What's QAN Platform

"The QAN private blockchain is ready and commercially available since October 14, 2020. Get your access key to the QAN private blockchain."

QAN is a multi-purpose smartcontract platform with the main goal to secure blockchains from quantum adversaries, meaning most of its cryptographic layer resists quantum computers.

In addition, QAN tries to address some practical limitations of current platforms by denominating platform fees in fiat currencies, having the option for a contract owner to pay its caller's fees, rewarding contract code reuse and having a fluid developer experience.

We aim respect and remain compatible with the practices made by ethereum and its most popular ERC standards, and also offer a migration tool from EVM1.0 type smartcontract into QAN.

At the time of writing this documentation, the two network types of QAN produced the following benchmarks:

  • PoA network with NATS overlay: 16kTPS
  • PoR network with our own gossip overlay: 1.6kTPS

Tests were performed in a docker network of 6 validator nodes each limited to:

  • 1.7Ghz CPU
  • 1Gb RAM
  • 100Gb Storage

Network

QAN has two types of network layers one the standard censorship-resistant epidemic-stype gossip network with an unbiased consensus and a more naive Proof of Authority network for enterprise players, aiming for transaction speed at the compromise of censorship-resistance.

Storage

We utilize facebook's RocksDB as our storage layer as it's the quickest and most scalable key-value store in the industry that's maintained by a reliable entity.

Cryptography

QAN's cryptographic stack consists of:

  • GLYPH for digital signatures
  • SWIFFTX for general hashes
  • SIS for special (length-regular) hashes

all of which are reduced to worst-case lattice problems.

These components are included in our Fence crate which in the case of a PoA network has to be licensed, and is included by default in the public network free of use.