Your Quai wallet's address belongs to one of 9 Zones (each under one of 3 Regions) on the Quai network. While processing of transactions is isolated between zones, it's possible to send assets from one zone to another. When sending, you don't have to worry or do anything special. Simply enter the destination address and amount. Koala Wallet will take care of figuring out if the Zone or Region is different or not, and handle everything automatically. You can read more about Quai's shard hierarchy here.
The first two characters of an address (ignoring the "0x" prefix) define which Region and Zone the address belongs to according to the table below.
Region 1 (Cyprus) 00 - 57 |
Region 2 (Paxos) 58 - AB |
Region 3 (Hydra) AC - FF |
||||||
Cyprus 1 00 - 1D |
Cyprus 2 1E - 3A |
Cyprus 3 3B - 57 |
Paxos 1 58 - 73 |
Paxos 2 74 - 8F |
Paxos 3 90 - AB |
Hydra 1 AC - C7 |
Hydra 2 C8 - E3 |
Hydra 3 E4 - FF |
Example: address 0xA6B3...23A0 belongs to the 3rd zone of the Paxos Region (Paxos 3) because its first two characters "A6" are in the 90 - AB hexadecimal range.
Transaction completion time
The way Quai was designed, transactions will take longer to show up at the destination depending if the source and destination addresses are in the same Zone or Region. Even though Koala Wallet does everything for you, it may be useful to know how long you can expect the transaction to be completed.
Transactions to and from the same zone complete within seconds.
Example: 0x3FA2... → 0x40C5...
Transactions to a different zone in the same region must first be included in that region's controller shard before confirming at the destination. This add fees and completion time, and can take a few minutes.
Example: 0x03CC... → 0x3991...
Sending to a different region requires the transaction to be included in the Region and Prime shards before it travels back down the hierarchy to the destination zone. This can increase the completion time to dozens of minutes.
Example: 0x61F0... → 0xC9CB...
If you have balances in multiple shards, Koala Wallet allows you to choose which one to send from. You may choose one that will finalize faster according to the destination address.
In any case, as stated, this entire process is automatic. Any multi-stage transaction requires no special action from the sender. If your transaction is taking longer than expected to confirm, most likely it's cross-zone. You don't have to do anything except be patient.
If the transaction hasn't finalized after more than 2 hours, a technical problem may have occurred. In this case please open a support ticket explaining the issue and including the transaction ID and involved addresses so we can check.