Part 1: Quarkchain - Providing a Secure, Decentralized, and Scalable Blockchain solution

#blockchain #decentralized #peer-to-peer #transaction #highcapacity

WHAT IS QUARKCHAIN?

Quarkchain, a new blockchain in the market, is a highly scalable and secure blockchain that can handle up to 1 million transactions per second.

WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF BLOCKCHAIN MARKET?

The word “Blockchain” means a digitally connected chain of blocks used for secure transactions across many computers. It is linked and secured by cryptography (method of storing and transmitting data). Although the first work of cryptographically secured chain of blocks dates back to the 1990s, the first blockchain was invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008.

It is used as a public ledger for transactions in the cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Bitcoin became the first cryptocurrency network to use blockchain technology. It started as a decentralized (more power to people) network and goes beyond just transactions and applicable in various other fields like businesses, healthcare, etc.

ADVANTAGES OF BLOCKCHAIN AND CHALLENGES FACED

• Decentralized – Storing data across a peer-to-peer network, this eliminates tampering of personalized data, is incorruptible.

• Permissionless – It is open to the public, does not need permission.

• POS vs POW – Proof of stake used by blockchain requires less energy (hash power) than the proof work which needs more energy.

• Helps businesses and other organizations – Businesses can use the new methods of digital processing transactions, reduces systemic risk and financial fraud.

• Alleviates the need for trust service providers – Does not need third parties to complete transactions.

• Smart contracts – Blockchain based smart contracts can be enforced without human interaction.

DESPITE MANY ADVANTAGES IN THE CURRENT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY, THERE ARE MANY CHALLENGES FACED

• Security – Even though the inherent feature of blockchain is security, there are still vulnerabilities, and it is not 100% secure.

• Decentralization – It is also a challenge a lot of mining pools formed, and it encourages centralization and can become a risk for decentralized POW-based blockchain.

• Scalability – Current blockchain transaction speed is reduced with more transactions.

• Multiple blockchains – means lower hash power operating each blockchain leading to long processing time and compromise in security.

• Lightning Network – this was created to alleviate scalability, but it led to transparency issues.

• Sharding – means breaking data into smaller parts in an extensive database, was introduced to address the scalability problem, but this led to cross-shard transactions, security issues with the single-shard takeover and scalability issues. The user account was also partitioned which led to users having multiple accounts to make transactions with others.

• Tradeoffs – if a user wants to increase the security or privacy, large data are needed for each transaction, which means lower transaction speed and more massive storage.

THE QUARKCHAIN PROJECT-WHAT IS DIFFERENT WITH QUARKCHAIN?

Quarkchain is designed in such a way that it overcomes whatever challenges are being faced by blockchain network. Quarkchain

• Enhances the scalability issue, but ensures security and decentralization are not affected.
• Enables cross-shard transactions.
• Manages simple accounts for clients.
• Opens standard to support various Dapp.
• Is incentive-driven.

WHAT IS THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND QUARKCHAIN?

• It consists of elastic sharding blockchain layer which is made up of minor blockchains (shards). Each shard can process transactions independently. As the number of shards increases, shards can process more transactions and the system capacity increases as the number of shards increases.

• It consists of root blockchain (rootchain) that confirms all blocks from sharded blockchains. The rootchain does not process any transactions as it is not economically efficient.

• It is designed to support additional shards in an active network and adding more shards lead to faster processing of transactions.

• The rootchain and shards in the Quarkchain Network run a “consensus algorithm” to protect all transactions.

• The Quarkchain Network has eight minor blockchains with target block duration of 10s and a root blockchain with target block duration of 150s.

WHAT IS THE POSITIONING OF QUARKCHAIN NETWORK IN BLOCKCHAIN SYSTEM AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER EXISTING BLOCKCHAINS?

• The hash power (the rate at which a computer is completing an operation) of 50% is reconfigurable, and by adjusting the hash power, the Quarkchain Network resembles existing blockchain system.

• If the hash power is 100%, then it becomes a single blockchain system as there is no miner on shards.

• If the hash power is 0%, then the Quarkchain Network system becomes multiple independent, and each shard will be treated as independent blockchain. It becomes more scalable and decentralized but becomes very insecure due to dilution of the hash power.

CONCLUSION

The Quarkchain Network is thus designed to address the scalability problem from the beginning, building a peer-to-peer network resistant to malicious attack. Therefore, the Quarkchain Network is designed to address all the challenges being faced by the blockchain technology.

Follow Quarkchain at Quarkchain.