Zilliqa is a payment processing and decentralized application (DApp) platform using blockchain technology. What makes Zilliqa different from all the others in this space is that they have implemented a technology called sharding (think of broken glass shards as pieces of a whole pane). Sharding technology is the latest major solution for scaling blockchain services, and is under consideration to be adopted by Ethereum, but Zilliqa already has it.
Zilliqa started in June 2017. They released multiple versions of a test net, spending over a year in testing and revisions. Not rushing to the market has raised expectations and confidence in some, while growing doubt and impatience in others, as many less-complicated projects are quickly deployed in only a matter of months. It is expected that the final product will go live sometime in late 2018.
According to the development team, Zilliqa is not just capable of scaling, but increasing in speed as the network grows. Most other platforms have to constantly keep up with demand as their user base grows, but Zilliqa is built from the ground up to only improve and get faster as more people start using it. In ideal conditions, it could compete with the payment processing power of Visa and Mastercard, but with lower fees and without relying on a centralized network.
How do they do this? It’s very complicated, but to put it simply, tasks are distributed among each shard, which work together at the same time. The more shards you activate, the faster the work gets done.
This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you put it in the framework of implementing all of this on the blockchain, then things start to get tricky. A unique scripting language named Scilla had to be developed in order to be able to do all this.
Inbound transactions are sorted by a network handler called the DS Committee. It sorts transactions into microblocks and assigns them to a shard where the transactions are processed and then sent back to the DS Committee for consensus and then ultimately to be added into the final blockchain. Each shard consists of 600 network nodes.
DApps, and soon smart contracts, will run on Zilliqa’s platform. It is designed to handle the type of apps that would massively overload other blockchains. It can handle DApps that run scientific calculations, account reconciliation, payment networks, high-demand ticket sales, and more.
The consensus method used by Zilliqa is called the Elliptic Curve Based Schnorr Signature Algorithm (EC-Schnorr), which is a type of Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In addition, there is also a Proof-of-Work mechanism that prevents Sybil spoofing attacks, which are an attack where identities are forges in a peer-to-peer network. .
Interesting Facts:
● The test net currently has over 3600 nodes and is capable of over 2400 transactions per second, compared to Ethereum’s 15 per second.
● Zilliqa will need a lot of network nodes in order to reach great speeds. While Zilliqa’s test net only has around 3600 nodes, Bitcoin has 11,000 and Ethereum 25,000.
● Mining Zilliqa helps secure the network at a much lower cost (and profit) than other coins. Zillqa will use any one miner’s hardware at full capacity for only 12 hours a month. The rest of the time it remains mostly idle. This cycle is referred to as an “epoch.”
● Zilliqa raised $12M in funding from private investors, and easily hit its $20M hard cap during its ICO. Their total token supply is 12.6 billion tokens.
● The Zilliqa team is comprised of several PhD-level computer science professors and experienced financial services personnel from around the world.
Website: https://zilliqa.com/
Whitepaper: https://zilliqa.com/resources.html
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zilliqa/
