Quarkchain — a hot new blockchain on the horizon

In this article I am trying to compare it to the existing projects. Before you read any further, this is my own opinion and NOT investment advice! Do not trust a lazy robot, do you own research! The project website can be found at here.

Results first!

(my own work & own opinion)

I am going to start with my assessment and only then add more details regarding Quarkchain. In the below, you can see an illustrative comparison of the 3 desirable blockchain properties — Scalability, decentralization and security.

In addition, I added a category for smart contracts, which are essential for industry disruption(note: you would notice privacy is out of the scope of this comparison!).

As per my assessment, Quarkchain achieves a great mix of scalability, decentralization and security, while allowing smart contracts! Read more to see how.

Scalability, Decentralization & Security

Quarkchain solves the trilemma as follows. Quarkchain design is a two layered blockchain.

Layer 1 — sharding, comparable to Zilliqa. Enables scalability, linear in amount of shards. The team claims up to 1M TPS! Their testnet already achieves 1.5k–2k TPS, which is already impressive although in real life things can get more complicated.

Layer 2 — root chain, securing the shards by containing the block headers in its own blocks. This is pretty interesting design idea.

Quarkchain decentralization is potentially very high, thanks to cluster mining. This allows nodes with less computing power merge and create full nodes, as illustrated below (from Quarkchain whitepaper).

(full credit to quarkchain.io, taken from the whitepaper)

Smart Contracts

In terms of smart contracts, Quarkchain borrows from Ethereum. However as observed by prominent ICO reviews Cryptobriefing here, Quarkchain has a minimal copypaste and overall the state of its github seems quite useful. As Quarkchain features EVM, it is Turing complete, unlike for instance Zilliqa.

Overall

I am so excited about this project. Note that it is not yet in the production phase. However if it delivers, I am expecting major industry disruption!