This Week in Quai 7/28/23
This Week in Quai offers weekly updates to the Quai Community by aggregating popular Quai quotes and social posts from the past week.
Welcome to the twelfth 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
“Why can’t we create more execution shards in the L1? Why can’t we process more in the L1 before we start going into all these other mechanisms? And I think for Proof-of-Stake, the chains that were launching then figured that was a must-have. It was like, ‘if we’re launching a new chain, we want to try out this new VM, we want to try this interesting architecture with how we process transactions in parallel, we have to be Proof-of-Stake.’ Because there was a stigma at the time around Proof-of-Work.”
- Quai co-founder Alan Orwick, PoW vs. PoS debate
In this quote from Alan’s participation in a debate with representatives from Near, Tron, and Hiro on Proof-of-Work vs. Proof-of-Stake consensus, Alan discusses the pressure that new blockchains have been/are under to use a Proof-of-Stake construction. While there are no distinct technical advantages to be gained from the use of Proof-of-Stake, there is a widespread misconception that Proof-of-Stake can offer improved speed and parallel processing simply because new chains that have explored these technologies have chosen to use Proof-of-Stake.
Quai Network, despite the industry trend of using Proof-of-Stake consensus, is being built with a Proof-of-Work based consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Entropy-Minima (PoEM), to secure the network. Quai Network’s decentralized bridging via coincident blocks can only be performed in a work-based system, as it relies on the stochastic process of mining.
While many innovations have been achieved by Proof-of-Stake networks, Alan emphasizes that the lack of innovation by Proof-of-Work blockchains is not due to the technical limitations of Proof-of-Work, but rather external forces driving innovation away from Proof-of-Work.
Technical Term of the Week
Sister Contracts (Quai Network) – A “sister contract” in the context of Quai Network refers to a type of cross-chain smart contract that is deployed across multiple chains within the network. These sister contracts are interconnected and can communicate with each other seamlessly, allowing developers to create applications that span multiple chains and interact with each other.
A sister contract is a multi-chain smart contract deployed within Quai Network’s multi-threaded architecture. These contracts exist in a single network context and contain references to other smart contracts in alternate contexts, which are deployed on different chains within the network.
By using sister contracts, developers are able to create a network-wide “mesh” of smart contracts that all interlink with each other. These interlinked smart contracts can be used to create decentralized applications that function on multiple or all chains within Quai Network.
Unlike most multi-chain systems where decentralized applications are siloed into disparate chains/contexts, Quai Network’s uniquely intertwined chain architecture enables these applications to access users and liquidity from all contexts simultaneously.
Top Posts of the Week
- A discussion on collecting NFTs in the Iron Age Testnet:
- An announcement of the first “Quai Fridays” community call:
- A new block post, “A Beginner’s Guide to the Decentralized Future” was posted:
- A discussion on GPU mining in Quai after the switch from BLAKE3 to ProgPoW:
- A discussion of sister contracts and how they enable multi-chain Dapps in Quai:
Upcoming Events
Quai Network Office Hours with Justin: August 1, 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: August 3, 2023 @ 9am CST – Join Dominant Strategies team member Max for a casual discussion/AMA on Quai Network’s technology.
Quai Fridays Community Call: August 4, 2023 @ 11am CST – Join members of the Dominant Strategies team on Twitter Spaces for a discussion on the development/testing of the Quai protocol, and how to build on Quai in the Iron Age Testnet.
