A new blockchain by the name of Quarkchain has been taking the internet by the storm. I am here to give a brief but useful overview as to why it has been gathering such a momentum and what we can expect in the near future.
First and foremost, let’s take a look at the team behind the machine:
Qi Zhou — Founder:
- Scalability expert.
- Achieved 10 million+ transactions per second on Facebook’s realtime infrastructure.
- Achieved 10 million IOPs with clustering for Dell EMC
Xiaoli Ma — Research Scientist:
- 7 years as a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.
- Founder Ratrix Technologies.
- CTO of Ratrix Technologies for 6 years and 5 months.
Yaodong Yang — Research Scientist:
- Vice Chairman in Education at Xi’an Jiaotong University at the Frontier Institute of Science and Technology.
- Co-founded Demo++, a tech incubator.
- Authorizes dozens of papers in peer reviewed journals and has over 600 citations in his name.
Wencen Wu — Research Scientist:
- Assistant Professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- MSC and PHD in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Zhaoguang Wang — Software Engineer:
- Work experience includes the following: Facebook (1 year), Instagram (4 months), Google (5 years)
- PHD and Masters degree in Computer Science and Engineering in the University of Michigan.
- Worked as a backend engineer for large complex distributed systems.
What about Quarkchain itself?
Quarkchain adopts a bi-layered blockchain system. It has an elastic sharded blockchain and a root blockchain.
The sharded blockchain can be increased or decreased as the system requires. Since each shard deals with a small subset of transactions, its elastic nature allows the system to allocate resources wherever requires the most attention. This will help increase scalability, an issue that plagues public blockchains of today.
The root blockchain is responsible for confirming transactions that occur throughout the network. The minor blockchains from the first layer sends block headers containing transaction information for confirmation and then a new block is created as a result of a successful transaction.
Hash power is evenly divided by the two, though this means only 25% of hash power is required for a malicious attacker to compromise the blockchain, an effort far below that which is required to do the same for Bitcoin (where around 51% of the network’s hash power is required).
With that said, sometimes sacrifices have to be made to achieve greater things. A less secure blockchain (though it’s still plenty secure considering how significant 25% would be for a public blockchain) may be necessary to achieve over a million transactions per second by Q2 2019.
You read correct… 1M+ Transactions per second.
To offer some context, Bitcoin can only manage around 6 to 7 transactions per second at the moment. In fact, Quarkchain has already managed 20,000+ transactions per second in its private testnet. That may be impressive, but the real deal is when it’s out in public.
In conclusion, I believe that achieving over a million transactions per second by Q2 2019 is unrealistic, but if anyone can achieve the impossible it’s the man who has consistently created systems to process millions of transactions, Qi Zhou.
Important links & Resources:
Website: https://quarkchain.io/
Whitepaper: https://quarkchain.io/QUARK%20CHAIN%20Public%20Version%200.3.4.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/quarkchainio
Github: https://github.com/QuarkChain
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/QuarkChain/