QuarkChain Monthly AMA Summary-03/28/2020
QuarkChain holds a monthly AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Telegram/Wechat groups on Saturday at 7–8 PM PST. This is the summary for March AMA. We welcome any questions, comments, and suggestions.
Question About DeFi and Multi-native Token
Q1: Nowadays, DeFi is changing our relationship with money, investing, credit, and debt . So, what do you think of the future of DeFi? What are the factors that QuarkChain could make a difference since there are a lot of projects involved in DeFi? What’s the strategy of QuarkChain in DeFi?
A1:
Anthurine: In fact, we have introduced DeFi over a number of occasions. Yet, for many DeFi remains an unfamiliar concept. Our team will crate more content to introduce DeFi to help evangelize the concepts.
For most people, we already reached an implicit agreement for the advantages of Defi. The existing financial circles as well as the blockchain community both would like to help DeFi grow and flourish.
To look further, you will discover that the best DeFi applications are designed by those with a traditional finance background, such as Makerdao and Compound. Even our DeFi application NUTS was born out of the hands of people with traditional finance experience. The advantages of these people is that they understand finance and DeFi all in all is one area within the bigger financial sector.
On the other hand, the infrastructure requirement for DeFi is demanding. Makerdao incurred huge losses during the massive drop on March 14 is merely one out of many examples. The challenges of Ethereum cripple the existing DeFi applications, which is something unsolvable for these DeFi applications who understand the financial dynamics : understanding finance is of a completely different dimension from designing infrastructure layers.
What are the problems of DeFi that run on Ethereum?
Let me emphasize again: difficult to use.
Firstly, Ethereum is too slow and ETH2.0 is still far away with its launch scheduled for next year.
Secondly, on ETH, one can only launch ERC20 smart contract tokens. So there is a difference between ETH, the native token, and ERC20 smart contract token, being first-class citizens versus the second-class citizens. One cannot directly deploy smart contracts and would require additional developments needed to be paid using ETH. The whole process is cumbersome and expensive. (Many have approached us regarding the difference between smart contract token and native token. We will have an introductory video to explain the differences)
Thirdly, the level of security remains in questions. Recently, we have seen a number of attacks that target DeFi contracts and the projects need to use centralized methods to recover the losses.
We have been designing QKC from its inception with tackling these problems in mind. So as for how we plan to work with DeFi, we plan to leverage our infrastructure layer that is flexible and fast and its abilities to launch multi-native tokens to partner with good DeFi applications. Our partners can safely hand over the infrastructure layer to us and we will in turn deliver the best-in-class infrastructure for them to satisfy the demand. However, our focus would not be professional financial DeFi applications because we would like to focus on building the infrastructure layer, which is our core strength. We aim to allow good applications to shine and thrive on top of our infrastructure; this is the principle we have been following since the founding of QuarkChain.
Ting Du: Let me supplement with some more explanations. The development of DeFi follows the wider concept of “Open Finance”. It is not limited to the area of encrypted assets. On the other hand, what we have seen in DeFi revolves around Ethereum. We should avoid limiting ourselves to just existing practice since finance is mobile and flows freely and therefore requires an infrastructure layer that is free and flexible. Luckily, this is precisely the advantages of our QuarkChain structural design.
We can summarize our future strategy with one phrase: Redefine the DeFi. We can help popularize existing DeFi and bring in more users.
Dr. Zhou: In fact, we see that DeFi is becoming one of the major powers in the blockchain world as the age of ICO passes.
However, as every new thing in the world, the DeFi are facing several challenges, especially the recent MakerDAO event because of ETH price crash.
So from perspective, our goal is to provide the next-generation platform for DeFi so that
1. users can easily participate in the DeFi using first-class assets such as native token defined by users
2. scalability is still an issue and we could solve it by our sharding technology
3. We are also building our ecosystem with other experts. For example, QNUT is a project that is building on top of us, and the QNUT team is enthusiastic in DeFi and is expert in finance. We are very happy to work with them!
Q2: When we talk about DeFi, we have to mention DApp. One of the biggest problems with DApps is the lack of activity and few usages. People just created DApps which have few use cases and contribute little to the blockchain ecosystem. To prevent and resolve this problem, what will the QuarkChain team do?
A2:
Ting Du: For now, DeFi remains a small area which is difficult for finance specialists to join because they lack the technical know-how. Many applications remain simplistic, which just requires a few lines of code to come up with an application that can be understood by the traditional finance circle. To change this dynamic and popularize DeFi, it would require the infrastructure layer to be more user-friendly and flexible.
Dr. Zhou:We believe there are several core problems:
1. From a user perspective, compared to centralized App, DApp is still too difficult to use. Thus our wallet, QPocket, aims to help alleviate the problem.
2. there are still limited applications on dApp. DeFi is one, but still the number of users is relatively small. Other areas such as gaming are still gaining the user tractions. We are closely monitoring the growth of dApps; working with the NUTS team is our first step and we are working on more partners to join our ecosystem.
3. the security created by smart contracts also brings about several problems.
Q3: What do you think about recent contract liquidations on MakerDAO? How would one gain customer trust when the system keeps failing every few weeks?
Qi Zhou: Indeed, every new thing will be challenged when it first got started, and I think for MakerDAO, when the team designed in the first place did not expect the issue that ETH would crash. The next issue is that the system is heavily relying on ETH, which creates a single point of failure.
And that is why we are discussing with the NUTS team, and plan to address the issue with them.
However, I think this is good for every project: for a good project, we need to test corner cases and audit as much as possible. Indeed, if the system crashes every few weeks, no service or product can gain trust from customers.
Q4. Recent Vechain, IOTA, and Steem were hacked. Now, how do you provide a better and good security to the project? And how can the QuarkChain team protect its users from hackers?
Qi Zhou：We keep on working to enhance our security.
1. QPocket recently supported a cold wallet so that you could use your unused cell phone as a cold wallet and for signature, without worrying about leaking your private key. Further, we will support hardware wallets such as Ledger soon. We believe providing secure wallets is one core security component
2. Thanks to our special PoSW consensus, the current network is running pretty safe, and we haven’t seen any double-spending attack happen for ETC.
We are building a lot of monitoring tools to closely monitoring the running process of the entire network including the balance of key addresses, network reorg detection, etc.
Q5: Can you explain how the creation of other tokens based on QuarkChain will affect the value of the platform?
Ting Du: Obviously, such creation will raise the value of QKC. For example, when QNUT is launched in the future, QNUT will use QKC for staking and borrowing and so on. Such design will improve the circulation of QKC. As for native tokens, to recap, producing native tokens would require a certain number of auctions and collaterals. The more usages there are, the more number of applications QKC will have.
Qi Zhou: We allow multiple native tokens to be created in the network and users are able to pay transaction fees using user-created native tokens instead of QKC.
In this way, we encourage people to create and use their token as the first-class citizen on our network.Even if the user pays another native token as a transaction fee, our network has a simple DEX embedded that will automatically convert the user token to QKC.That means as more native tokens are used as transaction fees, more QKC will be also used implicitly.
Q6: When will the issuance standard of the native token be released? When will the issuance function officially open? What are the restrictions? Where can I see the auction procedure for generation of QNUT tokens?
Qi Zhou: We plan to upgrade our network in Q3 to fully support the multi-native token feature. Actually, multi-native token is already programmed in the network, but it is not open yet.
To avoid the feature being abused, we will have an auction system to bid a token. We expect the native token could be bid in a couple of dollars in the early stage.
Currently, QNUT is implemented in QRC20 (ERC20 version of QKC), and it will be converted to QNUT native token once the network is upgraded.
Question about future plan:
Q7: how many partners currently trust the QuarkChain technology? What benefits do these partners bring to QuarkChain and vice versa? Does the team have any plan to collaborate with “certain companies” or other projects this year?
A7:
Ting Du: Partners of QKC are firm believers of our technologies; it is up to us to safeguard their vote of confidence and convert them into practical products to be used. Such implementation requires a process and what we achieved with QNUT is precisely a template for the future. For our partners, we have developed a new mode of partnership: unlike the dependent relationship for the Ethereum ecosystem where one cannot live outside of ETH, our mode of partnership is for each partner to take a bit of ownership of the other partner. Such a concept is called “multi-native token”, which aims to provide flexibility and autonomy. I believe this concept will gradually be accepted and recognized by the market.
Dr. Zhou: We are working with NUTS right now, and we are also working with other teams. Another direction is our consortium solution, which we have signed some contracts. More details will be disclosed later.
Q8: For project developments, adoption and awareness are very important ! So, can you explain in short about your marketing and future plans in 2020?
Anthurine: We need to acknowledge that the speculation is widespread across the entire market, similar to what was observed during the early days of the stock market. As we can see now, the era of speculation and fast money is fading away. What we observed in the US stock market for the last decade is that the outperformers are no mere speculation but outstanding technology companies who keep innovating themselves. To adapt to this shift of culture, we now align the overall marketing strategy to branding.
What this signifies is that besides telling people the acronym of QuarkChain, we should let other people know more about the details of QuarkChain and the recent updates of our team.
What we will do in the future is to share more quality in-depth contents which vary in format but are easily readable. We would like to intrigue more people by experimenting with different forms of data visualization. We also want to step onto different school campuses for technical sharing sessions and have first-hand engagement for technology enthusiasts and gain their recognition. From there, we will then carry out more public advertisements. Because of the outbreak of virus, we will develop more online activities to enable more people to participate free of physical constraints.
About the community, we aim not just to grow only the Chinese one but around the world. You may understand the idea of developing a community in a different sense than I do. As I might have mentioned before, for the past two years, blockchain was highly speculative and some projects only wished to boost the number of followers with little maintenance of the community. Since the days of speculation are gone, developing a community is no longer just counting heads but providing contents of added values and spreading the awareness of these quality contents to more people. This is also why I appeared less in the chat but have published more in-depth articles over the past few months.
Q9: What does your roadmap for 2020 look like? Name some important milestones you hope to achieve. What are the major developments lined up for QuarkChain this quarter?
A9:
Ting Du: For projects, we will definitely communicate with exchanges. However, exchanges have their own considerations so at best, we could push forward the progress as much as we could. Also, our mainnet token is trading on gate kucoin and upbit so miners have a number of choices to choose from.
Q10: As most people know, ecosystems determine the future of public chains, what does QuarkChain think about ecological structure? Are there any plans to increase the value of QKC?
A10:
Anthurine: First of all, our goal is to survive. It is the most essential thing personally or for our project. Without that, we cannot have ambitious goals for the future. We have been doing different preparation work to be ready for different kinds of challenges in the future. But no one can predict what is the worst scenario is to come but because of all the planning we have done before, we are always more well-positioned compared to our competitors. Ecosystem is an organic system, during difficult times like this, we should support each other and face challenges together. However, we would not stay inactive and be hesitant to take actions. That is why we will continue to develop and evolve around multi-native tokens. Our aim is to provide a better native asset production environment for existing partners and for more ecosystem partners in the future. For our most recent plans, we began to support second layer and third layer agreements, as well as application landing and developments. We wish that we can be independent and build reliable, trustworthy products with our talented team. If we can survive an extreme winter like this, then we will come out the strongest among all!
Dr. Zhou: The core part is that the platform should provide extra values to the above ecosystem and thus besides scalability, we believe one key part is to multi-native feature is that everybody could use the native token and do whatever they want as native token.
I think this is a core difference from others such as ETH, as directly competing with ETH with only scalability is not enough.
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