Today I will answer a series of questions about $QUARK based on my understanding.
Table of contents:
1. What are quarks?
2. Who invented quarks?
3. What narrative does quark have?
4. What is the arc20 protocol that Quark is in?
5. What is the AVM narrative of arc20?
6. Why do quarks never die and never return to zero? What is one coin, one satoshi?
7. Are quarks inscriptions?
8. Why didn’t Quark go to the UBS?
9. What is the distribution of Quark chips and the community? What is the core logic of Quark consensus?
10. What are the origin and development of arc20, the technical characteristics and application prospects of avm?
11. Quarks are colored coins. What is the difference between them and inscriptions? Why can quarks be a hundred times more powerful?
12. What is the mint cost of Quark and what is the profit and loss ratio
13. Why don’t quarks return to zero? Will they exist forever?
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1. What are quarks?
Quark, whose English name is Quark, is a token issued in the Bitcoin ecosystem based on the ARC-20 colored coin standard.
The ARC-20 standard was born from the Atomicals protocol and is another popular asset in the Bitcoin ecosystem besides BRC20 and Runes. Under the ARC-20 standard, the protocol defines an asset type called "Colored Coin". Among them, the most popular colored coins are Quark (market value of 20 million) and Atom (market value of 40 million). The former is the largest token in the community (19,000 holders), and the latter is the first token of the protocol.
Quark was deployed by an anonymous person, and 100% of the tokens were mined by the community. It was deployed on December 23, 2024, and was suddenly discovered by the community a few days later. Its huge size made the distribution fair enough, and the mining period window was long, so everyone could participate. Finally, on January 1, 2024, all tokens were minted. The average cost of minting each token is between $25 and $50, and the entire network is estimated to consume 300 BTC to complete the final minting.
As a colored coin, each Quark is dyed from 1 satoshi of Bitcoin. It is essentially a marked Bitcoin, so there is no such thing as zero. The minimum market value of Quark is 100 BTC, "with a bottom line and no upper limit". If Bitcoin rises, the lower limit of Quark will also increase. This is a coin that can be truly held for a long time with peace of mind.
From the perspective of Quark itself, as the basic unit of matter, under the narrative of the atomic protocol, it is consistent with the meaning of physical MEME, and the token name is easy to remember, easy to read, no duplicate names, and easy to spread.
In the past six months, Quark has had a very good community atmosphere, which continues to empower the token itself and build the protocol as a whole. It has developed a variety of community products such as order robots, shopping calculators, browser plug-ins, etc., and has established community accounts in ten countries on Twitter. It has also designed several peripheral products. The community continues to build, and the momentum is very good!
The community’s official website Quark.Meme has more detailed information.
2. Who invented quarks?
Quark is a fairly distributed and fairly minted token.
On December 23, after being deployed by an anonymous person, it was discovered by community members and then slowly began to spread, and became known to more people after a community Space.
When everyone saw other people on the chain starting to mint QUARK, they all joined the new wave.
In the last week, as the mining progress of Quark reached halfway, the chain began to roll up Gas, the minting fee increased, and the cost increased. Since Quark itself has been set with a certain mining difficulty by the deployer, each mining of Quark requires a certain amount of time on the personal computer, so during the minting period, many users also choose to directly purchase from the market at a premium.
In the end, all Quarks belong 100% to the community, and all costs are transparently visible on the chain. There is no project party, no pre-mining, and no insider trading.
After a half-month mining boom, the community was gradually established. Friends who held Quark gradually established communities and promoted and built them on Twitter. In the second month, the price reached its highest level in history, about $150 per piece (unit price 0.0075). Subsequently, as the overall Bitcoin ecosystem weakened, Quark also fell along the way to today's price of $40 per piece (unit price 0.002).
3. What narrative does quark have?
As one of the representative tokens in the colored coin track, Quark inherits the narrative of colored coins on the one hand, and serves as the native Meme of the Bitcoin ecosystem on the other.
First of all, from the perspective of the track, Quark is representative of colored coins and atomic protocols. If colored coins become mainstream in the future, or the atomic protocol and its AVM (Bitcoin's first-layer smart contract) go viral, then as an important native asset of the protocol, Quark will inevitably attract a lot of traffic. The Atomicals protocol itself has great potential and is a huge paradigm innovation for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Secondly, from the perspective of Meme, Atomicals as "atomic protocols" and physics Meme are a consistent narrative. Quarks, as the smallest substance of all things, are absolutely representative in the concept of physics and can be compared to the smallest unit of Bitcoin, Sats. At the same time, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the "community" narrative is very important, and Quark has a strong community with a high degree of consensus and continuous construction in the trough, so there is no need to worry that the popularity will dissipate.
Third, the original design of Quark is very sophisticated. As a colored coin, it does not have an excessively high satoshi content (too safe to have no imagination for appreciation), nor does it deviate from the "bottom line" range of colored coins. Even if the price of Quark rises several times, the bottom line rate of colored satoshis will still be very high.
Fourth, the main theme of the bull market narrative is still inseparable from the Bitcoin ecosystem. Atomicals is one of the leading representative protocols of the Bitcoin ecosystem. After the sector rotation, Quark is the best place to receive funds. Compared with other projects in the same field and with the same reputation, Quark's current market value is relatively low. There are few such representative projects that still hover around 20 million market value, and there is considerable room for growth beyond the circle.
4. What is the arc20 protocol that Quark is in?
ARC-20 is not the name of the protocol to be exact, but a token standard under the protocol.
ARC-20 was born from the Atomicals protocol (just like BRC-20 was born from the Ordinals protocol), and its Chinese name is also called the Atomic Protocol. The Atomicals protocol defines a set of methods for using Bitcoin, which includes tokens (ARC-20), NFT (Dmint), Realm, and Atomic Virtual Machine (AVM).
This protocol was released anonymously by Arthur (known as God A in the community). He has only spoken in a few interviews and has never appeared in person (relevant interviews can be found on YouTube). After the release of the protocol, many excellent developers and project owners have joined in. Now there are nearly 100 Atomic Ecosystem project owners (measured by the number of official project promotions). At the same time, Unisat, OKX, and Binance have also chosen to connect to ARC20 after BRC20 and developed independent market sections in their wallets.
Over the past few months, in addition to Arthur, many infrastructure developers within the ecosystem have also voluntarily participated in the technical maintenance and upgrades of the protocol. Atomicals is an open source protocol that any developer can freely maintain and update. It is a truly fair ecosystem that belongs entirely to the public.
In the specific section of the protocol, the ARC-20 token defines a colored coin on Bitcoin. Through the atomic protocol method, we can dye some ordinary Bitcoins (ordinary Satoshis) to make them marked colored coins (colored Satoshis).
The concept of colored coins was proposed by the OGs in the Bitcoin community more than a decade ago. It has always been a long-cherished wish of the Bitcoin cultural community, but it has not been realized because the Bitcoin mainnet has not been sufficiently scalable. It was not until several Bitcoin community proposals in the past two years and after the Taproot upgrade that some expansions of the Bitcoin mainnet became possible and colored coins were implemented. This is the first time in the history of Bitcoin that the concept of colored coins has been fully and correctly implemented.
To understand the protocol, you can read the official documentation: Atomicals.Guide
I also recommend an entry site made by a Chinese developer: arc20.how
5. What is the AVM narrative of arc20?
The full name of AVM is Atomicals Virtual Machine, which means "atomic virtual machine". Referring to the concept of EVM, it is not difficult to understand that AVM is a virtual machine implemented on the Bitcoin layer through the atomic protocol method, which can bring smart contracts to Bitcoin.
In the atomic protocol, dyeing and fading are two very important operations, which can be compared to the "0 and 1" at the beginning of the Internet world, and can be further expanded into a highly free programmable ecosystem. Under the limited conditions of the Bitcoin mainnet and with high security as the premise, AVM can successfully realize a series of applications represented by DeFi.
At present, the AVM beta version is almost complete and has been tested on the test network one after another. The leading infrastructure project Wizz Wallet is also conducting final perfection tests for the DeFi applications after AVM.
After AVM is launched, we expect more projects to choose this ecosystem to expand their territory. We also believe that the atomic protocol will gain more traffic and more practical applications will be born. The Bitcoin ecosystem will also jump out of the basic stage of asset speculation and enter the next stage of application-oriented ecology.
For more details about AVM, please read the white paper: https://github.com/atomicals/avm-whitepaper
6. Why do quarks never die and never return to zero? What is one coin, one satoshi?
One coin, one satoshi is the most basic design of the Atomicals protocol and a brand new way of playing in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In the past, all the altcoins in the currency circle were virtual coins and could be “returned to zero”, but under the colored coin system, the term “returned to zero” no longer exists, and at most they will only be “returned to satoshis”.
Each token under the ARC-20 standard is dyed from 1 satoshi of Bitcoin.
Taking Quark as an example, 20,000 tokens are considered as “one”. The 20,000 here actually means 20,000 Satoshi, which is the smallest unit of Bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC). In other words, no matter what, even if the whole world no longer plays ARC-20, everyone has sold Quark and there is no buying order, in this case, one Quark can be “faded” to 0.0002 BTC at any time.
This is the design of the underlying mechanism. These bitcoins are actually in your wallet and cannot disappear. Therefore, each Quark comes with an accident insurance.
There is no ceiling above and there is insurance below - when Bitcoin rises to 1 million, the price of Quark Satoshi itself will be 200 dollars per piece. Since Bitcoin can reach 1 million, the increase of Quark is definitely greater than that of Bitcoin. It can be said that buying Quark is another risk-free leverage to go long on BTC.
This is a logic that does not return to zero, but this kind of safety is only a short-term advantage. After Quark increases 10 or 20 times, there will be no need to mention this point anymore (this is why it is the most cost-effective to buy Quark now).
7. Are quarks inscriptions?
No, but currently ARC-20 tokens are still misclassified as “inscriptions” on many exchanges and wallets.
In fact, ARC-20 is very different from inscription standards such as BRC-20. ARC-20 is essentially a "colored coin". The "colored satoshis" obtained by marking "white satoshis" (uncolored bitcoins) are the basic components of colored coins.
In addition, other inscriptions can be directly engraved through a transaction, while the ARC-20 token introduces a proof-of-work mechanism, that is, mining. Each token has a corresponding mining difficulty. At that time, it took two hours for my personal computer to mine a Quark.
Because it is in line with the essence of Bitcoin and is sufficiently native and authentic, ARC-20 tokens have another major advantage: no third-party indexing and no additional mandatory consensus are required. These are all guarantees for the future security of colored coins.
Here’s a quote from 0xSea’s old tweet:
“The underlying idea behind the Atomicals protocol is Digital Matter Theory (DMT). The ARC-20 token is essentially a dyed Bitcoin (sats). One coin is one satoshi, that is, each ARC-20 token has one satoshi as its value backing. In terms of indexing, ARC-20 directly records based on Bitcoin’s UTXO, does not rely on off-chain indexing, and fully shares the security of the Bitcoin network.
Based on this feature, when transferring ARC-20 tokens, you can transfer directly without having to first engrave a transfer inscription like BRC-20. This not only saves users the transfer cost (saving the gas fee and time of engraving once), but also avoids adding junk inscriptions to the BTC network to occupy space.
Because of the minimum setting of 1 token = 1 sat, the ARC-20 token will not return to zero strictly speaking. As for how high it can rise, it depends on factors such as narrative and consensus. For example, $sophon, which has a high proportion of satoshis, has recently risen by 35-40% with Bitcoin, so the U standard will naturally make money.
It can be seen that ARC-20 and BRC-20 have obvious differences in account model, indexing method, transfer, etc. Its essence is colored coins, not inscriptions. Inscription is a special term in the Ordinals system. The Atomicals protocol does not belong to the Ordinals system. The two are parallel. It’s just that in the industry, for the convenience of expression, people are used to mixing it with BRC-20 and calling it "inscription", which does confuse their differences...
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8. Why didn’t Quark go to the UBS?
Quark's current main trading markets are Bitatom, AtomicalMarket, and OKX Web3, and the main exchange is BG. In addition, other platforms that support Quark trading include: Binance Web3, Gate Web3, Superex, XT, Unisat, Satsx, Dotswap, BingX, Unibit, Bitmart, AscendEx, Welcoin, etc. (See more on the official website)
At present, there is no truly "big firm" yet. There are two main theories about this.
Second, accessing the protocol is a hassle. ARC-20 is different from Ethereum or Solana, where a contract address can quickly connect tokens to exchanges. ARC-20 is a brand new token standard, and exchanges need to do additional development work to support Quark deposits and withdrawals, which has blocked many exchanges. Even if some exchanges are optimistic about ARC20 now, they will have to wait until ARC20 can bring more traffic and returns before they will take the trouble to develop it.
New things always need a long period of time to settle, this is inevitable and we can only wait and see.
Second, advantages. Quark is still in its early stages, and since it has not been listed on a major exchange, the prospect of future listing is a huge positive. It can be seen that many exchanges and institutions are paying attention to Atomicals, and even the leading OKX and Binance’s own wallet have taken great pains to develop a proprietary market for ARC20. It is unrealistic to say that they have not paid attention to Quark.
As for when it will be launched, we will have to wait until Quark’s scale grows further and major exchanges choose the right time to “build momentum”.
By the way, the market value of new coins on Binance used to be between 200 million and 300 million. Quark is too small today. When Quark increases 10 times, the big exchanges will take advantage of it and increase it by 100 times. Why not? We still need to be more patient.
9. What is the distribution of Quark chips and the community? What is the core logic of Quark consensus?
Quark’s chip distribution has always been fair, and all data is publicly available on the chain: https://bitatom.io/token/quark?tab=analytics&kind=leaderboard
The first place is the exchange, with a total circulation of about 9.7 billion (the rest were burned by early holders’ mistaken operations), and a total of about 19,000 addresses, which is the largest number of holding addresses for ARC-20.
The core logic of Quark Consensus, what I would say about this question:
1. The revolutionary paradigm innovation of Atomicals (especially colored coins) will inevitably change the face of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem;
2. The strength of the Quark community and the community token will still lead this round of Bitcoin MEME craze. The long-term persistence of the Quark community gives people strong confidence.
However, everyone may have different answers to their confidence in Quark. Some people choose Quark because they think there is no ceiling for the Meme on Bitcoin, some people choose Quark because they believe AVM will lead to a huge explosion of Bitcoin applications, some people choose Quark because they think the builders in the community are more reliable, and some people choose Quark because they value the cost-effectiveness of BTC as a guarantee of colored coins...
10. What are the origin and development of arc20, the technical characteristics and application prospects of avm?
The Atomicals protocol was probably born in June 2023 (the time of the first official tweet from the protocol), but at that time basically no one cared about it. Only Arthur was quietly updating and developing it. According to Arthur himself in an interview, before that, the design and conception of the Atomicals protocol had already taken a long time.
Around September, the first ARC-20 token, atom, was deployed and announced on Twitter. Subsequently, various Bitcoin ecosystem players at home and abroad began to deploy the Atomicals-JS environment and try to participate in mint. Through this round of new issuance, the Atomicals protocol and its ARC-20 token standard became known to the public for the first time.
The first token of ARC-20, Atom (named atomarc on the exchange), will soar thousands of times in the next few months, with the peak price of a single token being about 15,000 dollars (15U per token). Another popular token, Quark, was deployed in December of the same year and minted in early January. After the mint price increased four or five times, the Bitcoin ecosystem (including inscriptions and L2) collectively retreated, and all protocol assets fell. Today, the unit price of Atom is 2u, and the unit price of Quark is 0.002U.
AVM (Atomic Virtual Machine) was first proposed by the protocol author Arthur at the beginning of this year, indicating that smart contracts can be further realized based on the Atomicals protocol. Then in early April, the idea of AVM was first introduced in the form of PPT at the Hong Kong conference remotely; at the end of May, the AVM white paper was released; at the end of June, the precondition of AVM "partial coloring" was developed and activated; a week ago (end of June), the developer of the wizz wallet team said: AVM testing and development is in testnet4, and there will be the first very simple demo in the near future, which will be written and released by Arthur.
This time, smart contracts have been fully implemented on the Bitcoin layer, which is a great progress for Bitcoin, but the final effect still depends on the adoption rate. Only when more project parties recognize the value of AVM and choose to build on AVM can AVM's greater potential be unleashed.
The most anticipated point is DeFi. If Bitcoin's native DeFi is successfully implemented, it will start with liberating the liquidity of ARC20, and then gradually liberate the liquidity of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, and finally face the sedimentation of trillions of Bitcoin funds. DeFi is of great significance to Bitcoin. The first layer of native DeFi will be the only way for Bitcoin to develop, and AVM will achieve this.
Starting from basic interactive programming and moving towards more complex applications, AVM is expected to bring about a huge explosion of applications in the Bitcoin ecosystem after its successful implementation.
For technical details and implementation solutions, please refer to the white paper↓
Chinese: https://docs.wizz.cash/wizz-wallet/v/zh/avm-bai-pi-shu-zhong-wen-ban
English: https://github.com/atomicals/avm-whitepaper
11. Quarks are colored coins. What is the difference between them and inscriptions? Why can quarks be a hundred times more powerful?
The first half of the question has been answered in Question 7. Let’s talk about the second half.
First of all, the market value of the entire colored coin track is less than 100 million. How much are the five words "Bitcoin ecology" worth? How much are "Bitcoin native assets" worth? How much are "Bitcoin applications" worth?
On the one hand, as the mainstream protocol of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Atomicals will take on a large part of the narrative value of the Bitcoin ecosystem. On the other hand, Atomicals itself almost represents an entire application track, including the concept of "colored coins", which is also a whole new class of assets.
What should be compared with colored coins should not be just other coins, but the entire ERC20 market.
ARC20, based on Bitcoin, with a market value of 100 million;
BRC20, based on Bitcoin, with a market value of 1.5 billion;
ERC20, based on Ethereum, has a market value of 600 billion. Atomicals is not just an asset issuance protocol, but also represents the rise of several emerging tracks. I believe that the market value of the entire Atomicals ecosystem will one day reach more than 100 billion. Today is really early enough, and we need to be imaginative.
If Bitcoin is digital gold, colored coins can be regarded as the gold processing market. All digital crafts in the world exist in the form of colored coins. The market space for processing everyone's Bitcoin into more meaningful and valuable assets is huge. AVM is not mentioned here. The concept of colored coins alone is enough to raise Quark's valuation by several levels. Quark itself is the most popular and most consensus-based representative colored coin. Perhaps it will be an important symbol in the history of the entire currency circle.
In addition, there are many other aspects (such as PoW and RNS) that will become important factors in increasing the valuation of Atomicals. Looking up, there are too many reasons for the pattern. I can't finish talking about them all at once, so you can look through my historical articles.
12. What is the mint cost of Quark and what is the profit and loss ratio
According to the data, the cost of new issuance is 25-50U, and the total consumption of new issuance is about 300 BTC. (Today's market value is 320 BTC)
The highest turnover price was about 150U (some people bought 170 or 180U when there were no orders at the high point). After the high point, it was washed out for four or five months. The lowest price on the exchange fell to 20u, and then it rebounded to 40u and has been changing hands a lot since then. (40u is equivalent to 0.002U per piece)
The current price is no different from that of the first batch of participants, and is even lower than that of most community members (because community members have basically increased their positions at high levels). After several months of washing, the paper hands have been washed clean, and the only ones left are deep consensus holders. It can be seen that Quark has been little affected by these market crashes, and it will come back quickly every time it drops, because most holders know that if it falls again, it will only return to Satoshis, not zero, so Quark has an underlying design of "the more it falls, the harder it will fall."
There are two major things to look forward to. One is that the Atomicals protocol will gradually break through the circle. This is a relatively big hope. Both colored coins and AVM are leading the way. Many project owners and investors are also watching and preparing at all times. On the other hand, the Bitcoin ecosystem is recovering. The narrative status of the Bitcoin ecosystem is still strong. When funds are returned to the Bitcoin ecosystem sector, Quark is likely to be the most aggressive.
In general, the profit and loss ratio is quite ideal. If it falls, it will fall slowly (historical fact). If it rises, it will definitely rise quickly.
13. Why don’t quarks return to zero? Will they exist forever?
In fact, several previous questions have been explained quite clearly. The underlying design of colored coins makes Quark fall to the bottom price of Bitcoin at most. If Bitcoin continues to rise, Quark will naturally continue to rise.
Anyone who believes that Bitcoin will rise in the future has no reason to refute the future of Quark.
All of this is the basic setting of the underlying protocol (one coin, one satoshi), which has nothing to do with any person or any project. It is a fixed mechanism. As long as Bitcoin exists, the price of Quark will exist.
If everything really returns to zero and the narrative fails one day, the colored coins can "fade" into Bitcoin at any time, and there is no need to worry about liquidity issues.
Of course, we don’t think too much about failure. It’s enough for us to understand the downward guarantee. Usually we talk more about the upward space.
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The above answers are written based on my personal experience. There may be some key points missing. You can add them in the comments section!
