Welcome to the eighth 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.
Want to get “This Week in Quai” delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for the Quai Newsletter by Dominant Strategies.
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
“The design choice to remove state from Prime and Region was a great one.
Not only did it improve the system by reducing cross-chain settlement times, but it also makes the UX of Quai much easier to understand.
From a user perspective, there are no longer “levels” of chains in the hierarchy — all accounts and all transactions exist in homogenous Zone chains.”
– Dominant Strategies employee Max, via Twitter
In this quote from Max, an employee on the Dominant Strategies team, the impact of state being removed from Prime and Region is discussed. Within the Stone and Bronze Age Testnets, state was carried in the Prime chain and all Region chains, meaning that Prime/Region accounts existed and were maintained in their respective chains.
A recent design decision was made by Quai core developers to remove state from Prime and Region chains, meaning that Prime/Region accounts no longer exist, and that all accounts and transactions exist only in Zone chains. This decision had two major impacts:
- Cross-chain settlement times were reduced
- All accounts/transactions now exist on homogenous blockchain
The first and primary reason that this decision was made was to reduce cross-chain settlement times within the Quai protocol. By removing state from Prime and Region chains, those chains became “header chains,” requiring much less data to be maintained and processed within dominant chains. Additionally, removing state from Prime and Region chains ensures that each slice node is only required to maintain the state of one blockchain (the Zone chain they’ve selected) as opposed to the state of three blockchains (the Prime chain, the Region chain they’ve selected, and the Zone chain they’ve selected). This reduces the storage requirements of a trustless node.
The second reason for the decision, which acted as more of a beneficial byproduct, is that the user experience of the Quai protocol becomes much more simple and straightforward. Prior to this change, the experience of using Quai was different depending on which level of the hierarchy a user’s account was located in. A user interacting primarily with the Prime chain would experience ~1,000 second block times, while a user interacting primarily with Zones would experience ~10 second block times. By ensuring all accounts and transactions are maintained in Zones, users will no longer have to differentiate between blockchains within Quai. All blockchains that users can have an account on and interact with are Zones, which all experience ~10 second block times and are “homogenous,” meaning that the user experience on Zone 1 will look identical to the user experience on any other Zone.
Technical Term of the Week
Latency – A term referring to the amount of time it takes for data to travel from its source to its destination in a computer network.
Latency plays a major role in the scalability of any blockchain system. Minimizing network latency is critical to optimizing throughput and hash efficiency. The Quai protocol takes a unique approach to latency minimization, that relies on incentives for miners to self-organize.
Within Quai, each miner mines the Prime chain, and also self-selects a Region and Zone chain to mine. While any miner can mine any chain(s), there are two primary factors that impact a miner’s profitability that will play a role in which chains a miner chooses to mine.
- Difficulty: How likely am I to mine a valid block in the chain?
- Latency: How long will it take me to propagate a valid block if I find one?
While difficulty still acts as the primary metric that miners will look at to determine which chain to mine, latency is also introduced as a factor for miners to consider. When choosing which Quai chain to mine, miners will be heavily incentivized to mine the chains with the lowest difficulty. However, they will also be incentivized to minimize latency to their peers in order to minimize their uncle rate.
Both of these factors directly affect the profitability of a Quai miner. The higher the difficulty of the chain(s) they choose to mine, the less likely they are to find a valid block and receive block rewards. Similarly, the higher a miner’s latency to their peers, the more likely they are to be uncled out if they do find a valid block.
Quai miners are incentivized to balance both of these factors to create a network with hashrate evenly distributed across Zones, and with geographically/economically grouped Zones.
Top Posts of the Week
- A thread on Quai Network’s unique hierarchical architecture:
- A discussion of asset tokenization:
- Testnet Rewards for the Stone and Bronze Age Testnets can now be viewed in the Quai Dashboard:
- A thread on the tradeoff of Quai – cross-chain settlement time:
- A thread on the major updates that have been made to the Quai protocol since the Bronze Age:
Join us to build a better blockchain.
Quai Network is an open-source Proof-of-Entropy-Minima blockchain network utilizing the capabilities of merged mining to increase throughput and security. Users of Quai Network will enjoy fast transaction times without compromising decentralization and security. Miners will have competitive mining opportunities across the many blockchains within the network.
Capable of thousands of transactions per second, the Quai Network is a new solution to scalability that is soon to be ready for mainnet release.
Terms & Conditions / Disclaimer
The entirety of the Quai Genesis grants program, including the content of this article, is subject to the Terms and Conditions outlined here.
Opinions, ideas, and statements shared in this update are delivered with numerous assumptions, risks, and uncertainties which are subject to change over time. There are multiple risk factors, including those related to blockchain, cryptographic systems, and technologies generally, as well Quai’s business, operations and results of operations, that could cause actual results or developments anticipated not to be realized or, even if substantially realized, to fail to achieve any or all of the benefits that could be expected therefrom. We reserve the right to unilaterally, completely, or partially change plans, expectations, and intentions stated herein at any time and for any reason, in our sole and absolute discretion, and we undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise. ACCORDINGLY, WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO NOT RELY ON, AND DO NOT MAKE ANY FINANCIAL DECISION OR INVESTMENT BASED ON, THE STATEMENTS CONTAINED IN THIS UPDATE OR ANY OF OUR UPDATES/ARTICLES — INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY SELLING OR TRADING OF QUAI TOKENS, ETHER, OR ANY OTHER CRYPTOGRAPHIC OR BLOCKCHAIN TOKEN, OR THE SECURITIES OF ANY COMPANY.
The views, opinions, and statements made in this update are those of an individual author and not those of any institution, University, or legal entity operating within the jurisdiction of The United States or beyond. There is no association between these views, opinions, and statements and any for-profit or non-profit entity, particularly with Universities, Foundations, and other Agencies located within the United States. Any perception of such an association is purely accidental, and will be rectified immediately if brought to our attention by the reader.