Zilliqa (ZIL) Blockchain: The Ultimate Guide to Sharding, High-Speed Transactions, and Enterprise Adoption

Zilliqa: Everything You Need to Know

Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. Sharding is a technique that divides the network into smaller groups of nodes called shards, each of which can process transactions in parallel. This way, the overall capacity of the network increases as more nodes join the network.

The platform is home to many decentralized applications, and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming. Staking is an eco-friendly way to earn rewards and power the network by locking up ZIL, the native utility token of Zilliqa. Yield farming is a way to earn more rewards by providing liquidity to various decentralized protocols running on Zilliqa.

Zilliqa also has its own smart contract language called Scilla, which is a peer-reviewed functional programming language that focuses on security and formal verification. Scilla enables developers to write smart contracts that can identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities, such as reentrancy attacks, before deployment.

Zilliqa aims to become the blockchain of choice for large-scale enterprise use, including among the advertising, gaming, entertainment and financial services and payments industries. In its 2018 position paper, its team states that the platform "aims to rival traditional centralized payment methods such as VISA and MasterCard".

How does Zilliqa work?

Zilliqa uses a hybrid consensus mechanism that combines proof-of-work (PoW) and practical Byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT). PoW is used only for node identity establishment and sybil resistance, while pBFT is used for reaching agreement on blocks. This way, Zilliqa reduces the energy consumption and latency of PoW, while maintaining its security guarantees.

Zilliqa also implements network sharding at the transaction level, meaning that transactions are assigned to different shards based on their sender’s address. Each shard then runs pBFT consensus to validate its own transactions, and the final block is composed of micro-blocks from each shard. The final block is then validated by a committee of nodes called DS (Directory Service) committee, which is also elected by PoW. The DS committee also coordinates the sharding process and assigns nodes to shards.

Zilliqa claims to be able to achieve a throughput of over 2,800 transactions per second with 6 shards and 3,600 nodes in its testnet5. As more nodes join the network, more shards can be created, and the throughput can scale linearly.

Who is behind Zilliqa?

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 alongside Max Kantelia, a lifelong finance and tech entrepreneur, and Juzar Motiwalla, former president of the Singapore Computer Society. The company incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017 to develop the Zilliqa network, bringing on Dong Xinshu as its CEO, Yaoqi Jia as its chief technology officer and Amrit Kumar as its chief scientific officer. All three previously worked as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.

Zilliqa also has a team of advisors that includes Alexander Lipton, a former managing director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and founder of Stronghold Labs; Loi Luu, co-founder and CEO of Kyber Network; Stuart Prior, a former director at HSBC Global Banking; Nicolai Oster, head of ICO at Bitcoin Suisse AG; and Evan Cheng, director of engineering at Facebook.

What are the use cases for Zilliqa?

Zilliqa has been developing partnerships and collaborations with various industry players to showcase its potential use cases. Some of them are:

Project Proton: A joint venture with Mindshare, a global media agency, to create a blockchain-based digital advertising platform that aims to improve transparency, efficiency and accountability in the online advertising industry.

Hg Exchange: A member-driven private investment exchange that leverages Zilliqa’s smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities, such as shares of Uber, Airbnb and SpaceX.

Xcademy: A YouTube plugin that allows content creators and viewers to monetize their videos through tokenization and gamification.

Unstoppable Domains: A service that allows users to create blockchain-based domain names that are censorship-resistant, self-custodial and can be used to receive cryptocurrency payments.

ZilSwap: A decentralized exchange protocol that enables users to swap ZIL and ZRC-2 tokens, provide liquidity and earn rewards.

Zeeves: A Telegram-based bot that allows users to access Zilliqa’s ecosystem, such as staking, gaming and tipping, through a simple and user-friendly interface.

Zilliqa also supports various initiatives and programs to foster its community and developer growth, such as ZILHive, a grants, education and incubation program; Zillacracy, a community-run platform for governance and innovation; and LearnScilla, an online course for learning Scilla.