What is Zilliqa?
Find out more about Zilliqa, the smart contract platform that’s solving the blockchain trilemma, in our “What Is Zilliqa” guide.
Covered:
- What is Zilliqa?
- Who Created Zilliqa?
- How It Works?
- What Is ZIL?
What is Zilliqa?
Zilliqa is a smart contract platform that is permissionless and public. Employing the use of its sharded architecture, Zilliqa is among those blockchain networks that aim to solve the blockchain trilemma. Primarily the project is focused on addressing the limitations in scalability faced by most blockchain networks. It allows multiple concurrent chains to verify and execute transactions, thus increasing the speed and overall capacity of the network.
Launched in 2017, by a team of researchers from the National University of Singapore, its founders claim that Zilliqa can have a transaction speed around a thousand times faster than Ethereum. It is one of the world’s first blockchain networks with a sharded architecture. In addition to its unique sharding mechanism, Zilliqa also employs the use of a hybrid consensus mechanism. It is a combination of Proof-of-Work (PoW), and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT).
Who Created Zilliqa?
A team comprising Xinshu Dong, Yaoqi Jia, Amrit Kumar, and Prateek Saxena founded Zilliqa in 2017. All of them were researchers at the National University of Singapore at the time. The primary objective of the team was to create a product capable of processing smart contracts at scale, without compromising n core blockchain principles like decentralization. Sharding was deemed to be the appropriate technique to achieve this objective. Hence Zilliqa brings the theory of sharding into practice through its protocol in order to address the problem of scalability.
The project was incorporated in June 2017, under the name Zilliqa Research. The White Paper was released in August of the same year. Zilliqa is created using its own proprietary programming language called Scilla. In January of 2018, the source code of Zilliqa was released, and at the end of the year in November, the Final testnet was launched. The mainnet of the network was formally launched in January of 2019.
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How It Works?
The most prominent feature of Zilliqa is its reliance on sharding technology to provide an answer for high congestion. To put it simply, sharding is when a network is divided into different clusters of nodes. These clusters of nodes are known as shards and they have the ability to process transactions simultaneously. Therefore, instead of the whole network processing one transaction, different shards process multiple transactions in parallel. The higher the number of shards there are in the network, the greater is its transaction speed.
One of the most common concerns with sharding technology has been the difficulty of reaching consensus. In traditional blockchain networks like Bitcoin, the agreement of half the nodes is required for the verification of a transaction. Such an arrangement would be quite cumbersome on a sharded network in which the nodes are scattered across multiple shards. Luckily Zilliqa has a remedy for this problem. Its hybrid consensus mechanism delegates the verification of transactions to the shard level. This means that individual shards can not only process but also verify transactions. Furthermore, Zilliqa has added a second layer to the verification process to ensure its validity. This second layer consists of a group of nodes known as the directory service (DS) committee. The DS committee has access to the entire blockchain, and can easily confirm if verification is valid.
Zilliqa has also partnered with Chainlink to provide access to real-world data. This will be achieved through the use of Oracles. These oracles shall allow the Zilliqa smart contracts to import data from beyond their own network. Similarly, this also provides an added layer of security to the network. Since the data will be provided by multiple nodes, hence there will be no central point of attack or failure.
What is ZIL?
ZIL is the native token of the Zilliqa platform. It has several utilities in the network which include the ability to execute smart contracts, pay transaction fees, and as rewards for the miners. In the future, it is also intended to be used as a governance token. Initially launched as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, the token was later swapped to the Zilliqa network after the launch of its mainnet. More than $22 million were raised in the first public sale of ZIL from December 2017 to January 2018. Only members of the Zilliqa Slack or Telegram groups who had been members before November 29, 2017, were allowed to participate in this sale.
The total supply of ZIL is capped at 21 billion. The platform periodically releases more ZIL into circulation in the form of rewards for the miners and the stakers. 40% of the total supply of ZIL has been reserved for the miners.
Concerns
The primary concern with Zilliqa is the same that is everpresent for all projects that are looking to solve the blockchain trilemma. The main problem faced by all these so-called ‘Ethereum Killers’ is the enormous level of competition. The project that emerges successfully from amongst all this competition is likely to wipe out all others. Even Ethereum itself after Ethereum 2.0 may spell the end for all these upstart projects. Another concern is that most new projects prefer Proof-of-Stake (PoS) over Proof-of-Work (PoW) citing it as much more efficient. Zilliqa uses a hybrid PoW consensus mechanism, and it remains to be seen if it will remain successful in the long term.
Where To Buy ZIL?
You can purchase ZIL through KuCoin exchange, similar to how you would buy another cryptocurrency. You can either place a market buy or a limit buy. With a limit buy, you determine the price you are willing to pay, and your order gets filled once the token price reaches your limit price. If you want to get your hands on the token quickly, you can place a market order, where you agree to pay the current price and have your order filled almost immediately. If you are interested in purchasing ZIL, you can do so by visiting KuCoin, Gate.io, or Binance.US.
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