So what's next for this coin?
Survival like any other altcoin
no seriously, I had in mind of getting in touch with quark-algo coins to see if we can potentially merge mine, however there are only 2 potential candidates in quarkbar and animecoin and unfortunately their communities combined are not that strong either so even if we do merge mine with them it won't account for that much more security so it seems rather pointless at the moment.
In regards to actual development, last time I heard from Max he said he's going to take a look implementing the message feature for our core wallet, the discussion was public on quarktalk. It would be cool if we could send encrypted messages from our wallets but I don't have a timeframe for this or if he's actually working on it. We should however have a stable version of Quark 0.9 released by the end of year, whether Max will implement the messaging functionality in that release remains to be seen.
As far as coin adoption there is no progress as far as I know, we have no one to get in touch with merchants, we have no one promoting quark at crypto meetings around the world, we have no representative to get in touch with press(I had hoped that Julie would take that role but I haven't heard from her in a while so I doubt she's going to do it anyways). The ones that I personally contacted said that they will look into adding quark but because there are so few requesting it I don't see them accepting it anytime soon. We are being taken out of exchanges due to low volume, latest one being Vaultofsatoshi but we can't control that and there are too many exchanges anyways.
The positive news is that we have a good community forming at quarktalk and there are some projects going on, things are slowly but steadily progressing and hopefully more quarkers will join and start supporting them with anything they can(ideas/funding/promotion/etc).