Bitcoin currently operates with around 6 to 7 transactions per second; Ethereum allows up to 15 transactions per second. These are pretty abysmal speeds considering how many users of there are of the aforementioned, but it is the number of these users that are the cause of such speeds.
This is known as the scalability problem; the greatest issue that has prevented the blockchain technology from achieving universal adoption. There have been methods to fix the issue, but at the cost of both security and decentralization, which are two other major characteristics of the blockchain that appeals to so many.
Quarkchain intends to stay true to what blockchain is meant to be, a decentralized and secure peer to peer network, while solving the scalability problem. They have already deployed a private testnet that is managing 2000 transactions per second, a feat that outshines most of the other higher valued blockchain 3.0 projects.
The methodology Quarkchain employs is a two layer blockchain system with the first being an elastic sharded blockchain and the other being a root blockchain. The latter is intended to handle the confirmation of transactions while the former processes and records relevant data such as user accounts and the transactions made between accounts through many “shards” in the form of minor-blockchains.
Elastic sharded blockchains are flexible in nature, or in other words they can be reduced or increased as the network requires. In addition, each minor-blockchain is responsible for a small portion of the transactions that occur, through which they manage to tackle the scalability problem rather significantly.
The coding behind Quarkchain is purposeful and effective. The team seems to be determined to ensure that blockchains remain decentralized and secure. To do so, Quarkchain developed several features that would prevent the formation of mining pools and distribute hash power more evenly.
Other features within Quarkchain are more designed to attract and retain users; for example, Quarkchain uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to enable the use of smart contracts as well as support for dApps. If they can manage to solve the scalability issue before Ethereum does, it would be unsurprising if most users and developers migrate over to Quarkchain. In fact, it would be surprising if they don’t.
Now it’s clear that Quarkchain looks very promising, but the team has not released any total proof of work that what they promise is guaranteed to be achieved; however, this is usually the case with ICOs of this nature. Regardless of this fact, the team has yet to secure enterprise partnerships and projects for the Quarkchain platform, stating that they will only do so when they have something that will prove their claims.
With that said, it is important to analyze just who is leading the engineers behind this ambitious platform. Qi Zhou is a scalability expert who has achieved 10 million transactions per second for Facebook and 10 million IOPs with clustering for EMC. The man seems to love figures in the millions because he is planning for speeds of over 1 million transactions per second by Q2 of 2019. The rest of the team are highly qualified individuals that make it easier for anyone to have faith in the project; however, only time will tell.
For more information, go through these resources:
Quarkchain Website: https://quarkchain.io/
Github: https://github.com/QuarkChain
Code Review: https://cryptobriefing.com/quarkchain-code-review-deep-dive/
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio
Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/quarkchain/