Welcome to the seventh 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 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
“You can achieve trustless “bridging” via merge mining of a hierarchy of closely coupled chains with reciprocal validation. This can only happen with worked based consensus algos in a L1.”
– Quai co-founder Dr. K, via Twitter
Within this Tweet, posted as a part of a discussion on sharding, Dr. K describes how Quai’s unique approach to sharding enables trustless bridging. Dr. K explains that trustless bridging can be achieved by using “reciprocal validation” – reciprocal validation means that both chains commit to one block, and if that block gets rolled back/proven to be invalid, both chains will be affected.
Within Quai, even if an attacker is able to accumulate over 51% of hashrate in a single shard and push an invalid state transition in a single shard, that transition will never be broadcasted to other shards as long as more than 51% of the entire network’s hashpower has not been compromised.
Technical Term of the Week
Merged Mining – The process of combining block headers to allow miners to compare hashes they generate against the difficulty thresholds of multiple blockchains simultaneously.
The concept of merged mining is integral to Quai Network, and is used to shard state without sharding security and transfer state across shards trustlessly. Merged mining was originally conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2010, and was first implemented into Namecoin in 2011.
Within Namecoin, merged mining was used to bootstrap hashrate/security by incentivizing Bitcoin miners to also check their hashes against Namecoin. Namecoin functioned as a completely independent blockchain, with much of the mining base being the same as Bitcoin. Namecoin blocks and Bitcoin blocks included completely separate data, but could be mined simultaneously by the same miner if the hash they proposed fulfilled the difficulty threshold of both blockchains.
Within Quai, the same technology of merged mining is used in a different way. Merged mining is used in Quai Network to interlink and share data across a multi-chain system. As mentioned earlier, when merge-mining Bitcoin and Namecoin, miners will find hashes that are valid in both Bitcoin and Namecoin. Unlike the Bitcoin/Namecoin merged mining construction, however, when miners find blocks that are valid in multiple Quai chains, data from both chains is shared in the block. Thus, when a miner finds a block that is valid in multiple Quai chains, they are creating a “bridge” between the two chains that can allow data regarding cross-chain transactions and contract interactions to traverse the network.
This method of facilitating cross-chain transactions via merged mined “coincident blocks,” is a new concept unique to Quai. To the Dominant Strategies team’s knowledge, coincident blocks are the first example of a truly trustless bridge between two blockchains, as the entire process relies only on mining and does not introduce any new validator sets.
Top Posts of the Week
- Testnet Rewards for the Stone and Bronze Age Testnets are now displayed in the Quai Dashboard:
- A thread on Gas in ETH vs. Quai was posted:
- A Twitter discussion on what it will take for mass crypto adoption:
- A thread on merged mining and how it benefits Quai was posted:
- A discussion on whether NFTs can have utility or are just on-chain jpegs:
- A clip from Dr. K about how Quai Network will have no roadmap after launch was posted on Twitter:
- A recording of Quai University Call #9, focusing on mined transactions (Quai’s solution to MEV) has been posted:
Upcoming Events
Quai Network Office Hours with Justin: June 27, 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 29, 2023 @ 9am CST – Join Dominant Strategies team member Max for a casual discussion/AMA on Quai Network’s technology.