
Get exclusive money-saving offers and guides
Straight to your inbox
We’re reader-supported and may be paid when you visit links to partner sites. We don’t compare all products in the market, but we’re working on it!
Scalability is one of the biggest challenges facing existing blockchain platforms. As bitcoin, Ethereum and a host of other big players continue to brainstorm and test scaling solutions, there are several new projects at varying stages of development designed to offer a much higher transaction throughput.
Zilliqa is one of those platforms. Billing itself as a “next-gen high throughput blockchain platform”, Zilliqa uses sharding in an effort to scale up to thousands of transactions per second.
So, how does it all work and does Zilliqa have what it takes to deliver the goods? Let’s take a closer look.
Zilliqa is a public blockchain platform designed to process thousands of transactions per second. One of the biggest problems facing many blockchain platforms is a lack of scalability – essentially, the larger a network gets, the harder it is to reach consensus, and the average per-second transaction rates of many cryptocurrencies leave a lot to be desired.
Through the use of sharding – dividing the network into several smaller component networks that can process transactions in parallel – Zilliqa’s transaction rate actually increases as the mining network expands. Theoretically, Zilliqa will be able to match and possibly even exceed Visa, the largest payment processor in the world.
The platform is also be designed to support smart contracts and dapps, allowing users to build and deploy decentralised exchanges, financial algorithms, high-performance scientific computing applications and more.
Other popular solutions under consideration to solve the blockchain scalability problem include moving some information off-chain, or increasing the block size. While they certainly offer improvements, they fall well short of offering the transaction throughput needed by the increasing number of applications built on smart contract platforms.
Zilliqa’s solution is to implement sharding, which basically takes a “divide and conquer” approach to scaling. There are multiple forms of sharding in Zilliqa – network sharding, transaction sharding and computational sharding – but network sharding is the most critical.
Network sharding involves dividing the Zilliqa network into separate groups of nodes, which are called shards. In practice, for security reasons, Zilliqa requires every shard to have at least 600 nodes.
However, for the sake of a simple explanation, let’s assume that if the network has 1,000 nodes, it can be divided into 10 shards that each consist of 100 nodes. Each shard can process transactions in parallel, so if one shard can process 20 transactions per second (hypothetically), then the powers of all shards combined can process 200 transactions per second.
And because these shards can process transactions in parallel, the more nodes that join the network, the more transaction throughput Zilliqa can handle.
Zilliqa’s network uses a hybrid consensus mechanism. Proof-of-work (PoW) is used to establish mining identities, to perform network sharding and to offer protection against so-called Sybil attacks (when malicious nodes create multiple identities and try to influence the decision-making process).
However, PoW is not used for consensus, and Zilliqa instead relies on a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (pBFT) protocol. Used within each shard, this mechanism offers higher throughput and also guarantees finality, with the last step of the protocol requiring nodes to sign that they have all seen and agreed on the block.
With the ability to process 8,000 transactions per second, Visa is the largest payment processor in the world. During testnet trials in April 2018, Zilliqa achieved speeds of up to 2,000 transactions per second.
At time of writing (November 2019) Zilliqa says it has achieved 2,828 transactions per second on its live network. As Zilliqa’s capacity is designed to increase in line with the size of the network, there is further room to grow.
By way of comparison, Ethereum currently handles roughly 15 transactions per second.
ZIL is the ticker symbol of Zilliqa’s native currency token, Zillings. ZIL tokens are used for mining rewards, transaction fees and smart contract execution.
A total of 21 billion ZIL were created, with 6.3 billion distributed during the platform’s January 2018 token generation event. A further 6.3 billion tokens were distributed to investors, Zilliqa Research, the founding team and other supporting organisations, with the remaining 8.4 billion ZIL to be released as mining rewards.
Zilliqa can trace its roots back to 2015, when some of its team members proposed the theory of sharding in an academic paper. The protocol has since been researched and developed through Anquan Capital Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based technology company.
The Zilliqa team is led by CEO Amrit Kumar. Most team members have a PhD in computer science or engineering, and the project’s list of advisors includes Kyber Network co-founder Loi Luu, founding partner of FBG Capital Vincent Zhou, and many more.
Zilliqa’s January 2018 token sale raised US$22 million in funding.
Zilliqa has secured several important partners, including:
Rather than storing your tokens on an exchange, which exposes you to the risk of hacking and theft, most users recommend moving your crypto holdings into a private wallet.
ZIL tokens are supported by a wide range of popular cryptocurrency wallets. Compare cryptocurrency wallets to find the one that's right for you.
2019 was a big year for Zilliqa, with the successful launch of the mainnet in Q1 of 2019.
Going forwards, the Zilliqa roadmap includes enhancements to the platform's native Scilla programming language, further evolutions of its core protocol and the addition of support for higher-level programming languages.
The launch of the Zilliqa mainnet demonstrated that the technology behind the network can perform in real world conditions. But there's still the not insignificant matter of the competition.
Ethereum has its own sharding plans and is also working on a number of other improvements to solve scalability bottlenecks, plus it has the advantage of being an established player. Other smart contract platforms like NEO, which claims to be able to process up to 1,000 transactions per second, could also limit Zilliqa’s adoption. There’s no shortage of other platforms with their own scaling solutions.
Zilliqa has proven itself to be a functional, high-scalability blockchain platform in real world conditions, but many of the speculators hoping that these successes would translate into large ZIL price gains have so far been disappointed.
With this in mind, make sure you do your own research before deciding whether or not you should buy any ZIL. The project’s whitepaper, position paper and mega FAQ are all excellent resources to help you understand the technology behind Zilliqa and the features it offers. But bear in mind that the cryptocurrency markets are highly unpredictable, and don't always perform the way you'd expect.
The economic landscape of Southeast Asia makes DeFi a necessity, and stablecoins help.
Read more…Aqilliz aims to help companies replicate the success of the Mindshare-PepsiCo trial with Zilliqa.
Read more…Decentralised and centralised fintech is coming together to shake up the payments landscape.
Read more…Images: Shutterstock
A step-by-step guide to buying, selling and trading the ZIL token. Learn where to buy it in Australia, how it works, ways to securely store it and things to consider before buying.