Zilliqa Review: Beginners guide
Zilliqa (ZIL): A dApp platform built to scale
Industry type: Decentralised Applications.
What is Zilliqa? Zilliqa is the world’s first high-throughput decentralised applications (dApp) platform that is designed to scale simultaneously with growing demand. Started in 2016 and based in Singapore, Zilliqa is focused on providing industries with high transactions rate requirements such as insurance, online auctions, computer science, and advertising.
What gives it value?
- It is built to scale to growing demand.
- dApp developers can build their applications on the network.
- It is built specifically for dApps that require high transaction rates.
- It has a capped supply of 21 billion ZIL tokens.
Interesting Technology:
- Network sharding is the secret ingredient behind Zilliqa’s ability to scale to demand. It does this by dividing the system into small groups (shards) that process batches of micro-blocks separately rather than a single block together. Once all shards have processed their micro-block, the information is merged into a single block and secured on the blockchain. As the network grows, shards are further and further divided and so achieving scalability on demand.
- Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is the algorithm used by sharded nodes to find consensus on the blockchain. BFT requires ⅔ of nodes to agree on the ‘truth’ across the entire network.
- Scilla is the coding language used to write smart contracts. In the past, smart contracts have been known to suffer from a severe lack of security, the Zilliqa team, on the other hand, claims that Scilla is resistant to bugs.
- Transactions are processed and the blockchain is built with the proof of work (POW) algorithm. Because miners are grouped into shards, POW becomes much more efficient than in other settings.
- Zillica is an ERC20 based Ethereum token until its mainnet is launched in late 2018.
Notable team:
- Xinshu Dong is the CEO of Zilliqa. Dong has an extensive history working with software systems security, including defences against threats to web applications, web browsers, mobile platforms, and cyber-physical systems.
- Prateek Saxena is the co-founder of Zilliqa and chief scientific advisor. Saxena is also the co-founder of Aquan, a company building high velocity distributed ledgers and trusted computing platforms for financial markets.
- Liu Haichuan is a core developer for Zilliqa who has experience in working with unmanned vehicles and mobile applications.
Notable partnerships:
- FBG capital is a leading digital asset management firm is investing in Zilliqa and acting as an advisor to help it gain commercial and financial adoption.
- Bluezelle is a developing decentralised storage solution made specifically for dApps in the future. Zilliqa has partnered with Bluezelle and will use its storage facilities for its dApps.
- Mindshare is a global media and marketing services company that has partnered with Zilliqa to address fake news advertising and data privacy.
- Spokkz, a community-powered film and television blockchain project that has partnered with Zilliqa to use its network. Spuul, the creator of Spokkz is an over the top (OTT) provider with over 60 million users in 180 countries.
Zilliqa Review: The Good
- They are already achieving 2488 transactions per second on the testnet.
- It provides services to industries that require a high-throughput including, advertising, auctions, scientific computing, and insurance.
- Its Scilla smart contract language is resistant to bugs.
- Through sharding, it scales to demand. Also, as POW miners are collected into smaller shards it is far more energy efficient than most other POW systems.
- With Byzantine Fault Tolerance and POW, the network will be very secure and offer competitive transactions fees.
Zilliqa Review: The Not So Good
- Due to its high throughput, it may run into issues with storage.
- Its new Scilla smart contract language is not universal and may put developers off from using it for want of a more common coding language.
- It has a lot of competition in dApp platforms and will need to capture real adoption to own a market share.
Future Roadmap:
- The Mainnet will be launched in September 2018.
CONCLUSION:
Whilst many dApp networks are wrestling with ways to solve scalability issues Zilliqa will be launching with facilities to scale on demand. As it may take years for other networks to solve the issue, Zilliqa may be at an advantage if it is able to gain adoption. Considering that its testnet can process over 2000 transactions per second it appears that it has good working technology. Like all other competing dApp platforms though, Zilliqa will need to gain market substantial adoption and favour in order to give value to its promises.
Zilliqa Price:
The current Zilliqa price, market cap and charts.
Local exchanges:
Coinspot: www.coinspot.com.au
Overseas exchanges:
Huobi: www.huobi.com
Binance: www.binance.com
KuCoin: www.kucoin.com
Where to store this crypto:
Hardware wallet: www.bitgear.com.au
Desktop wallet: www.exodus.io
Online wallet: https://www.myetherwallet.com/
Mobile wallet: https://enjinwallet.io/
Similar coins:
Ethereum (ETH) – The most popular dApp platform.
Ethereum Classic (ETC) – The original dApp platform.
EOS (EOS) – 2nd generation dApp platform.
Cardano (ADA) – 3rd generation dApp platform.
Further information:
Whitepaper: https://docs.zilliqa.com/whitepaper.pdf
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/zilliqa/
Website: https://zilliqa.com/