What Quarkchain is and why all my friends talk about it

Have you heard of Quarkchain?

I have many times as all people I know would not shut up about it. I am guessing I chose my friends well. Finally I read about Quarkchain quite a bit.

Although some technicals are not revealed yet, it seems to be an ambitious plan for the blockchain trilemma, coined by Vitalik himself.

Quarkchain is in an early stage just prior to its token sale. For some people the proposed value add of Quarkchain might not be immediately obvious. For those I have prepared the following diagram infographic.

(This is my own work)

Quarkchain and its solution to the scalability trilemma

The 3 items of the trilemma are solved in this design as follows:

Scalability  — sharding layer. Not many sharding blockchains are in production but some form of sharding is a hot topic in many including Ethereum, Zilliqa and Quarkchain. On the diagram each logo represents its own blockchain.
Cross shards transactions are possible but need to be confirmed by the rootchain.

Security  — the rootchain is planned to have more slower block times, but a lot of security and hashpower. If an attack is performed on a shard, the root chain should find out.

Decentralization — unlike traditional blockchains not all nodes need to process all the transactions (even on the rootchain). Smaller nodes can form clusters to effectively work like full nodes (supernodes).

(full credit goes to quarkchain, this is form their whitepaper)

It has Turing complete smart contracts in addition to the above! Kudos.

Further links

I am linking some cool reviews of this project:

1. A relatively deep review of the technicals (given avalailable info)
2. Crush crypto review resulting in good short term and long term potential

All reviews I have seen were quite positive. NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE — I see myself producing the below tshirts soon
If things go well, George is selling these on the street