What is Zilliqa?

Zilliqa (ZIL) is a public, permissionless blockchain that aims to offer high throughput by completing thousands of transactions per second. It strives to address the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by utilizing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform hosts numerous decentralized applications and, as of October 2020, it also supports staking and yield farming. The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts. Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing, and developed by Zilliqa Research.

How does Zilliqa work?

Zilliqa operates on a sharded network, which it purports to be among the early public blockchains to do so. This allows it to aim for high throughput and a high rate of transactions per second, which it aims to use to address the scalability issue. As each shard processes transactions individually, the number of transactions that can be processed per second increases as the network grows and the number of shards increases. Records are immediately added to the Zilliqa blockchain after being processed, eliminating the need for additional time for confirmation. The Zilliqa network is secured through a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or pBFT, consensus protocol, which requires at least two-thirds of all nodes to agree that a record is accurate for it to be added to the blockchain.

What are the potential use cases for Zilliqa?

Zilliqa aims to be a preferred blockchain for large-scale enterprise use, including the advertising, gaming, entertainment, and financial services and payments industries. It seeks to be used for a wide range of applications, from simple computations such as search, sort, and linear algebra computations, to more complex computations such as training neural nets, data mining, financial modeling, scientific computing, and any MapReduce task. Zilliqa's new language, Scilla, is designed for its smart contracts and is intended to automatically identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities at the language level, making it easier to formally verify the safety of smart contracts through mathematical proofs.

What is the history of Zilliqa?

Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet. Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Saxena and several students in the School of Computing published a paper in 2016 that outlined how a sharding-focused blockchain could improve network efficiency and speed. Around the same time, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital, which incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017 to develop the Zilliqa network. The Zilliqa network has been active and running transactions each month.