Binance French AMA Summary
On Aug 10th, QuarkChain had AMA with Binance in Binance French Telegram group. Dr.Zhou introduced critical problems that blockchain industries faced and how QuarkChain solves these problems. For people who did not attend the AMA, please check the AMA summary below.
Part 1: Introduce QuarkChain
Q1: Congrats to QuarkChain launched Mainnet at 4/30, and announced token swap at 7/30! Also, you announced big news: QKC listed on Bithumb! Could you give us a brief introduction about QuarkChain?
A1: QuarkChain is a next-generation blockchain that aims to provide 1: great scalability, and 2: great flexibility via blockchain sharding technology.
We know BTC has about 7 transactions per second, ETH is about 15 TPS, and we could greatly scale them to more than 55K in our TPS competition — while maintaining decentralization and strong security
The flexibility means we are only a blockchain with fixed consensus/transaction/ledger model, but we could easily adopt new consensus, new transactions, and new ledger model to the system, while enjoying strong security and cross-shard transactions.
Q2: There are three solutions to solve blockchain problem: sharding, layer, and cross-chain, Why does QuarkChain choose sharding technology, what is sharding?
A2: Using plain language, sharding in blockchain basically runs multiple chains concurrently (imagine multiple ETHs chains), and using innovative consensus to make sure 1, cross-shard transactions can be done efficiently (unlike BTC/ETH, or ETH/ETC). 2, All shards are sufficiently secured (not like ETC is attacked by moving Ethash hashpower from ETH).
Compared to cross-chain, I believe sharding could bring better tradeoff in security, decentralization, and scalability. As I mentioned, cross-shard may experience security issue such as if a user moves its assets from ETC to ETH, and ETC is attacked, and the extra asset is created on ETH.
While in our design, such an attack is impossible thanks to sharding.
In addition, it is very hard for BTC to recognize ETH assets, while for our sharding design, each shard can recognize another shard asset very easily and the cross-shard transaction is very efficient.
BTW: Sharding is also the core technology at Google, Facebook to build up their global-wise services, which I used to work for.
Q3: Expect QuarkChain, there are many other projects that use sharding technology. What are the differences between QuarkChain and them?
A3: First of all, QuarkChain implements state sharding via our cluster design so that the processing and storage of the ledger could be split to multiple nodes, while a lot of existing solutions adopt so-called transactional sharding, and the nodes need to store and process all data.
Second, unlike a lot of sharding projects that depend on a specific consensus (e.g., PoS), QuarkChain allows different shard running different consensus, ledger, transactional model, and even token economics, while all of them share the same security level. This makes QuarkChain much more flexible than other solutions.
Third, QuarkChain’s design is already proved by the mainnet, which has been running for months, while a lot of existing projects (such as ETH2.0) are still working in progress.
Q4: Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum also agrees that sharding is the future of blockchain infrastructure. what is the difference between QuarkChain, Polkadot, and Cosmos?
A4. Honestly speaking, after designing QuarkChain, I am quite surprised that some ideas are being implemented by other projects such as Polkadot and Cosmos.
Cosmos is more like cross-chain solutions — to perform inter-chain transactions, it will lock one asset in one chain and create the corresponding one in target shard. As I mentioned before, this must be carefully designed as if the source chain is attacked, the extra asset is created. While we are not suffering this issue since we atomically “move” the asset from one chain to another chain, and we ensure that the asset is also unique during the move.
For Polkadot, its parachain is very close to our shard. However, it relies on PoS and staking/slash for security, while we don’t rely on a PoW/PoS or dPoS — we could use any combinations for shards
Q5: Can you tell us what functions the mainnet has achieved?
Currently, first of all, sharding is fully functional in our network.
Second we already open transactions both in-shard and cross-shard in the network (a.k.a. atomic balance move from one shard to another shard)
Third, we successfully implement a consensus called proof-of-staked work that aims to combine the benefits of both PoW and PoS, and there is dramatically grow of both hashpower and staked tokens especially after the token swap.
Q6: PoS and Staking were two hot topics in the first half-year of 2019. However, people talk about PoW and mining right now. Which consensus that QuarkChain supports?
Our root chain and shard chains could run any consensus including PoW or PoS. In addition, for a single chain, we propose Proof-of_staked-Work to combine their benefits.
The issue is that we see a lot of PoW blockchains, e.g., ETC, BTG was attacked because of the hashpower can be easily moved from one chain to another chain (e.g., by renting them from nicehash).
While for PoS, it is hard to liquidate the tokens to attack another chain, but PoS has several issues such as stake-at-nothing since there is no physical cost to mint the tokens.
PoSW aims to harvest both benefits — a miner would stake before it could efficiently contribute its hashpower to the network. The good thing is that a chain with smaller hashpower can be efficiently guarded by PoSW and the cost of attack becomes much higher!
(I personally would urge all smaller PoW chains to adopt PoSW)
Q7: Here is an interesting point: Future is for BTC, ETH, and other new public chains. What do you think?
I am not quite sure what other new public chains, but we definitely are one of the other new public chains.
So I think the future belongs to a tech that addresses a real problem. And besides technology problems such as scalability and flexibility, I think a key problem of blockchain is the division of the existing community of blockchains. E.g., BTC and ETC’s miner communities are almost non-overlapped.
A lot of people uses ETH, but they hardly use privacy tokens
We have so many chains, so many wallets, but hard to find one could one all the features in one wallet in a decentralized way. So I think the future is a technology that could unite existing blockchain technologies and communities, and that is also our goal.
With different shard running different consensus, ledger, transaction, and even token eco, we allow different users to just use a single chain and finish all the features without leaving it. E.g., we now support multiple hash algorithms — in the future, BTC/ETC/…. miners, all of them can contribute their hashpower to QuarkChain.
Part 2: Answers from Community
Q1: What is the role of QKC token in your project? How QKC token demand will increase with adoption?
QKC is our genesis token, and it could be our gas fee or the token to guard the network via staking.
Using it as gas fee it is one major utility feature of QKC. (together with support for smart contracts)
In addition, to secure the network, each shard needs to stake some QKCs before creating a block in the shard (e.g., mining or minting). With more shards are added in the network, more QKCs will be staked to secure the network.
Q2: What is your Monetary Policy? Inflationary? Deflationary? Fixed supply forever or additional tokens to be issued? 2.If the project is forked off another coin, what is different and why the need for a new asset?
We have a fixed supply model forever, i.e., 10B QKC. For new shards, they need to stake QKC, but the token mined/minted may be another native token with special features. E.g., suppose we create a shard with zerocash technology, only the token ZEC-on-QuarkChain can enjoy the benefit of confidential transactions, but mining ZEC-on-QuarkChain must stake sufficient QKC.
Q3: How has Facebook’s Libra affected crypto adoption, and what is its impact on future growth?
Actually, for a new revolutionary thing, the stages people view it is 1, ignore, 2, laugh at, 3, against, 4, accept. I think Facebook’s Libra is great signal to show that more and more people and big organizations are accepting cryptocurrency as the future. And it is possible to broadcast the use of cryptocurrency to billions of users. That is amazing!
Q4: You reached 55k TPS within the TPS competition, this is certainly an excellent result compared with your competitors, although you originally planned 100k TPS, how and by what time are you going to reach this goal?
A4: First, 55K TPS is verified by our community through TPS competition, and we interview the top 3 winners, and all of them say as long as they have better machines, 100K TPS should not be difficult. Second, currently, QuarkChain is implemented in Python, which is good for programming, but is slow. We are also implementing other QuarkChain implementation in other languages (go), and our early results are very exciting — about 3x or more. This means 100K should be easily achieved with the same machines in TPS competition.
Q5: About your newest article:” Fixed-Supply Token Model With Dynamically-Added Shards/Chains”. Can you explain more about it? Did QuarkChain accomplish it？Or QuarkChain is working on it?
A5: We formula an equation with the assumption that “if we start with 8 shards, and add one shard every year, how to emit QKC so that the total supply is 10B”. This results in an interesting quadratic formula, and we could calculate how to decrease the supply rate of QKC every year (0.88 per year) so that there are only 10B QKC in the world.
Q6: Many blockchain projects and companies focus on making very complex systems and say they will revolutionize the banking system and help the unbanked. Since you work in the business area, how realistic do you think such statements are?
A6: I think the major gap is “education” since there are still a lot of people that don’t understand blockchain. For example, if you lose your private key, then you lose your balance, but a lot of people feel there is a way to find it (and even this is such service, scam!!!)
However, I feel this is also a good signal of early adoption of the blockchain tech. So there is plenty of room to grow!
Q7: It is safe for investors to stake 100% of their QKC now? Is there a refund for QKC investors if QKC own network gets hacked while doing staking?
A7: First of all, we employed 4 code-auditing companies to check our code and make sure there is no major issue
Second, we open the features of QuarkChain slowly so that the functions are well tested in mainnet before more features coming.
Third, in case of a network failure (and hack), we may face the difficulty of rolling back network (as BTC and ETH do). We will handle over the issue to our community and let them vote and decide :)
Thanks for reading this summary. QuarkChain always appreciates your support and company.
Website
https://www.quarkchain.io
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https://t.me/quarkchainio
Twitter
https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Medium
https://medium.com/quarkchain-official
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https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/
