QuarkChain Bi-weekly Project Progress Report: Aug. 20 - Sept. 4

Welcome to the 13th QuarkChain bi-weekly report for the period from Aug. 20 to Sept. 4! For better communications with our community, we’ll be updating our progress every other week. Note that we also have a surprise for you at the end!

1. Important Announcement

We have announced a new token release plan: all the undistributed tokens held by private sale purchasers, the foundation, and the QuarkChain core team will remain locked for another nine months (until early June 2019). Please check the detailed schedule at https://medium.com/quarkchain-official/summary-of-quarkchain-major-progress-and-token-distribution-schedule-update-91cb722a7a95

2. Development Progress

1. Implemented neighboring rules of sharding for cross-shard transaction throttling, which helps reduce communication cost inside the cluster and make them scale better;
2. Implemented remaining JSON-RPC over HTTP endpoints such as retrieving storage, estimating GAS / GAS price, etc;
3. Supported creating QuarkChain accounts, storing / loading keystore files via command line;
4. Analyzed logging / monitoring (Kafka + Druid) results of testnet clusters during load testing, and identified several performance bottlenecks (such as the order of broadcasting blocks). Will investigate further for potential solutions.

3. Offline Activities

3.1. 2018 Silicon Valley Mars Blockchain Summit

QuarkChain CEO, Qi Zhou has been invited to join the panel of 2018 Silicon Valley Mars Blockchain Summit. He briefly reviewed QuarkChain's latest development processes including QuarkChain testnet 1.0, which reached a peak TPS of 1.4K+ during the live demo. In addition to the scalability problem of blockchain, Qi Zhou also highlighted some practical issues of blockchain such as usability of ERC20 tokens. Qi Zhou reveals QuarkChain’s original multi-native-token design to address this issue so that a user could create a native token and use it as GAS and payment (https://medium.com/quarkchain-official/supporting-multi-native-tokens-in-a-single-blockchain-686fc65f5931). Furthermore, Qi Zhou emphasized another critical function of future blockchain which is called transaction efficiency. Currently, general purpose VMs could be inefficient and slow for some specific transactions. QuarkChain is proposing to address this issue by creating new shards to support different consensus algorithms, transactions, and even new VMs.

3.2. Combination Meetup with Ankr In Vietnam

Recently, Ankr held an offline meetup in Vietnam. As an ecosystem partner of Ankr, Professor Yaodong Yang, the foundation scientist, represented QuarkChain and participated in the conference with the vision of promoting collaboration. He launched a heated discussion focusing on consensus algorithm, incentive strategy, QuarkChain mainnet development, and sharding techniques with many blockchain experts.

3.3. Blockchain Symposium Seminar, Korea

Jonathan Kim, Head of QuarkChain Korea, attended a public meeting of the Blockchain Symposium seminar as the opening-session speaker and was interviewed by the media after the meeting.

4.Strategic Partnership

On August 23, according to QuarkChain oversea’s news platform, Vidy, a blockchain company with promoting new technologies, adhering to the concepts of “open and inclusive” and “mutual benefit”, has built a strategic partnership with QuarkChain. As always, QuarkChain wants to collaborate with high-quality partners to accelerate the development of the Internet ecosystem and application together.

Vidy was founded at Silicon Valley by Harvard alumni Patrick Colangelo and Credit Suisse's elite Matthew Lim in 2016. Since then Vidy has grown to a team with 20 people in San Francisco and Shanghai. For the past two years, Vidy has built a solid underlying technology foundation for the innovation of the Internet industry with its core technology of video processing based on natural language-based transcription, markup and indexing. Vidy's consulting teams are mostly industry giants including P&G CTO Alan Boehme, Coca-Cola Vice President Damian Marano, and Pepsi's former CEO Dawn Hudson, Sephora Marketing Director Kimberly Wheeler, Ogilvy's former Chief Digital Officer Brandon Berger, and former UBS Group Ex-Chairman Lim Ho Kee.

At present, the Vidy’s team has started deep collaborations with many public chains, especially those with blockchain decentralization technologies and distributed data processing. The strategic partnership between QuarkChain and Vidy will mainly focus on promoting blockchain infrastructure technologies, and giving active assistance and support for both sides in the data layer, consensus layer and application layer.

In this bear market, we have never stopped running forward. We do what we are supposed to do and keep making progress. We hope to offer you a satisfactory answer in the future.

Finally, here comes our surprise for you! If you are curious about the daily life of QuarkChain US team, click on https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain/status/1037924844346650624.

FYI:

1. We just opened QuarkChain’s official developer community on Discord. Feel free to join us and discuss up-to-date blockchain technologies with other hackers!
   Here is the link: https://discord.gg/gVYRazf

2. Thanks for the suggestions from community members, we have started a new post in our official Reddit account (https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/) to collect questions before each AMA. Please feel free to post your questions and suggestions there any time before AMA. (Every Saturday from 7 PM to 8 PM, PST)

3. We opened our official Facebook account now! Welcome to post there, give us your feedback and ask us questions at https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain/!

Thank you for reading our bi-weekly report! The QuarkChain community appreciates your support!

Website
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Steemit
https://steemit.com/@quarkchain
Medium
https://medium.com/quarkchain-official
Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/quarkchain/
Weibo
https://weibo.com/QuarkChain