BitBay is a free, decentralized marketplace for buying and selling goods and services on the blockchain. You can connect directly with peers and transact without the need for a middleman like Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist. Transactions are secure and anonymous. They’re also guaranteed by escrow. The project aims to be the new standard for eCommerce, allowing individuals to trade one-to-one at scale. As a result, BitBay claims it will revolutionize global trade. It’s seemingly a great solution for other niche applications as well, where groups of people aren’t served by existing marketplaces. In the beginning, BitBay got off to a rocky start. In 2014, the original founders raised capital in bad faith and quickly abandoned the project after fundraising, leaving the lead developer holding the bag. It seemed like BitBay was finished, but the developer continued working on the project out of a sense of duty to the original investors, without access to the capital raised in the fundraising round. The BAY token is the transactional token in the marketplace. You use it to buy and sell, and it can also participate in freezes, escrow, bets, swaps, etc. The token itself operates like Bitcoin and is secured by the network. Although you can use BAY for transactions, you don’t have to. You do, however, have to use BAY if you’d like to take part in token staking. BAY’s price cratered after the original founders left and stayed low until March 2017 when it took off. It has been through several cycles of bull and bear runs, with a max price over 30 cents in January 2018 before retreating to its current value. BitBay supports all kinds of privacy and security measures. It’s easy to create a multisignature wallet for added security. There are integrations for Tor and other proxies that help anonymize your connection to the marketplace. An on-screen keyboard allows for password or key entry without using your keyboard and being susceptible to keylogging. Additionally, you can create images with your private key embedded, so that finding a stored key is more difficult for a hacker. The marketplace also has functionality for time locking contracts and swapping currencies. This enables all kinds of cross-chain transactions and financial implements. The time lock and other smart contract elements make it possible to create bets, escrow, futures and options trades, or any number of other financial transactions. The idea and implementation by BitBay, of a decentralized marketplace and trading platform is brilliant and shows further promise of expansion.The rocky beginning of the cryptocurrency and its subsequent comeback as a promising platform indicate that the developers are in it for the long haul and don’t plan on abandoning the platform after all these years.
QuarkChain is a secure, permission-less, scalable, and decentralized blockchain. One of the goals of QuarkChain is to utilize sharding technology to deliver over 1 million transactions per second (tps). Essentially, QuarkChain markets itself as a peer-to-peer blockchain with a high capacity throughput to help deliver fast and secure decentralized applications. The team behind QuarkChain created this blockchain to resolve the issue of scalability that all the major blockchains are currently facing. The team feels that because of the urgency of this issue, the Bitcoin community simply cannot afford to wait until they all agree on a solution. Instead, they feel that by offering different solutions, such as the one inherent in QuarkChain, this compels the community to split via a hard fork and find the solution that works best. QuarkChain encourages increased decentralization through multiple cheap nodes that then create a cluster that works as a super-full node. This prevents the high expenses associated with super-full nodes when the tps gets high. In terms of protection, all transactions within QuarkChain get the protection of 50 percent of the network’s hash power. This makes a double-spending attack incredibly challenging, particularly when combined with QuarkChain’s decentralized nature. QuarkChain relies on a two-layer blockchain structure. Sharding blockchains known as shards are the first layer, while the second layer is a root blockchain that confirms the shards’ blocks.The major work on QuarkChain began in Q2 2017 with research into the problem of blockchain scalability. In Q4 of that year, the team drafted the whitepaper. In February 2018, it released the white paper and completed verification code 0.1. March 2018 saw the 0.1 versions of both the wallet and testnet. Now in Q2, the team is working on the testnet 1.0 and smart contract 0.1. In Q4 2018, the team will have the QuarkChain Core 1.0, along with the mainnet 1.0 and the SmartWallet 1.0. By Q2 2019, both the SmartWallet and QuarkChain Core will be in their 2.0 versions. QuarkChain is a decentralized blockchain network that aims to resolve the issues of scalability that plague existing networks by using sharding technology. In this way, QuarkChain can dramatically extend the usefulness of blockchain technology since many applications are limited by the scalability of existing blockchain networks. The project is still in progress, but QuarkChain has already made many positive steps and already began invite-based beta testing for the testnet, showing significant progress and potential. The main features of Quarkchain are: 1. Reshardable two-layered blockchain: Quarkchain consists of two layers of blockchains. We apply elastic sharding blockchains (shards) as the first layer, and a root blockchain as the second layer that confirms the blocks from the first layer. The second layer that confirms the blocks from the first layer. The second layer is flexible to be resharded as needed without changing the root layer. 2. Guaranteed security by market-driven collaborative mining: To ensure the security of all transactions, a game-theoretic framework is designed for incentives, where at least 50% of overall hash powers are allocated to the root chain to prevent double spending attack on any transactions. 3. Anti-centralized horizontal scalability: In any blockchain network with a high TPS, a super-full node can be extremely expensive, which encourages centralization. In contrast, QuarkChain allows multiple cheap nodes forming a cluster to replace a super-full node. 4. Efficient cross-shard transactions: Cross-shard transactions in QuarkChain can be issued at any time, and confirmed in minutes. The speed of cross-shard transactions increases linearly as the number of shards increases. 5. Simple account management: There is only one account needed for the entire blockchain (shards) in QuarkChain. All cryptocurrencies from different shards are stored in one smart wallet.