QuarryChain Litepaper

QuarryChain is an L1 blockchain built for high throughput, sub-second finality, and near-zero per-transaction cost. It runs a 3-layer protocol stack with a Delegated Proof of Stake consensus, an EVM-compatible virtual machine for Solidity contracts, and a native token model designed for both fungible value transfer and real-world asset tokenization at scale.

The thesis is simple: most production blockchains force a tradeoff between speed, cost, and developer ergonomics. QuarryChain is engineered to refuse that tradeoff. The QVM runs existing Solidity contracts unmodified. The bandwidth model gives every account 5,000 free daily transactions. The DPoS validator set is elected by token holders every six hours. The whole network is designed to feel free at the point of use, while remaining cryptographically and economically sound underneath.

QuarryChain is structured as three layers stacked on top of each other: Storage at the bottom, Core in the middle, Application at the top. Each layer has a single, focused job, and they talk to each other through a protocol built on Google Protocol Buffers — meaning every API is language-neutral, version-tolerant, and 3 to 10 times smaller on the wire than the JSON or XML alternatives.

The protocol exposes both a Protobuf API for language-native clients (C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Go, Objective-C, and more) and a RESTful HTTP API for everything else. Same interface, two transports — pick whichever fits the tooling you already use.

Proof of Work spends real-world energy to secure the chain. Standard Proof of Stake replaces that energy bill with a hoarding incentive — the more tokens you hold, the more influence you get, which tends to concentrate validation in a small number of large bagholders. QuarryChain runs Delegated Proof of Stake, which keeps the energy efficiency of PoS but takes the validator selection out of pure stake-weight and puts it in the hands of the community.

Becoming a candidate isn't free. The protocol burns 9,999 QRC from an applicant's account when they enter the Quarry Miner race — enough to make sybil candidates economically painful, low enough that a serious team can self-fund a campaign. Candidate ranks 28 through 127 also earn vote rewards, so the long tail has skin in the game even without producing blocks.

TaPoS — Transaction as Proof of Stake

Every QuarryChain transaction includes a fragment of a recent block header hash. This forces every transaction to commit to a specific version of history — making it impossible to replay a transaction on a forked chain that doesn't include the referenced block. The same mechanism doubles as the network's defense against denial of service, 51% attacks, selfish mining, and double-spend attacks. It costs nothing extra and runs invisibly under every transaction the network processes.

Three node types

The QuarryChain Virtual Machine is a lightweight, Turing-complete VM forked from the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It tracks Solidity ^0.4.24 and is approximately 100% compatible with EVM bytecode. If a contract deploys to Ethereum, it deploys to QuarryChain — same source, same ABI, same wallet integrations.

The compiler reads Solidity and emits bytecode. The QVM executes that bytecode through opcodes against a stack-based finite state machine, then accesses on-chain data through an interoperation layer. Standard EVM mental model, faster execution, and a different fee model underneath (covered in the next section).

Most blockchains charge a per-transaction fee. QuarryChain doesn't. Every account on the network gets 5,000 free bandwidth points every day, refilled automatically. Standard transactions and token transfers are paid out of that bandwidth budget — not out of the sender's QRC balance. The user experience is closer to using a free internet service than paying gas.

Energy is separate from bandwidth

Smart contracts use a second resource called Energy. Where the EVM meters every contract operation in gas paid out of the sender's balance, QuarryChain accounts gain Energy by freezing QRC — and the amount of Energy you get scales with your share of total frozen supply. Energy is purely computational, separate from the bandwidth cost of broadcasting the transaction. State-changing functions consume Energy. Read-only calls don't.

The few things that do cost QRC

A small set of network operations have fixed fees, paid in QRC, that exist to discourage spam and fund the network:

The combination — free bandwidth for normal use, frozen-stake Energy for smart contracts, and fixed fees only on network-altering operations — is what lets QuarryChain claim 100,000 TPS without forcing every user to think about gas. The network earns from deployment fees and a 0.25% transaction-level revenue share, not from nickel-and-diming individual transfers.

QuarryChain ships two production token standards today, with two more on the roadmap. The split between protocol-level (QRC-10) and contract-level (QRC-20) is intentional — most projects don't need a custom contract for a simple payment token, and protocol-level tokens are dramatically cheaper to transfer.

Live today

On the roadmap

QuarryChain Solidity tracks the same versioning as Ethereum's, so any token standard that compiles on EVM can be ported with minimal work. The two standards prioritized for native support are:

QuarryChain wasn't designed only for digital-native assets. The protocol's most distinctive bet is on tokenizing real-world assets — taking value that already exists in the physical or legal world and giving it a programmable, transferable on-chain representation. Anything from a kilogram of gold to a building to a film royalty becomes a token you can trade, fractionalize, or use as collateral.

What can be tokenized

Practically anything with provable ownership and a stable enough valuation to settle on. The categories the protocol is explicitly engineered around:

How tokenization works on QuarryChain

From the developer side, every tokenization project follows the same four-step process. The order matters — once a contract ships, it can't be unshipped.

Why bother

QuarryChain's governance has two layers. The first elects the validator set and pays them. The second lets that validator set vote on the protocol's own dynamic parameters — block rewards, transaction fees, and other knobs — without requiring a hard fork.

Layer 1 — Quarry Mining

Anyone can become a Quarry Miner candidate. Applying burns 9,999 QRC from the candidate's account, which prevents trivial sybil spam. Every QRY holder can vote, weighted by frozen tokens — 1 frozen QRY equals 1 Quarry Power, and votes are recounted on a time-based cadence. The top 27 by vote weight become active producers for the next round.

Rewards are split into two streams, both denominated in QRC:

Block production rewards land in a sub-account that the QM controls but can't spend directly. A withdrawal can be made once every 24 hours — small friction that prevents validators from leaking rewards to compromised wallets in real time.

Layer 2 — The Committee

The 27 active Quarry Miners collectively make up the Committee. Only Committee members can propose changes to dynamic network parameters (block rewards, transaction fees, energy multipliers). Once a proposal is created, it's active for 3 days.

The two-layer split matters. Stakers control who validates, but validators — accountable to those same stakers because they can be voted out at the next voting round — control the dials that tune the protocol. Neither layer can capture the other without losing its position.

QRY is the native token of the QuarryChain network. It pays for bandwidth, drives validator elections, and is the unit of account for smart contract deployment. The supply is fixed at 200 million tokens, and every allocation is on a public, contractually-enforced vesting schedule.

Every slice, accounted for

Five categories cover the entire 200M supply. No tokens are unallocated, none are reserved for the foundation outside of the ecosystem grant pool, and the team allocation is the strictest-locked of the five.

Vesting timeline

Tokens unlock gradually over 48 months. Team tokens are completely locked for the first 12 months, then vest linearly over the next 24. No allocation reaches full circulation before month 24, and the public sale tranche is the only one with significant TGE liquidity.

Cumulative supply over time

Stacked across all five allocations, this is what circulating supply actually looks like month-by-month. The curve flattens as private and team allocations finish vesting, leaving long-tail emission from the staking pool.

The protocol on its own is just rails. What makes a chain useful is what people build on top of it. QuarryChain ships with a first-party ecosystem of user-facing apps, plus a developer toolchain designed to get a Solidity engineer from git clone to a deployed contract on testnet in under an afternoon.

Core applications

Developer toolchain

Four phases. Each phase has a single goal and a fixed list of deliverables. We're currently mid-Phase 2.

QuarryChain is built by a small, focused team across engineering, design, and operations. The protocol's ambition is large, but the decision-making surface is intentionally small.

QuarryChain isn't a thought experiment. The protocol is live on testnet, the QVM runs Solidity contracts unmodified, and the ecosystem has working wallets, an explorer, and a DEX. Mainnet, listings, and the first delegate elections are next.

If you build smart contracts, deploy one to our testnet and see what running with free bandwidth and 3-second blocks feels like. If you run a project that needs cheap, fast settlement, talk to us about what migration looks like. If you want to validate the network when mainnet goes live, the candidate process is documented and open.