From a commercial point of view, the key point of blockchain technology is throughput.
Therefore, most public chains on the market focus their research and development "firepower" on improving TPS and concurrency, which includes two directions. One isvertical expansion, Change the underlying architecture, such as the lightning network that improves the transaction confirmation speed of the Bitcoin blockchain, and the EOS that adopts the new consensus mechanism DPoS expansion, etc.; but once the vertical expansion exceeds the upper limit, the cost will increase exponentially. two isHorizontal expansionpublic chain
I recently contactedpublic chainQuarkChainchose the latter,With the help of sharding technology, multi-chain parallelism is realized, while improving throughput and scalability, while ensuring network security.
The core members of the QuarkChain team have worked for Facebook, Google and other companies, and have many years of experience in high-performance system development. The team completed the underlying design at the end of last year, and began to realize the prototype this year. According to the introduction of the founder cycle,In the test network launched by QuarkChain at the end of March, the TPS can reach about 2000. The team is developing the next version of the test network, with a goal of tens of thousands of throughput.
The test network has also been launched, and EOS is also telling the "story" of improving throughput. In fact,EOS with the "stunt" of community operationIt is currently the closest public chain (or operating system) to blockchain 3.0.
The difference between QuarkChain and EOS is:
consensus mechanism. QuarkChain has made certain improvements based on PoW. Compared with EOS DPoS, QuarkChain has more nodes and a higher degree of decentralization.
underlying architecture. QuarkChain adopts a "main chain + sharding layer" structure. The main chain relies on computing power to increase the economic cost of double-spend attacks and ensure transaction security; the shard layer is responsible for processing a large number of independent transactions. The same currency can use resources on different shards (such as smart contracts) to achieve cross-shard transactions without causing The main chain is congested.
In order to help us better understand cross-shard transactions, the cycle makes a metaphor:
A sports car (DAPP with high throughput requirements) driving on a country road (public chain with low TPS) cannot take advantage of its speed. Therefore, QuarkChain first built a highway (the main chain) so that the sports car "does not wear the chassis", and then builds the exit of the overpass highway (slicing layer), and the sports car obeys specific traffic rules (network protocol), such as turning on the lights and changing lanes (cross-shard transactions), reach the destination quickly (achieve high throughput).
Not too long ago, we introducedEthereum founder "V God" demonstrates the sharding expansion solution on the Ethereum main chain. last week,The market value of Singapore's public chain Zilliqa, which introduces sharding technology, is close to 1.6 billion US dollars。
Now that sharding technology is getting more and more attention from the "chain circle", what is the threshold of sharding? Zhou Qi said that there are currently no mature cases for applying sharding technology to the blockchain. How many shards are divided, how to shard, how to ensure security, etc. need to be explored from scratch by the team.
The cycle has experienced a complete development cycle in a large Internet company, and is familiar with the whole process. In order to verify the technical feasibility as soon as possible, QuarkChain chooses languages such as Python to develop prototypes, reuse mature smart contracts that have been "running" on Ethereum, and hopes to gradually improve the system with the help of the community.
QuarkChain has partnered withSingapore blockchain PaaS company Morpheus LabsReach cooperation; and invite hundreds of developers to develop DAPP based on the test network. Cycle believes that QuarkChain can be applied to scenarios with higher throughput requirements in the future, such as payment, decentralized exchanges, social networking, games, etc. The main network of QuarkChain is planned to be launched at the end of the year, and then it will expand and evolve in the direction of Lightning Network and privacy protection.
QuarkChain has been established for nearly 2 months, and the team has about 7 people, including 3 engineers, and is currently expanding.
It is understood that QuarkChain has completed 16 million US dollars of private placement financing (the capital has not yet been disclosed).
I am Hao Fangzhou, senior editor of Odaily. I am looking for reports on high-quality blockchain projects. You can add WeChat nooxika. Please note the company + name + reason.
