Welcome to the sixth edition of “This Week in Quai,” an initiative by the development company of Quai Network, Dominant Strategies. This Week in Quai offers weekly updates to the Quai Community by aggregating popular Quai quotes and social posts from the past week and offering a schedule for upcoming events.
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What is Quai?
Quai Network is a pre-launch cryptocurrency. Quai is the first blockchain protocol that is simultaneously decentralized, censorship resistant, and infinitely scalable. Quai, in contrast to traditional cryptocurrencies, functions as a network of many interoperable blockchains braided together. Due to a breakthrough discovery that occurred during research on Proof-of-Work, Quai Network utilizes a new consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Entropy-Minima (PoEM), which eliminates all consensus-based forks, and enables all Quai nodes to remain in “perpetual consensus.”
Quote of the Week
“The goal with Quai isn’t to create a roadmap. That’s effectively what every other [Layer 1] in crypto has ever sold anybody. If you look at Ethereum, Vitalik has probably made 100 different roadmaps, and they all look completely different over 7 years. Just like TCP/IP was codified, and the only change to TCP/IP in the last 30 years was an optional, backwards compatible upgrade, we have the same expectations of Quai.”
– Quai co-founder Dr. K, via University Call #9 on May 31, 2023
In this quote, Dr. K expresses how the ethos of blockchain development has changed drastically since the release of Bitcoin, and how Quai is going against the grain by doing all development work prior to the protocol’s launch.
Much of the appeal of blockchain and cryptocurrency surrounds its immutable nature. While immutability can refer to the inability to change information that has already been recorded, it can also refer to the inability of the protocol to change.
If a cryptocurrency is ever to be used ubiquitously as money, the blockchain it relies upon must be static. Roadmaps and major protocol changes lead to uncertainty on whether the protocol will remain the same over time. Dr. K also draws a comparison to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP), which is the standard used to transmit data over the internet. For the adoption of value transfer over the internet to be as widespread and refined as data transfer over the internet, the value transfer protocol (blockchain) must be similarly standardized and reliable.
With this in mind, the Dominant Strategies team has no plans to add features to Quai Network after Mainnet launch. Quai is intended to be an completed and immutable value transfer protocol, similar to how TCP is a standardized information transfer protocol.
Technical Term of the Week
Gas (blockchains) – The unit that measures the computational effort required to execute specific operations or transactions on the EVM. Each operation, from simple transactions (like transferring tokens) to more complex interactions (like executing smart contracts), requires a certain amount of gas to complete.
Gas is a critical component of any blockchain utilizing the EVM or any other decentralized state machine. Gas is used to allocate the limited computational resources of the EVM in an open market.
Different EVM operations cost different amounts of gas. In Ethereum for example, a simple transfer of tokens has a base fee of 21,000 gas. More complex interactions, such as the creation of a smart contract, can cost 32,000 gas as a minimum.
Each Ethereum block has a “block gas limit,” or a maximum number of gas that computations in that block can use. This ensures that no blocks can require too much computation to impact the validation or production of future blocks. In Ethereum, the absolute maximum amount of gas a single block can consume is 30 million. Practically, Ethereum targets a 15 million block gas limit by fluctuating the base gas fee of operations.
The price of gas fluctuates with demand, and is priced in Gwei, the smallest unit of Ether. During periods of low demand, gas prices can be as low as 4-8 Gwei/gas. During periods of high demand, however, it is not uncommon for the price of gas to exceed 150 Gwei.
In Quai Network, gas fulfills the same purpose. However, within Quai, each chain has its own market for gas. Thus, if one chain is experiencing a surge in demand, its price for gas will begin rising independently of all other chains. As this gas price rises in one chain, all parties will be incentivized to distribute activity across the network to other chains with a lower cost of gas.
Additionally, Quai Network is able to function smoothly at a significantly higher block gas limit than Ethereum. During internal DevNets, the block gas limit has been set to 80 million. During the Iron Age Testnet, the block gas limit will likely be set to 50 million. Even at a block gas limit of 50 million, each Quai Network block can process nearly double the EVM operations of each Ethereum block, at a much shorter block time. When extrapolating this increased block gas limit across Quai’s entire multi-chain architecture, it can be estimated that the Iron Age implementation of Quai will process ~450 million gas worth of computations per ~10 seconds, while Ethereum processes a maximum of ~30 million gas worth of computations per ~12 seconds.
Top Posts of the Week
- A new browser wallet for Quai Network, named Pelagus Wallet, has been open-sourced on Github and announced:
- Quai co-founder Dr. K explains how the current form of money is not an accurate representation of value:
- A chart demonstrating the tradeoffs of Quai infinitely scaling:
- More Quai community members have gotten their hands on Quai Merch boxes:
- A thread was released on the importance of the new Proof-of-Entropy-Minima (PoEM) consensus mechanism:
Upcoming Events
Quai Network Office Hours with Justin: June 20, 2023 @ 10am CST – Join Dominant Strategies team member Justin for a casual discussion/AMA on Quai Network’s technology.
Quai Network Office Hours with Max: June 22, 2023 @ 9am CST – Join Dominant Strategies team member Max for a casual discussion/AMA on Quai Network’s technology.