Architecture
This Wiki serves to explain the details of QLC Chain, including technical structure, features and advantages.
A Block Lattice is a block architecture that was first introduced by the Nano cryptocurrency. With Block Lattice, each individual transacting account on the network possesses their own blockchain, which is controlled by the account’s private keys. Under the Block Lattice structure, user’s blockchain tracks the account balance, rather than a transaction amount, which allows for less intensive storage and faster transaction speed. There are 4 types of Blocks in Nano: OPEN, SEND, RECEIVE and CHANGE. They are used for recording transactions. Balances are transferred between blockchains through SEND and RECEIVE blocks.
Nano further introduces the Universal Block to consolidate four types of blocks and encode all account data in every transaction. This design increases the efficiency, improves the security and simplifies codes needed in the network. There are two major improvements:
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Signature checking performance improvement: Before the change, SEND and RECEIVE do not include the account signature, so that block signatures has to be verified while running the main ledger insert process and Input/Output (I/O) operations is blocked for finding associated account. This is very time consuming. When the Universal Block contains the account information, unlimited number of block signatures can be verified without blocking on any I/O operations. Although it increases the block size, the overall performance through TPS and lower transaction processing latency is an acceptable tradeoff.
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Efficient Balance Lookups: The absence of account balance in the current design also occupies long I/O operations. With the implementation of Universal Blocks, we can know the balance simply by looking at one block, instead of searching down the chain for the last SEND Block.
The following illustrates the structure of a Universal Block:
Compared with the traditional blockchain architecture used by Bitcoin and Ethereum, Block Lattice delivers almost instantaneous transaction speed and unlimited scalability on low-power consuming hardware, which is highly suitable for network transmission. Block Lattice technology has proven to be stable in its more than two-year operational history. With peak transaction speeds of 7000 TPS and more than 500,000 users on more than 700 consensus nodes, this technology has outperformed most known blockchain technologies.
QLC Chain further advanced the structure by introducing multidimensional Block Lattice to support the Smart Contract and new consensus algorithm especially for network transmission services. QLC Chain team continues the development and aims to build one of highest performing network protocols for the future.