First Blockchain projects

After the financial crisis of 2008, an individual, or a group of individuals, with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, created the world first truly decentralized peer-to-peer currency. Transactions within the Bitcoin network would occur without any immediatary and it would all be recorded on the distributed ledger; called Blockchain. Bitcoin became to be immune to Bank & Government regulations and was designed be the savior of the financial world. At first this was a truly innovative invention that would come to change the world as we know it, and lay the ground for a different financial future. But after its popularity rose, so came the problems with it. The sher numbers of users and transactions of the Bitcoin network would put constraints to the network as it became more and more congested. This led to a rise in both transaction time and transaction cost.

To battle the shortcomings of Bitcoin, while still maintaining a decentralized network, many competitors rose to the occasion with their solutions. But one would stand out over them all, and that was Ethereum. And with it was the second generation blockchain born. As well as allowing peer-to-peer transactions, this next generation blockchain would also allow for smart contracts and dApps(Distributed Applications) to be run on it. As this is a network that is running constantly without any downtime, anything run on it would never go down and be completely free from fraud, control, and interference. Ethereum’s design would also allow it scale better and to run more transactions per second (TPS), comparing its 15 TPS to Bitcoins 4 TPS (For another comparison, VISA runs on average 1500 TPS).

What’s next in Blockchain?

Since 2008, there have been many new Blockchain projects, as well as dApps. Bitcoin is still number one if counting Market Capitalization, followed by Ethereum. Ethereum, while being a technologically better alternative to Bitcoin, does also have its shortcomings. It has problems with smoothly scaling further beyond its size at the moment, with rises in transactions in the network showing directly how it congests the network.

We’re now in the midst of another quiet revolution: Blockchain — Vinay gupta, Harvard Business Review

Now in 2018, there is many exciting projects in the works that claims to be the next generation blockchain networks and solving the shortcomings of earlier blockchain projects. A few of those are Dfinity, Seele, Edenchain, and AI-centric projects like Nebula AI, Matrix AI, and SingularityNet. Projects specifically focusing on achieving high throughput are RChain, Credits, Hashgraph, Zilliqa, and Quarkchain. Those all are in my opinion good competitors for the next-generationblockchain network, but one of my favourite project is QuarkChain. I will talk a little bit about that one below.

What is Quarkchain?

Quoting their website, Quarkchain is the next generation blockchain infrastructure, a high capacity peer-to-peer transactional system. The project is run by a team of highly experienced & educated individuals from Google, Facebook, IEEE, and they are led by founder Qi Zhou. With Testnet throughputs of 2279.37 TPS, and a infrastructure design with improvements in scalability it can theoretically reach TPS of 100,000+ making Quarkchain one of the most high capacity blockchain networks currently under development. With its Testnet being very early stage development, we can expect improvements as the next version of testnet releases in Q2 2018. The first version of the mainnet is expected in Q4 2018, while its token sale is undergoing at this very moment. Quarkchains main mission is to allow the network to scale as much as possible without the need for sacrificing security and decentralization. The scalability of blockchain networks, as I talked about earlier, is the main problem todays blockchain networks are facing.

What sets quark apart from the rest?

But how will Quarkchain do that? Which are the underlying technological improvements in blockchain technology they want to make to reach their mission? Let’s a look at the 6 main pillars of improvement coming from Quarkchain that sets them apart from their competition. These are:

Blockchain infrastructure

Quarkchain will implement a 2-layered blockchain structure, a sharding layer and a root layer. The sharding layer can be resharded as needed to handle higher TPS, while the root layer confirms all the blocks from the sharded layer(s). Root layer will use PoW, and sharding layer will use rfPoW (root-chain first proof of work). rfPoW is used to determine which shard fork is going to survive, and the fork with the longest root chain will proceed to survive always. This consensus algorithm makes it harder to perform double-spend attacks on the network, since the attackers has to retain at least 50% hashing power on the root chain.

Mining system

Quarkchain aims to create a fair mining ecosystem with allowing weaker miners a chance in the network. Quarkchain encourages this by allowing collaborative-mining within the network.

Anti-centralization design

To avoid the creation of many and expensive large nodes , which is a form of centralization on the network, Quarkchain will allow clusterization of smaller and cheaper nodes. A cluster of nodes can replace a full super-node, and this will increase decentralization of the network.

Transactional system design

As Quarkchains mission is to enable scalability on the network, they will ensure this by allowing fast and instantly issued cross-shard transactions. This is a feature very important to maintaining the high throughput of the network while the network keeps scaling, as the strains of the root layer eases up by allowing these kinds if cross-shard transactions.

One point-of-access wallet

One account. One wallet. All cryptocurrencies from different shards in one place. As simple as that.

Smart Contract Design

Quarkchain wants to make it as easy as possible for existing dApps to migrate their applications onto the Quarkchain network. This is possible by allowing support for turing-complete smart contracts, meaning that there will be a support for Ethereum Virtual Machine on the Quarkchain network. Migration of dApps from Ethereum network to Quarkchain network is possible. While Ethereum is actually developing sharding-support for their own network, it will take a long time until the whole network supports this since it is harder to allow sharding on a already existing (And large) network than a new network, such as Quarkchain. This is a great advantage to Quarkchain, and this can be used as a great strategy for Quarkchain to attain more users and traffic on their network.

Is quark heading for a success or failure?

Well, let’s first take a quick look at roadmap of Quarkchain. While a complete Testnet is yet to come (Planned for Q2 2018), Quarkchain already has a first version of their testnet up and running. The results from this testnet has exceeded expectations, and Quarkchain is ahead of their roadmap. They still have more to prove to the Blockchain community, but we will have to wait until further releases to say more about Quarkchain.

In my personal opinion, combining what we know about the technology, the testnet, the team, comparison of Quarkchain and competitors, and everything else between and more, Quarkchain is a great bet as the true next-generation blockchain network. Still, I will have to wait for Quarkchain to prove my bet, but my hopes for this project are really high. Will it fail? Or will it succded?

Some last words from me

If you have made it all the way here, thank you for reading my post. And if you liked this post, consider following me on Medium. I will be doing ico reviews and other blockchain & cryptocurrency related posts.

Signed Spectre.