Hello crypto nation, I’m Kris with Exodus, and it’s time to jump in the deep end
as we take an in-depth look at Zilliqa.
For those of you who like to read, click the link above to visit the Exodus blog for a
breakdown of the Zilliqa coin and mainnet.
And now let’s answer the question, “What is Zilliqa?”
Zilliqa is a public blockchain platform introduced in 2017 and founded by a team of academics,
entrepreneurs and engineers from the National University of Singapore. The platform has so far
found real-world usability in various industries such as finance, digital advertising and gaming.
The Zilliqa blockchain has a utility token called Zilling, no relationship to shilling, or ZIL for
short. It is used within the Zilliqa ecosystem as gas to execute smart contracts, as rewards
for miners and to pay network transaction fees. Before we dive deeper into the Zilliqa ecosystem
and what makes it unique, for all you ZIL investors out there, let’s do the numbers
Zilliqa was reported to raise $20 million dollars in private funding and another $2 million dollars
during the one-week ICO for the company’s ZIL token from 27 Dec 2017 to 4 Jan 2018. The ZIL
token achieved its All-Time-High of $0.2303 on May 10 2018 and has a circulating supply of 11 billion
coins and a maximum supply of 21 billion coins. Are you a long-term holder of ZIL? Let us
know in the comments why and what your future Zilliqa price prediction is.
So what makes Zilliqa unique in the cryptocurrency universe? Two words: Sharding and Scilla.
Zilliqa’s mainnet went live in January 2019, becoming the world’s first public
blockchain platform to successfully utilize sharding to effectively scale its network.
Sound familiar? Well if you haven’t heard of sharding,
it’s the process of fracturing a network of blockchain nodes into different groups
called shards. Take for an example a network of 1,000 nodes. Zilliqa would divide the
network into 10 shards each with 100 nodes. Every shard processes a small portion of all
transactions simultaneously and in parallel with other shards. This is called a microblock.
These microblocks are then merged into one complete block and added to the blockchain.
Due to the parallel transaction processing, if each shard can process 10 transactions per second,
then all shards together can process 100 transactions per second.
Now for security reasons, a shard must be sufficiently large with more than 600 nodes
to lower the probability of having a fraction of up to 1/3 of the shard being malicious.
With a shard size of 600 nodes, the probability of such is 1 in a million.
With sharding, Zilliqa is able to solve the blockchain trilemma of scalability,
privacy and decentralization. Scalability remains one of the biggest challenges of
public blockchain platforms with current platforms unable to scale at large to handle an increase in
network size. The Zilliqa blockchain is able to scale almost linearly as the network grows,
meaning that the potential to process a greater amount of transactions
increases as the number of participating nodes in the network increases.
Anybody up for a flash mob?
In a recent trial run, Zilliqa reached near 2,500 transactions per second using 6 shards with a
total of 3,600 nodes. This is in comparison to Bitcoin’s 4-7 transactions per second and
Ethereum’s 7-15 transactions per second. In fact, Zilliqa is out to take on payment systems like
Visa and MasterCard’s average transaction rate of 8,000 transactions per second.
Another area that Zilliqa achieves greater efficiency is in its consensus protocol.
Like Bitcoin, Zilliqa uses the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol,
but only to establish initial mining identities and to defend against
sybil attacks. Any new node who wishes to join the Zilliqa network has to first perform a PoW
as an entry ticket to the network. This gets a little complex here.
In order to give finality to transactions, Zilliqa moves away from PoW, and uses an optimized
practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol, which delivers the following benefits.
A byzantine fault tolerant system basically means that if there is a malicious actor in the system
then the system is actually protected from those malicious actors trying to take over the network
pBFT enables: Finalized transactions with no
need for multiple confirmations; no waiting period Higher energy efficiency as consensus is reached
without requiring intensive computations Incentivization of every node with greater
payout and lower reward variance Unlike PoW, pBFT does not require
the entire transaction history to be saved on the blockchain, thus improving
storage requirements. Zilliqa is currently exploring decentralized cloud storage network
options to further optimize their storage. Zilliqa as a whole is less energy intensive,
requiring about one third of the energy required by blockchains using PoW as
a consensus protocol. Only 1 minute out of every 2-3 hours is needed to mine ZIL, allowing miners
to dual mine or triple mine other chains at the same time and optimize their earnings.
Recently, Zilliqa has added staking to further
incentivize the network. Staking opens up Zilliqa’s seed nodes to the public,
increasing the network’s decentralization and creating more utility for the ZIL token.
Well here’s a fun fact. Zilliqa comes from the word
‘silica’. Just as silicon is used to power computers around the world,
Zilliqa is gearing up to power the next generation of decentralized apps around the world.
Zilliqa has its own smart contract language,
Scilla or Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language.
Scilla is said to be easier to understand and more
secure by addressing known security vulnerabilities of other languages.
Only time will tell if Zilliqa has what it takes to compete with the likes of Ethereum,
EOS, Algorand and well,
there’s a lof of projects out there trying to knock Ethereum from its smart contract throne.
Polkadot anyone?
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