#quickx

Cryptocurrencies can be a disruptive force in the financial world. Unlike fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies are not managed by a central intermediary. They operate in a decentralized manner on the blockchain ledger. The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies creates the possibility of reduced transaction fees, faster transaction processing, and greater ease in global payment transfers.

However, one could argue, that the most remarkable feature of cryptocurrencies is the element of greater security in their functioning. The enhanced security exists, due to the decentralized nature of crypto-assets, which has no ‘single point of failure’, unlike banks or digital payment systems such as Paypal which can be hacked.

However, transaction fees have significantly gone up in recent times, and transaction times have also increased, due to a surge in transaction volume. Scalability and interoperability are also major issues.

Quick X presents an innovative approach to solving these challenges, by introducing an off-the-chain mechanism for cross-chain transactions. However, the most interesting aspect of the solution proposed by Quick X is the extremely high degree of security that it offers.  

Here’s How Quick X Offers a High Degree of Security in Cryptocurrency Transactions

Quick X introduces the concept of pooling facilitators, which are investors that provide necessary liquidity in the Quick X ecosystem. Pooling facilitators, essentially, create a decentralized liquidity pool, which acts as a bridge between the sender and receiver of crypto-assets. The transactions are always carried out by trusted pooling facilitators, and trust is always established in a decentralized fashion.  

Quick X, with the introduction of pooling facilitators, takes several measures to ensure a high level of security in the ecosystem. A routing protocol and algorithm constantly updates and checks for the trustworthiness of every pooling facilitator, which ensures the quality of liquidity providers. The decentralized mechanism of establishing trust, providing liquidity, and subsequent performance of off-the-chain transactions is one of the core pillars of the Quick X technology, which ensures that there is no ‘single point of failure’.

Moreover, the core infrastructure of the solution continues to be blockchain and the private keys of the assets are always held by the users themselves. Users always retain full control over their blockchain assets.  

Quick X ingeniously takes advantage of the decentralized nature of blockchain, with its security features, along with the decentralized pool of algorithmically trusted liquidity providers, to create a payment infrastructure that is extremely secure.  

Quick X can be a Gamechanger for Cryptocurrency Adoption

Quick X can solve several major challenges, which come in the way of mass adoption of cryptocurrencies, while ensuring an extremely high level of security. Quick X is working towards creating a secure, interconnected network of private blockchains, which is similar to what TCP/IP protocol achieved by connecting different private intranets, leading to the eventual creation of the internet.  

Quick X offers a multi-currency crypto debit card and wallet to end users, along with an option to exchange cryptocurrencies. Merchants can set up a payment gateway, which comes with an incredibly low 0.5% transaction cost.

Originally, Bitcoin promised low-cost, fast peer-to-peer transactions. While disrupting industries for better, blockchain has also stumbled upon inherent limitations, hindering its progress. Transaction speed and cost are the key hurdles. Following its foray into the mainstream, cryptocurrency has consistently struggled with slow transfers and excessive transaction costs. So the question everyone wants answering is: how much faster does a blockchain transaction need to be to satisfy modern business and everyday uses?

Why Blockchain Is A Slow Driver

So what exactly is the underlying mechanism causing performance when we start a transaction and wait up to a day to see it completed?

As of late 2016, Blockchain processed seven transactions per second, and each transaction cost $0.20 and could only store 80 bytes. Transaction speed has not changed and to compound this, fees have increased. To add to the slow transaction time, Bitcoin records transactions only once every 10 minutes to reduce the risk of payment rollback, increasing security. Clearly, this is not practicable for daily use in any form.

And this isn’t the end of the slow transfer-time woes. Upon its inception, blockchain was not intended to be used as currency, but as a secure and traceable store of immutable information. It is actually used as a store of information today, but this is looked down on by cryptocurrency-users since miners (transaction processing computers) perpetually reprocess and re-record information, queueing and slowing transactions (coined “bloating”).

So where do all these roadblocks, humps and bumps in the road leave us? Well, at the close of 2017, it took on average 78 minutes to confirm bitcoin transactions - rendering blockchain completely unusable for daily purposes and making it inaccessible (and unattractive) to the everyday person, business, entrepreneur or other.

What Blockchain Needs For Widespread Adoption

Returning to the promise of low-cost, quick peer-to-peer transactions - the potential of this original well-intended promise has not been lost forever, and when it comes it will open the sluice gates to widespread adoption of cryptocurrency in daily life business and personal. That’s not to mention unprecedented security benefits; without intermediaries (banks) in the process, hacking attacks would be virtually impossible to pull off as they’d need to hack every ledger simultaneously - not an easy feat by far!

A Provider Of Solutions

Enter QuickX. An innovative startup designed around the purpose of offering users instant blockchain transactions, across blockchains, and for a minimal fee. What benefits does QuickX offer up?

A quick cross-chain App the addresses the blockchain issues of speed & functionality: QuickX uses an off-chain protocol for transactions which sidesteps the need for waiting on miners to complete their tedious work.

Cross-chain acceleration: off-chain transactions, made possible through the use of “pooling facilitators” (liquidity facilitators), can make inter-chain transfers quickly and seamlessly.

Rapid & Economical: the QuickX eWallet stores all of your cryptocurrencies securely in one place for immediate use. PC hacks and lost USBs are no longer problematic since your wallet data is securely stored in their cloud.

Cross-chain transactions are basically transactions from a blockchain of one type of cryptocurrency to a blockchain of another type of cryptocurrency.

Different blockchains have different protocols. Traditionally when someone who has assets in a bitcoin blockchain wants to transfer to someone who has assets in a litecoin blockchain, he would first have to convert his assets to litecoin assets. Not only is this process tedious it is also time-consuming and costly

Cross-Chain Issues

The cost of transactions and the time it takes to finish a single transaction, which goes up to several seconds in some blockchains, are just but a few of the many problems facing blockchains.

This problem becomes even more complex when you are doing transactions from one blockchain to another.

The cost of transactions usually rises because of the miners who perform transactions on behalf of investors. The irony of this is that the reason why bitcoin was created in the first place was to create a new currency which did not involve any monetary institutions and to avoid unnecessary interchange fees.

For cryptocurrencies to survive they must solve the problem of cross-chain transactions. The aim is that cryptocurrencies will fulfill the reason why they were created.

The Benefits of Cross-Chain Transactions

Cross-chain transactions give the advantage of improved privacy. With cross-chain transactions, the trading fees will greatly come down. They also tackle the issue of time spent per transaction.

Blockchain developers have for some time now been thinking of ways to salvage the situation. Recently steps were made and the first ‘atomic swaps’ (exchanging one cryptocurrency for another without a third party) between bitcoin and litecoin were successfully completed.

This improvement shows that things have started moving in the right direction. Atomic swaps make it easy for transactions to be conducted in a trustless manner and they also ensure that the outcome of the transactions are either that they go through or they don’t (reducing the double-spend risk).

However hopeful we are, there are some hurdles on the individual blockchains. This might mean that we’ll have to stay for a little longer before atomic swaps become consistent.

Cross-Chain Transactions, QuickX and Pooling Facilitators

Technologies like bitcoin’s lightning network and ethereum’s raiden network are still under construction. Individual blockchains are also still solving problems like scalability. It might be a while before it's all systems go.

This is where QuickX technology saves the day. QuickX solves problems like those of scalability, time and cost by building a decentralized platform. This transactions are done off the chain for the same blockchain assets by having pooling facilitators.

Pooling facilitators input the necessary liquidity into the ecosystem while facilitating the cross-chain instant funds transfer. This is actually the framework of QuickX interoperability.

Pooling facilitators can make transactions for other users and can ask for a loan from any other pooling facilitator.

What QuickX aims to do is to solve issues and offer solutions like: low costs for users, instant transactions, multi-cryptocurrencies usage, investment opportunities, almost zero operating costs, a global market, trust, security and total control.

With all these challenges solved, the crypto-market will continue to grow and the best thing is that it would be all-inclusive.

Introduction Here’s How Quick X Enables Inter-Chain Transactions by Introducing Pooling Facilitators Quick X Presents a New Investment Opportunity for Investors

Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a powerful alternative to fiat currencies, offering numerous benefits such as lower transaction fees, faster payments, better security, and significantly easier global payment transfers. As of early 2018, the combined market cap of cryptocurrencies is over $500 Bn with over 1500 different cryptocurrencies.

However, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is not without its fair share of problems. Transaction fees have increased because of the high transaction volume. Transaction times have also increased due to the same reason. Scalability is also an inherent challenge because each node on the blockchain needs to process every transaction. Moreover, inter-chain transactions are time consuming and expensive, which creates a major challenge for mass adoption.

A new technology, named Quick X protocol, can solve these problems by introducing the concept of pooling facilitators that inject the necessary liquidity in the ecosystem, enabling inter-chain transactions through an off-the-chain mechanism.  

Quick X makes use of pooling facilitators to connect different blockchains with each other. Pooling facilitators are individuals or businesses, which act as liquidity providers to enable cross-chain transactions in the ecosystem. Pooling facilitators, essentially, act as facilitators between senders and receivers in the decentralized ecosystem, while making profits on their liquidity infusion.

Every time a payment request is made to the Quick X platform, the request is sent to a best selection algorithm, which finds the best pooling facilitator with the lowest transaction cost, from a decentralized liquidity pool of pooling facilitators. The algorithm maintains the record of every pooling facilitator in the decentralized liquidity pool along with its transaction costs.

If a pooling facilitator doesn’t have enough liquidity, it can even take a loan from another pooling facilitator at a predetermined cost, which makes the system even more efficient. Pooling facilitators are constantly checked by a routing protocol and algorithm for trustworthiness, which makes the entire system extremely secure and trustworthy.

The introduction of pooling facilitators has created a new investment opportunity for potential investors. Pooling facilitators make profits at nearly zero costs, as transactions are not added to the blockchain under normal circumstances. Anybody can become a pooling facilitator, and contribute to the overall health of the Quick X ecosystem, by providing a minimum amount of liquidity. Large-scale investors can also lend money to analyst teams, which can act as pooling facilitators on behalf of investors.

The Quick X technology is being built by by Secugenius, a leading cybersecurity company with a clientele of over 200 global companies. Quick X can overcome the limitations of cryptocurrencies such as slow transactions, high transaction fees and lack of interoperability by combining ‘trustless decentralized blockchain’ with ‘algorithmically trusted decentralized pooling facilitators’.

Quick X has the potential to create a larger interconnected network of blockchains, which can accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies by solving the various challenges associated with them.  

Blockchains have been touted as the biggest thing to have happened to the human race in the recent past. However great though the blockchains are, they came with some some limitations that are giving both the developers and the investors a hard time.

Current Blockchain Issues

Cross-chain transactions have been one of the greatest limitations of blockchains. Transactions costs are high and coupled with the time taken to conduct transactions, this has really put a strain on the large-scale adoption and harnessing of blockchain’s potential. This is arguably the factor that will determine the success of blockchain.

On top of this, lack of regulation make it a volatile market with many investors clutching their purse strings. Unfortunately scams and market manipulation do exist (as they do in the fiat currency world). The recent onecoin scam is one of the many scams that disrupted various blockchains.

Another burgeoning concern is the environmental and energy cost. Looking at the largest blockchain: bitcoin, experts estimate that it consumes more energy than 159 individual countries!

These growing pains negatively impact blockchain, making it unattractive to the common person for everyday business and personal use, further entrenching the issue of scalability.

Enter: Instant Transactions

It is hard to relate to cryptocurrency for everyday business. This is largely due to the technicalities involved with acquiring the currencies. However, this is soon to change and we may soon be seeing immediate payment goods and services with a multi-currency debit card.

Traditionally if a business wants to perform a cross-chain transaction, they have to first convert their crypto assets. Imagine a system offering solutions to the traditional blockchain problems (speed, transaction costs, scalability and problems to do with cross-chain transactions) where businesses are able to accept payment in different cryptocurrencies immediately.

Now picture a multicurrency wallet to go with this system, not only does this make transactions easier, but it allows business people to have assets in different cryptocurrencies in the same wallet.

Employing instant cross-chain transactions from your multi-currency wallet for day-to-day business transactions, the current blockchain limitations are quickly fading in your rear view mirror.

A Solution to Blockchain Limitations

QuickX is developing such a system where cross-chain transactions are carried out immediately through the use of ‘pooling facilitators’ (off-chain liquidity providers) and the user has a multicurrency wallet to conduct their everyday business. The fact that businesses can have instant conversions of their currencies will open more doors, widen the markets, and enable small businesses to grow tremendously.

Finally, in this dawning world where the benefits of crypto technology will soon be reconciled with present-day business needs, consider for a moment those who opt out of this revolution. A business operating without an e-wallet and instant transactions draws similarities to opting out of direct debit, debit and credit card transactions, instead preferring cheques and money orders. The essence of this is that blockchain is presently being used under limitations and the necessary framework for maximum usage and benefit has yet to be put in place.

It was back in 2009 when Bitcoin first appeared on the market and stirred things up. Ever since then, the community around it has grown, as well as the number of new blockchains that emerge every year. In 2017, and with their number still in the hundreds, CoinMarketCap figures show that “the estimated total worth of cryptocurrencies was almost 100 billion dollars”. As of this year, there are more than 1300 cryptocurrencies available and in another ten years, according to the World Economic Forum, as much as 10% of the world’s GDP will be stored in them.

Yet due to the different protocols most of the blockchains use, there is still a limitation on the communication between them. And if the public is to adopt digital currencies, this is the challenge the industry needs to face.

Bridging the gap

Until now, the best solution was automated trading bots and exchange websites. They made exchanges between different cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies a lot easier. Still, they are not as useful to the average consumer who would prefer to use, for example, Ethereum to buy a computer from a seller accepting Bitcoin. In such a case, the buyer would have to convert his Ethereum coins into Bitcoins through an exchange in advance. Which would take time, not to mention that the buyer would have to look up the seller and find which currencies they accept.

Now, imagine what could happen if you could use a platform which has a pool of digital currencies available. By having the platform make the exchange within itself, there is no longer a need for a large waiting period. In the above scenario, the consumer enters a shop with their wallet filled with Ethereum, makes the transaction, and the seller gets paid in Bitcoin in mere seconds and without any additional cost.

The same platform can also be used by traders making exchanges, businesses trading with each other and so on. Something which it can accomplish by not having to contact a miner for every single transaction that occurs within it.

Why it is necessary for the growth of the industry

Digital currencies have come a long way, but they have not yet become mainstream. Most people still view them more like assets than anything else. And who can blame them, when it could cost them 20 dollars to simply buy their morning coffee. But if you were to eliminate the cost of the exchange, drastically reduce the amount of time needed for it to take place, and allow everyone to pay and receive payment in the cryptocurrency of their choice. Well then, that suddenly sounds more like a currency than an asset. And it just may be the final step before digital currencies finally become mainstream.

One of the great limits on blockchain technology is scalability; each node needs to process every new transaction on the system. It means the work is recorded onto each and every block for all payments, over and over again. This flaw is seemingly inherent in the distributed ledger system which governs the mechanics of the blockchain. At times this can be incredibly frustrating for users, making transactions slower and more costly than desirable. The intrinsic flaw in the system is that the blockchain will only ever be as fast as its weakest link. It’s like being caught in traffic behind a slow moving vehicle with no option to overtake, everybody gets caught up and the tailbacks get progressively longer. It’s frustrating for all concerned, so what’s the solution?

How Great Can We Be?

A conventional database, ran on a central system can be improved simply by purchasing greater computer power, much like upgrading your personal computer. In a decentralized structure this is impossible as a slow node will slow everyone down. Think of it like this: in a traffic jam it doesn’t matter whether you own a high performance vehicle or not, you’re still going nowhere fast.

At present the whole system would need to be improved significantly to make any noticeable difference. Change can only happen as fast as it occurs organically within the system. The bigger the ecosystem, the bigger the inherent flaw: increased adoption creates increased structural pressure. Imagine trying to pump more and more water through an aging pipe network, the pressure will eventually increase until breaking point and then, you’re in trouble. This undermines credibility in the entire blockchain system. The solution cannot come from within the existing cryptocurrency network.

Quick X Thinks Bigger

At present, Bitcoin is capable of carrying out just 7 transactions per second. Ethereum manages 20. Compare that to more established payment methods. Paypal manages a whopping 193 and Visa knocks them all out of sight with a possible 56,000 payments per second. Now consider those 7 transactions per second once more. That blockchain traffic jam is a serious growth killer.

Quick X navigates around this jam by creating an off-chain transactions network. A decentralized off-chain network allows some traffic to take another route: a short cut of sorts. This opens up new pathways to the desired destination and takes a huge amount of pressure off the existing blockchain network. With Quick X it is entirely possible to have instant transactions with near zero fees, and the slow moving blocks of data are no longer an obstacle in your way. Quite simply, Quick X creates a faster, leaner cryptocurrency experience. The upscaling of blockchain can now be virtually limitless.

Conclusion

Blockchain technology has many advantages over traditional payment methods but it is inherently hampered by scalability issues. By thinking bigger, we can solve this. Cryptocurrencies will only become adopted by the mainstream when the existing scalability issue is solved. Quick X opens the door to a faster blockchain solution, and a faster blockchain is one with room to grow.