Quai Network

Quai Network is a Proof-of-Work blockchain network that uses a multi-chain, sharded architecture organised in a hierarchy of chains (Prime, Region and Zone). It supports an EVM-compatible, account-based ledger and is designed to scale by distributing execution across many merge-mined chains, with cross-shard transfers handled through native external transactions (ETXs).

The network uses a consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Entropy-Minima (PoEM), which assigns an intrinsic weight to blocks to support deterministic fork resolution rather than relying only on a longest-chain rule.

The protocol includes two native assets, QUAI and Qi, which are designed for different roles within the network. QUAI is the EVM-compatible, account-based coin intended for programmable activity on the network, while Qi is used as the network’s second native asset alongside QUAI.

Quai Network was co-founded by a team with academic and industry experience in distributed systems and blockchain research. Several of the founders previously worked together at the University of Texas at Austin and at Dominant Strategies.

• Dr. Karl Kreder (Dr. K): Co-founder of Quai Network and Dominant Strategies. He holds a PhD and focuses on distributed systems, consensus mechanisms and cryptographic protocol design. He is described as the architect behind Quai’s multi-threaded execution model and the originator of the Proof of Entropy Minima (PoEM) consensus mechanism. His research spans the intersection of physics, information theory and decentralised systems, with published work on blockchain scaling, merged mining and hash-based consensus. He also has an academic background in materials science and nanotechnology and is an IEEE-published researcher and speaker on blockchain architecture and scalability.
• Alan Orwick: CEO of Dominant Strategies and co-founder of Quai Network. He has led the development of adversary-resilient distributed systems and production blockchain infrastructure, including work related to economic coordination at protocol scale. Before Dominant Strategies, he was a software engineer at Apple building supply chain ETL pipelines and analytics systems. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where he founded Texas Blockchain in 2017 and later returned as a visiting scholar researching blockchain economics. He is an IEEE-published researcher whose work includes blockchain scaling, distributed AI inference and agent coordination systems.
• Jonathan Downing: Co-founder of Quai Network. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked as a research assistant on the BlockReduce protocol. He was an early adopter of smart contract platforms including Ethereum and has several years of experience across cryptocurrency projects. He has been involved in Quai’s core engineering since the project’s early stages, focused on blockchain infrastructure and protocol development.
• Sriram Vishwanath: Co-founder of Quai Network and a Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) Eminent Scholar and Ken Byers Chair in Telecommunications in ECE at Georgia Tech. His research spans wireless systems, decentralised infrastructure and artificial intelligence, including multi-antenna and full-duplex wireless, large-scale machine learning and decentralised platforms for critical infrastructure and automation. He is also a serial entrepreneur who incubates and accelerates deep-tech startups and serves as a technical fellow at MITRE Labs. He received his PhD from Stanford University, his MS from Caltech and his BTech from IIT Madras. He is an IEEE Fellow and Senior Member of NAI with published work in areas including MIMO broadcast channel capacity, locally repairable codes for distributed storage and mean field analysis of blockchain systems.
• Yanni Georghiades: Co-founder of Quai Network and the lead author of the BlockReduce technical paper. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and is completing his PhD there. His doctoral work focuses on BlockReduce and related problems and spans machine learning, optimisation, software and hardware security, game theory, cryptography and distributed computing. He has also worked as a software engineer, contributing practical implementation experience to his research on scalable blockchain architectures.