Quarkchain Review

Quarkchain promises 1M TPS

Bold claims is the name of the game with generation 3 blockchains. Quarkchain claims it will achieve over 1 million transactions per second (TPS). We've been here before. Credits claimed this. Credits has been criticized heavily for its amateurish codebase. Basically it's not blockchain. In my tradeoffs post (inspired by the DCS framework) it's very clear that creating a decentralized network that is also synchronized and fast is currently unsolved. One approach to breaking through to achieve all three elements is a sharding-based blockchain. Projects working on sharding include Zilliqa and Ethereum (project Plasma). Quarkchain joins this group.

The road to high TPS

Before we get to a decentralized system that can achieve millions of TPS it might be worth it to look at its centralized counterpart. Internet companies such as Google and Facebook have reached these thresholds. Each of these firms have world class data centers complete with the best-in-class hardware. They presumably have optimized their software stack to work in harmony with their hardwares to get the most out of their network. On top of the best hardware and software, they have also likely architected their system for high levels of fault tolerance and implemented high levels of redundancy.
Okay so how would a decentralized network fare where each of the nodes in the network host a variety of hardware quality, the blockchain software is still evolving, and the uptime availability of the nodes is highly variable.

Zilliqa beat Ethereum to the punch in releasing sharding. In Zilliqa's most recent test run they claim 2.5K TPS with 6 shards, 3,600 nodes on homogenous Amazon AWS EC2 instances. They even claim to have exhausted all of the available AWS instances in Singapore during their test. So what happens when the difficulty level increases and the nodes introduce varying qualities of hardware. Likely, TPS will decline. Zilliqa's latest results clearly show they are moving along in increasing TPS with an increased number of shards and nodes. Their test 7 months ago hit 1,400 TPS with 4 shards, 2,400 nodes).

Parent and Sharded Chains

Two-tier chain architecture: the first tier is the rootchain and the second is the sharding layer. The rootchain only checks the headers of the sharded level blocks. Each sharded chain houses their own transactions. The sharded chains will feature cross chain communication. Quarkchain has opted for horizontal sharding.
Network bandwidth: Let's start with their bold claim of a million TPS. I don't believe it but let's just call this their theoretical limit when they fully wrap up their development. – up to a million transactions per second, which is much more than the current capacity of Visa and Mastercard combined. Their testnet run posted on their site shows 2,300 TPS. This is similar to Zilliqa's test last month (2,500 TPS) with 6 shards, 36 nodes.
Cross-Chain transactions: Transactions across sharded chains.
Smart contracts: Par for the course these days. Turing complete smart contracts.

Overall Impressions

Quarkchain is trying to solve the "really, really fast blockchain" problem. So are a whole slew of other teams as I mentioned in this post. Zilliqa is testing their solution and have proven their testnet is up and running. Ethereum's sharding solution is supposedly underway. Credits is in flames in the public eye. With the race to make sharding work, it's a positive development Quarkchain is actively recruiting testers. Their private repo must at least be at a level worth showcasing to testers. Please apply if you fit the bill. I'd love to see how their technology performs.
I'm not impressed by big headlines such as "million TPS". It's clickbait at best. But I am intrigued by the team's background. There's a wealth of relevant experience on the core team and the advisory board. Their team is loaded with big name firms (Google, Facebook) and with PhD's in the relevant fields. If you're going to bet on a speculative project, you'd want to bet on a team with backgrounds like these. The Team reminds me of the RChain team: very academic, big tech experience.

In addition to their backgrounds, the team is located in blockchain hubs. They are incorporated in Singapore (like every other major blockchain it seems) and many are present in the Silicon Valley. Proximity to so many other projects and advisors helps in intangible ways and directly when it comes to recruiting future team members.

Their GitHub repo is private at the moment but it would be nice if they opened it up once the testnet results are in. It would bring goodwill to the community and recruit others to provide suggestions/improvements to it.

As for the token metrics, it's impossible to say what we are looking at in terms of price evaluation. Token metrics to be announced. I know that their private sale has already closed. Their public sale is targeted for the end of May or beginning of June. Hard cap of $20M.

Seeing that Zilliqa did well in its ICO (9x USD, 13.7x ETH) I would assume Quarkchain to perform well for its investors.