Zilliqa

Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain designed to deliver high throughput, capable of handling thousands of transactions per second. It addresses the challenges of blockchain scalability and speed by utilizing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform supports numerous decentralized applications, and since October 2020, it has also offered staking and yield farming.

Development of Zilliqa began officially in June 2017, with its testnet launching in March 2018. Just over a year later, in June 2019, the mainnet was launched.

ZIL, the native utility token of Zilliqa, is utilized for processing transactions and executing smart contracts on the network.

Zilliqa was initially conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore's School of Computing. In 2016, Saxena, along with several students from the School of Computing, published a paper illustrating how a blockchain centered around sharding could enhance network speed and efficiency.

Around this period, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital with Max Kantelia, a seasoned finance and tech entrepreneur, and Juzar Motiwalla, the former president of the Singapore Computer Society. In June 2017, they established Zilliqa Research through Anquan Capital to further develop the Zilliqa network, appointing Dong Xinshu as CEO, Yaoqi Jia as chief technology officer, and Amrit Kumar as chief scientific officer. All three had previously served as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.

Zilliqa claims to be the first public blockchain entirely based on a sharded network. This design enables it to achieve high throughput and a rapid transaction rate per second, addressing scalability challenges. Each shard individually processes transactions, so as the network expands and the number of shards increases, the transaction capacity also grows. Additionally, transactions are immediately recorded on the Zilliqa blockchain after processing, eliminating the need for further confirmation time.

Zilliqa aims to become the preferred blockchain for large-scale enterprise applications, targeting industries like advertising, gaming, entertainment, and financial services and payments. According to their 2018 position paper, the platform aspires to compete with traditional centralized payment systems such as VISA and MasterCard.

Both Anquan Capital and Zilliqa Research, the entities behind Zilliqa's development, hold substantial reserves of ZIL.

By 2021, the Zilliqa network has become an active one, processing millions of transactions each month. The blockchain has also demonstrated significant scaling progress, evolving from producing over 900 blocks per day when the mainnet initially launched to over 2,500 blocks daily.

Zilliqa has a maximum supply cap of 21 billion tokens. Initially, ZIL was made available for sale as an ERC-20 token during a token generation event that wrapped up in January 2018. These tokens were later transferred to the Zilliqa mainnet through a token-swap event finalized in February 2020.

Prior to its launch, Zilliqa produced 60% of all tokens (12.6 billion ZIL) for distribution at the token generation event, while the remaining 40% (8.4 billion ZIL) will be created through mining. Ten percent of all tokens (2.1 billion ZIL) were set aside for Anquan Capital, 12% (2.52 billion ZIL) for Zilliqa Research, and 5% for current and future Zilliqa team members, with a distribution plan announced for quarterly releases over three years.

Zilliqa's design aims for all tokens to be mined within a decade, with block mining rewards gradually decreasing. According to the whitepaper, the goal is to have 80% of the tokens (16.8 billion ZIL) mined within the first four years, leaving 20% (4.2 billion ZIL) for the subsequent six years.

The security of the Zilliqa network relies on a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) consensus protocol, which requires at least two-thirds of the nodes to agree on the accuracy of a record before it is recorded on the blockchain. Each shard in the Zilliqa blockchain uses a node group to verify a subset of transactions, and once consensus is achieved within the shards, another node group confirms their collective results and adds a new block to the blockchain.

The network employs elliptic-curve cryptography to secure its consensus protocol and supports multisignatures. Alongside the pBFT consensus protocol that safeguards transaction records, Zilliqa also utilizes a proof-of-work algorithm to assign node identities and form shards.

Zilliqa introduced a novel programming language named Scilla for its smart contracts. Scilla, short for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language, is a safety-focused language designed to automatically detect and eliminate security flaws at the language level, making it easier to formally verify the safety properties of smart contracts using mathematical proofs.

Zilliqa's native token, ZIL, is available on several leading cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Huobi, Bitfinex, and Bithumb, allowing users to trade it against fiat currencies, stablecoins, and other cryptocurrencies.

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