QuarkChain ICO Review (EN)
Disclaimer
This is not a financial advice. Investing in ICO is extremely risky, always remember to do your own research and consult financial and legal advisors before investing in ICOs. We are not paid to do this review, do not take part in bounty/referral program and do not hold any QuarkChain tokens at the time of writing. All the information is given for educational purposes only.
Executive summary
QuarkChain — brand new permissionless (anyone can run a node) public blockchain architectured from the scratch to maximize transactions per second while maintaining high level of security (in comparison with other blockchains striving for scalability) and decentralization of nodes. QuarkChain’s hardcap is $20M USD while its closest competitor — Zilliqa has $556M USD market capitalization. QuarkChain team members possess extensive experience in building scalable decentralized networks and has already tested alpha version of its product. The alpha version achieved 2 360 transactions per second (TPS). The team plans that mainnet will be able to process 1 million TPS if needed (AliPay hit record at 200 000 TPS).
We consider QuarkChain as the most interesting project in 2018
Overall — 9,5/10
Idea and impact — 9/10
Roadmap and product stage — 9/10
Team — 8/10
Hype — 10/10
Token sale metrics — 8/10
Opinion (not a financial advise) — will participate (3–5% of the portfolio)
Idea
QuarkChain architecture was built from scratch to support sharding (which is the process of blockchain horizontal splitting into parts that function independently and process transactions in parallel) and cross-sharding (when transaction initiated in one part can be processed by another part). Quarkchain blockchain consists of a root blockchain and infinite number of shards. Root blockchain validates blocks created by shards while shards process transactions into blocks. QuarkChain incentivize economically miners to allocate not less than 50% of resources to root chain and evenly between the shards. Consensus in root blockchain is reached through Proof of Work algoritm. Shards currently also use PoW algorithm to process transactions however in the future this might be changed to PoS. QuarkChain supports private permissioned blockchains however currently Quarkchain is focused on promoting its’ public blockchain among partners. The best use cases for QuarkChain come from finance, IoT, AI and gaming industries.
QuarkChain brings in following technological features:
1) Sharding and cross-sharding transactions, theoretically QuarkChain can process more that 1 million transactions per second;
2) Internal open market for computing resources. Shards will differ by hash function algorithms and difficulty; therefore miners will have an opportunity to choose the most appropriate shards while QuarkChain will incentivize to allocate resources evenly between the shards
3) Smart digital wallet will automatically perform transactions across all shards therefore user don’t have to create wallet for every shard. Sharding is completely hidden from the end user, however smart contracts developers may choose particular shard;
4) QuarkChain is fully compatitable with Ethereum Virtual Machine therefore Dapps created initially for Ethereum blockchain can be deployed on QuarkChain;
5) Off-chain transactions will be supported by QuarkChain. Some Dapps and smart contracts may need to communicate with external in relation to the blockchain sources (for example weather forecast web-site or coinmarketcap) in such cases off-chain transactions are needed to execute all the conditionals properly;
6) QuarkChain will incentivize miners to unite in clusters — super-nodes that verify all the blocks inside root blockchain and all the shards. This will be done to avoid mining resources centralization in several mining pools.
Competitors
Other analysts ratings
ICO-Drops — 10/10 (very high)
Ian Balina — 9/10 (87%)
Midgard Research — 8,5/10
CryptoBriefing — 8/10 (82%)
DiddyCarter — 9/10 (A-)
CrushCrypto — 10/10 (Good/Good)
Lendex — 8.5/10 (86%)
Sergio 10/10 (99%)
TheGobeOne/OHeyMatty — 9/10
CoinBloq — bullish
In telegram — more than 60 000 subscribers and still adding
Roadmap
Q2 — Testnet и code goes live on github
Q3 — Testnet v2.0
Q4 — Mainnet
Token sale metrics
Name: QuarkChain
Ticker: QKC
Website: https://quarkchain.io/
Key dates: applications for pre-sale are no longer accepted
Hardcap for pre-sale and main sale: $20M USD
Price per token: $0,025 (1 ETH = 31 533 QKC)
Pre-sale bonus: 25%
Tokens sold on ICO: 20%
Lock-up: team — 2 years, QuarkChain Foundation — 2 years, advisers — up to 2 years
KYC/AML: Yes
Key Team members
Advantages
Infrastructural project full of innovative features that should give QuarkChain competitive advantage;
Hardcap is 25 times lower than key competitors’ marketcap (Zilliqa);
Team has experience in developing scalable distributed networks in such companies as Dell, Google, Facebook;
Team conducted alpha test that processed 2 279 transactions per second, mainnet is scheduled for Q4 2018;
Team is based in Paolo Alto US with key members graduated from Georgia Institute
Before the mainnet QRC will be ERC-20 token
Telegram channel already has 60 000 members
Disadvantages
QuarkChain is less secured in comparison with Ethereum and Bitcoin as only 25% of all network resources are needed to take over the blockchain. However, this figure is higher than for other blockchains using sharding scaling mechanism;
Partnerships statuses are not disclosed. Team claimed that they will soon publish full list of partners who will run ICO on QuarkChain however for now there is no confirmed ICOs on QuarkChain. Worth to note that key competitor — Zilliqa hasn’t announced any ICOs as well;
Professional investors are not disclosed yet. Team promised to publish the list after private sale is over;
Only 20% of tokens sold on the crowd sale and pre-sale;
In terms of token price appreciation PoW consensus algorithm is worth than PoS. In general QRC token usage is limited.
Conclusion
We think QuarkChain is one of the most interesting projects launching in 2018, which should be monitored after ICO as we believe that it will get into top 30 tokens by market capitalization by the end of 2018 (this is not financial advice, always remember to due your own research).
