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Quai Network

Quai Network is the only decentralized cryptocurrency with the capacity to scale to all global commerce.
Quai is a merge-mined hierarchy of blockchains, which allows the network to process more than 50,000 transactions per second. The architecture is a composable multithreaded execution environment with blocks being produced approximately every 1.1 seconds.
All blockchains in the network can transfer and receive state using Proof-of-Work 2.0, which asynchronously produces hash linked references between chains. Quai extends traditional consensus to enable transfers between blockchains without introducing new trusted validation mechanisms.
Quai provides nearly infinite scalability through dynamic sharding by allowing the hierarchy to horizontally expand as demand for block space increases. This enables Quai to support low-cost day-to-day transactions as the user-base grows in perpetuity.
While blockchain technology has shown its potential to enable a widely-used digital currency, existing solutions reintroduce subjectivity while only achieving limited scale. Quai is unlike other multi-chain solutions which require a trusted set of validators, creating weak security guarantees when moving between chains.
Quai addresses issues with scalability while maintaining decentralization to create an un-censorable network which can be ubiquitously used as money.

What does "Quai" mean?

The word Quai derives its origin from the word kuai (块 – kuài). "Kuai" is a colloquial measure word for money, like "quid" in the UK and "buck" in the US, but it is the word used in everyday Mandarin. The use of the word "kuai", literally means "piece", and is the word used historically for coins made of silver or copper.

Key Features

Merge-Mined Hierarchy

All of Quai blockchains are organized into a three-tiered network hierarchy. Each miner must mine three blockchains within the network simultaneously. Merged mining allows miners to increase throughput while also reusing work to secure multiple blockchains making the mining up to 10,000 more energy efficient*.
Quai's merge-mined hierarchical structure is referred to as Proof-of-Work 2.0, as the architecture is an improvement upon the original structure of Proof-of-Work blockchains.

Multithreaded

Current blockchains are unable to provide enough block space to find reasonable market equivalence with demand, leading to high gas fees during periods of sustained usage. Quai Network introduces multithreaded blockchain execution, which drastically increases the available supply of block space across many interconnected blockchains.
Through the use of multithreaded execution, Quai Network is able to process upwards of 50,000 transactions per second.

Infinitely Scalable

Quai Network will launch with 13 chains, and has the capacity to automatically expand the hierarchy by adding more chains to accommodate network demand. Quai's upper bounds of horizontal scaling are only limited by the market-demanded time to global transaction propagation. The larger the network grows, the longer the average cross-chain transaction will take to reach its destination. Although this feels like a limitation, this trade-off will exist in any chain-based system. However, the speed that Quai is able to achieve at scale is heuristically approaching the physically limited propagation constraint.
*Per transaction, assuming full transactional load and the same number of miners on both Quai Network and the Bitcoin Network.