlier that Google and Facebook are first started adopting Sharding, and they are very experienced of doing it. Our core engineers previously worked at Google and Facebook, and their responsibility was using Sharding to solve Scalability for the low-level development of the large distributed system.
People may question about their experience in BlockChain, but they are all experts in the field of Sharding and Scalability. If we are not experienced, then nobody would be experienced. Thus our team is very confident in our project.
6
Jimmy: QuarkChain is known for its innovation in technology. As a CMO, although you are not an expert in technology, can you talk about your understanding of QuarkChain’s technology innovation from a technical perspective?
Anthurine：I think our product has epoch-making significance. Why do I say that? If you look backward in the history of Internet’s Scalability, before the year of 2000, there are three famous companies, EMC, Oracle, and SUN which doesn’t exist anymore. Those are using vertical expansion to solve Scalability. They sold expensive machines, and these machines can achieve very high TPS. But the problem was that it’s tough to continue to expand capacity when the machines reach their limit. Meanwhile, there’s primarily exponential growth in expenditures.
Therefore, after the year of 2000, Google and Facebook decided to give up the vertical expansion method but adopt the horizontal expansion method. The idea of horizontal expansion is that expensive machine is unnecessary when horizontally connecting ordinary devices. Whenever the Scalability is not enough, add a device, and theoretically, the expansion is unlimited. And once you've built up the entire infrastructure, the extension is effortless and inexpensive, mainly a linear increase in costs. At the same time, I want to point out that, after the horizontal expansion is done, it is possible to replace the cheap machines with expensive ones, which means that the vertical expansion is also merged.
Coming back to the decentralized era, as for the solution for Scalability, most people think about methods of reducing time to generate blocks, increasing the capacity of blocks, or creating new consensus, and these are all some decent directions.
However, it could be difficult and time consuming to realize capacity expansion. Like I just said, vertical expansion can be fast regarding single chain, but once the limit is reached, it’s hard to continue the expanding process, and there’s exponential growth in cost.
Thus, we are using horizontal expansion. The best thing about it is as long as the vertical expansion is good shape when people recognize a new consensus, we can directly apply it since multiple blockchains are running concurrently. Each blockchain can use a new consensus.
We are using POW right now since we believe that POW has been thoroughly tested and has an excellent reputation for almost ten years. As long as there is a new consensus on proper use, we can apply it to our system.
7
Jimmy: I learned from the latest reports that QuarkChain and SegmentFault have started to collaborate. This is the first news on QuarkChain ecology. How do you plan for the future ecological layout? Is there anything you can tell me in advance?
Anthurine: Actually, we have only disclosed two partners so far. Besides SegmentFault that you just mentioned, we also started collaboration with a Singapore Project called Morpheus Labs.
We are actually in a good relationship with several projects, and everybody’s looking forward to checking on our testnet. Like I just said, we will release our public testing network in June, and it’s not going to be a mere testing, but it will also support intellectual contracts to allow DAPPs to run on it. Regarding all the collaborations, we have not announced them yet but will announce them one by one after the public offerings. Ecological construction has always been important to us. Since we are very proud and confident in our technology, we hope to have more DAPPs to join in the ecology.
8
Jimmy: There’s lack of information about investors, and it seems the team is reserving the info. Can you release it now?
Anthurine: I always think that a project is not trustworthy when it’s chic but lacks support from well-recognized investors. In fact, QuarkChain already has many investors. So why did we choose not to release the information now? It’s mainly because this project is already viral, and people would think we are showing off, but that’s not the case.
We hope to release our investors’ information after the public offering, and so you can see how supportive they are. People also asked why we gave some shares to private placement but not the public offering. We hope to gain long-term support from our community, but we chose well recognized funds during private investment for the benefit of the long-term development of our project. Money is not the most important but the resources the investors offer are essential, and help our project to go further and build a better ecology.
9
Jimmy: I know the next test network invitation is in June and there will be 100 volunteer testers. How’s this going on? Have the 100 testers been confirmed?
Anthurine: Yes, we have confirmed our volunteers. Thanks for the community’s support. We received more than 1,000 applications, and everybody attached their Github address and resume. That’s our initial intention since we sincerely hope that more program developers can join in our developer community because this is a technical project. Thank you all very much. This is the first time that we interact with our community to test our network, and we will have more interactions in the future.
10
Jimmy: Lastly, I have a question on behalf of everybody - are there more allocation we can buy?
Anthurine: This question has been asked frequently. When people see me wearing a QuarkChain T-shirt or my badge in the Consensus conference, the first question they would ask me is that if there is any QuarkChain allocations. I want to tell you that our private sale ended on April 15th and we are now in the process of public sale.
We noticed that there are many syndicators claiming they have allocation of private sale and please do not trust them! We have no cooperation with any syndicators or pools. Our private sale allocations were given to institutes/funds that offer long-term support, and only a small amount was delivered to our advisors.
Second, there is too many scams before public sale. Please follow our official website and that’s the only source of information you can trust.
Jimmy: Thank you, Ms. Xiang. Hope QuarkChain will get better and better, and I hope that you all will keep following QuarkChain. I think QuarkChain will continue to surprise us.