The fourth Stanford Blockchain Conference took place between February 20–22, 2020 with industry veterans such as Vitalik Buterin and experts from prestigious institutions such as Stanford University, Princeton University, Cornell University, and Facebook. Members of QuarkChain, such as CEO Dr. Qi Zhou and CMO Miss Anthurine Xiang, were among the honorable guests of the conference. During the conference, Dr. Qi Zhou delivered a speech on “What The Future Blockchain Looks Like to Empower Business.”
Following the traditions from previous years, this conference centered on the safety engineering and risk management of the blockchain systems. It discussed the applications of encryption, decentralization consensus, formal methods, and empirical analysis in order to enhance the security and lower risks in blockchain designs. Yet with the rising interests in blockchain applications in China, other than theoretical analysis, there were increasing number of academia and industry practitioners who casted their attention on applications. As a result, enterprise-level blockchain application, as the area with most number of uses cases, became the most popular topic during the conference.
As the currents swift quickly in the industry, whether blockchain can gain a foothold in enterprise-level applications became an important question. At the same time, the reignited competition between alliance chains and public chains also was discussed intensely among conference attendees.
During Dr. Qi Zhou’s speech, he outlined the two trends he observed in the blockchain space: firstly, alliance chains and public chains complement each other. In the future, enterprise-level applications would require a comprehensive infrastructure solution to connect alliance chains and public chains to satisfy all the requirements. Secondly, there still exists many problems with public chains; some earlier public chains simply chased after TPS with little business practicality and few functionalities, which make it difficult to upgrade and scale. At the same time, the traditional playbook of launching mainnet and dApps is no longer viable and the industry is now in search of new possibilities.
The future blockchain system would require the abilities to keep up with these two trends and to solve pressing problems in the industry. Otherwise, one will be eliminated from the intensified competition of the industry. QuarkChain is redefining the problem from the infrastructure perspective and has invented its proprietary Boson consensus framework which can be applied onto both alliance chains and public chains. As such, this framework fits in squarely as a comprehensive solution for both alliance and public chains.
Dr. Qi Zhou presented the Boson Consensus at IEEE DAPPCON 2019 in April 2019. Boson Consensus is an infrastructure framework for blockchain systems that supports heterogeneous sharding and guarantees safety for root chain on the basis of sharding. This mechanism can be used for infrastructure of various blockchain systems where QuarkChain is the first in its implementation. Using the same consensus, the QuarkChain team has also created an enterprise-level solution for alliance chains, QuarkChain Union.
When used for public chains, the Boson consensus has high level of flexibility which enables compatibility with multiple consensus mechanisms, virtual machines, ledgers, and token economics. Through this framework, other blockchain projects can operate on the QuarkChain mainnet as shards, and even interact with other public chains to realize interoperability.
When used for public chains, the Boson consensus has high level of flexibility which enables compatibility with multiple consensus mechanisms, virtual machines, ledgers, and token economics. Through this framework, other blockchain projects can operate on the QuarkChain mainnet as shards, and even interact with other public chains to realize interoperability.
In the area of alliance chains, the Boson consensus also demonstrates same level of flexibility and compatibility. Not only can it realize the functionality of controlling access rights and authoring rights to enter, it can also implement heterogeneous sharding to enable different areas within the same network to take up various functionality, so to become the alliance chain version of Polkadot or Cosmos. Besides that, it can also support the Raft and BFT consensus mechanism that are commonly used by alliance chains; it can even provide a gateway to connect to HyperLedger Fabric.
After the talk, members of the team also participated actively as audience during other talks and informal chats, exchanging views and discussing with fellow industry practitioners about the latest trends in the industry. At the end of Vitalik’s talk, Dr. Qi Zhou also discussed with him off-line to explore directions for application of blockchain technology.
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