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.
Loopring is a decentralized exchange protocol and an “automated execution system” built on Ethereum that will allow its users to trade assets across exchanges. It isn’t a decentralized exchange. Rather, it facilitates decentralized exchanging through ring-sharing and order matching. Decentralized and centralized exchanges alike will be able to implement Loopring, giving the exchanges access to cross blockchain and cross exchange liquidity and giving investors access to the best prices available on the broader market. Moreover, Loopring is blockchain agnostic, meaning that any platform that uses smart contracts (e.g., NEO, Ethereum, Qtum) can integrate with Loopring. Serving as its head, Loopring founder Daniel Wang used to run a centralized exchange called Coin Port back in 2014. “At that time,” he told Coin Central in an interview, “[I was] trying to solve the problems of centralized exchanges, and then I realized that it’s not possible. Those problems are inherent to the centralized exchange model.” Thus, he began conceptualizing what would become Loopring. In the past, he’s also held a position as a Google Tech Lead and was a co-founder and VP of Yunrang Technology. Loopring’s CMO, Jay Zhou, was formerly employed by Ernst and Young, helped found SJ Consulting, and used to work in PayPal’s Risk Operations unit. Johnston Chen, the project’s COO, has worked as the chief information officer at 3NOD. Loopring is not a DEX, but a modular protocol for building DEXs on multiple blockchains. We disassemble the component parts of a traditional exchange and offer a set of public smart contracts and decentralized actors in its place. The roles in the network include wallets, relays, liquidity-sharing consortium blockchains, order book browsers, Ring-Miners, and asset tokenization services. Before defining each, we should first understand Loopring orders. At its root, the Loopring protocol is a social protocol in the sense that it relies on coordination amongst members to operate effectively towards a goal. This is not dissimilar to cryptoeconomic protocols at large, and indeed, its usefulness is largely protected by the same mechanisms of coordination problems [20], grim trigger equilibrium, and bounded rationality. The Loopring Protocol can facilitate trading between ERC20 tokens. Loopr needs to convert Ether to Ether Token for trading as Ether is not ERC20 compatible, but Ether Token is. Converting between Ether and Ether Token will be done for you automatically when you submit an order, but if you want to trade frequently, we strongly suggest you to convert some Ether to Ether Token beforehand manually; otherwise each order will take one more blockchain transaction just for the ETH-WETH conversion which takes time and gas. Conversions between ETH and WETH are done on-chain through Ethereum transactions. ETH and WETH are always converted 1:1 which is guaranteed by the WETH smart contract. The WETH smart contract also guarantees the total WETH issued is exactly the total ETH deposited. In other words, ETH and WETH is equiviate in value, and WETH is just the ERC20 form of ETH. The Loopring blockchain project had managed to raise almost 15 million US dollars during the period of the Loopring ICO, as all the regulatory experts watched this unprecedented crowdfunding. Daniel Wang, the founder and the main person behind the Loopring ICO, hand made it very transparent that the interface is quite bad but the underlying mechanism and the Order matching facility is very great. Loopring mining can be initiated very easily by using various performance calculating devices such as CPU, GPU, as well as application specific integrated circuits. The Loopring mining process can be initiated through the high-end Linux systems, according to reports. Loopring mining is basically a metaphor which is not similar to the Bitcoin mining but here the users need to match the specific orders from a huge database. Specifically, Loopring mining requires the usage of the ethereum nodes along with JSON API, IPFS, etc. Check out CoinBureau for the full review of Loopring.