As many of you already know, there is a weekly AMA (ask me anything) on Telegram/Wechat group every Saturday, from 7-8 PM PST. This is the summary for AMA of last week. We are always happy to take feedback and answer your questions, see you all this Saturday!
Part 1: Marketing Questions
Q: Do you have some good news to share with us?
A: We successfully organized two meetups in Singapore and attended the Blockchain Connect Conference in Silicon Valley this week. And on July 4th, we will unlock tokens, and the circulating supply will be 770 million at that time. What’s more, We will launch our public testnet V2.0 and announce new partners before mid-July. All development and marketing plans are on track.
Q: Zilliqa has just announced testnet V2.0 with 1000 nodes (4 shards) and a lot of exciting features. I know QuarkChain only have roughly 100 nodes in coming public testnet. How do you compete with Zilliqa regarding nodes? What do you think about new features they just introduced?
A: Firstly, the number of nodes doesn’t relate to scalability directly. For example, EOS only have 21 nodes for block produce and Ontology just recently released their testnet with 15 nodes. In Ethereum and Bitcoin, having more nodes even means the slower network. Most people running so many nodes are just for an incentive.
Secondly, the reason, the reason why Zilliqa requires so many nodes is that its number of shards depends on the number of nodes (In this case, 250 nodes per shards). However, we don’t have these constraints because of our design. This will give us a lot of benefits to achieve high TPS with a small number of nodes. You will understand more when you see our testnet which will be released pretty soon.
Q: Blockchains are quite competitive. What plans do you have in place to encourage the community to support this project continuously?
A: We will continue to post our development process, ecosystem building and many more on our social media including Twitter, Telegram, Medium, Steemit, and Reddit. We will also have marketing campaigns after public testnet.
Q: How is QuarkChain going to address the high inflated TPS claimed by other companies?
A: High TPS doesn’t mean everything. Besides high TPS, people also care about security, decentralization, stability, token eco, etc. Even regarding TPS, the critical difference between QuarkChain and other companies is that we allow increasing more TPS (scale-out) on demand while they could quickly hit the TPS limit.
Part 2: Technology Questions
Q: Can QuarkChain achieve decentralization by smaller nodes? How many nodes does QKC need to maintain high TPS that whitepaper suggests at least?
A: For your first question, thanks to our sharding technique, we can achieve scalability with smaller number of nodes. For example, suppose our testnet has 21 clusters, and each one has 64 nodes, then the total nodes are 21 * 64 = 1200+. For your second question, it depends on how powerful the node is. Right now, a single power EC2 node can support 10k+ TPS.
Q: In Andre Cronje's article, he gave 1 issue Quarkchain may face, which is: "So since these are parallel chains, what happens if everyone simply transacts on Ethereum A, and no one uses Ethereum B or C? Well, then Ethereum A becomes congested and it will start suffering throughput. This will cause fees to go up, so now, if you wanted to have a cheap transaction, you could simply process your transaction on Ethereum B, and if both A and B have an equal load share, then you could move to C. This concept is the market-driven collaborative mining, thanks to the reward structure the load is shared across the shards. The problem though, you have all your funds in Ethereum A and you want to now participate to the ICO on Ethereum C, but A is congested and you have to pay high fees to make your transfer from A to C, and not only do you have to pay the high fees, but you have to wait for the root chain to finalize your transactions, adding more overhead. Have you overcome this obstacle? If yes, how did you do that?
A: There is a missing part in the article of how we partition system state. Adding more shards will partition some states from existing shards to new shards. Thus, the congestion is inherently solved after re-shard.
Q: For cross-shard consensus, will it use the same mining tools as root chain transaction?
A: Cross-shard transaction relies on root chain, so it will use the same consensus as root chain.
Q: I heard that micromanagement that users have to do between their shards would create bad UX. How do you solve this issue?
A: This is addressed by smart wallet, which will handle the TX details so that users won’t realize the details.
FYI:
We now open our official Reddit account! Welcome to subscribe us, post there and ask us questions at https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/
(NOTICE: our website URL ends in r/quarkchainio, NOT r/quarkchain)
We also have a new Medium account https://medium.com/@quarkchainio! Welcome to continue following us and posting comments!
Thank you for reading the AMA summary of last week! The QuarkChain community appreciates your support!
Website
https://www.quarkchain.io
Telegram
https://t.me/quarkchainio
Twitter
https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Steemit
https://steemit.com/@quarkchain
Medium
https://medium.com/@quarkchainio
Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/
Weibo
https://weibo.com/QuarkChain
