What is Zilliqa (ZIL)?

Zilliqa is a layer 1 blockchain permissionless built to deliver high transaction performance, strong security, and low transaction fees, enabling Web3 applications across a multitude of industries and providing a powerful, accessible platform for everyone from emerging developers to established enterprises.

It pioneered the use of sharding technology to improve scalability and transaction speed. This technique divides the network into several smaller segments, or “shards,” that allow transactions to be processed in parallel, significantly increasing performance without sacrificing security. Her custom programming language, Scilla, is designed to facilitate the development of secure and efficient smart contracts.

Zilliqa was conceptualized by a team of academics and computer scientists from the National University of Singapore, led by Prateek Saxena, Xinshu Dong and Amrit Kumar. The project was started at the NUS School of Computing and launched its mainnet in January 2019. The Zilliqa ICO in 2017 was a success, raising around $22 million, demonstrating the strong community interest in the innovative sharding technology. .

Furthermore, Max Kantelia He is a co-founder of Zilliqa. As a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience building technology products and services companies in Europe, the United States and Asia for the financial services industry, Max was selected by EY as one of the top 100 FinTech contributors of Asia in 2016.

Zilliqa Goals

Zilliqa's main goal is to overcome the scalability issues faced by other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. To do this, it seeks to provide a viable solution for applications that require high performance, such as games, financial services and advertising. Zilliqa focuses on being a secure and efficient platform for developers and companies looking to build dApps and decentralized services.

Zilliqa achieves this by making use of sharding to process large numbers of transactions in parallel, allowing for a high volume of transactions per second. In addition, it currently incorporates a hybrid consensus mechanism that combines Proof of Work (PoW) and Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), which guarantees security and efficiency.

Additionally, thanks to the use of the Scilla programming language, Zilliqa manages to provide its users and developers with advanced options for the development of decentralized applications (dApps), with extensive optimization for the security of smart contracts.

How does Zilliqa work?

Zilliqa stands out for two key innovations:

Sharding, the key to scalability

When we talk about Zilliqa being scalable and fast, we are not talking about magic solutions, but rather an engineering solution developed for this purpose, a solution that is based on sharding. Let us remember that sharding is a scaling solution for blockchain networks that involves dividing the network into smaller partitions, known as fragments. Each shard processes a subset of transactions, enabling parallel transaction processing and increasing overall network capacity.

Well, Zilliqa has implemented sharding on its network in order to address scalability issues commonly found in blockchain networks. This solution works as follows:

• Network Sharding. First, the Zilliqa network is divided into smaller groups of nodes, each of which forms a shard. If there are 1000 nodes, these could be split into 10 shards with 100 nodes each. Each shard processes transactions independently, enabling parallel processing and increasing transaction throughput.
• Transaction sharding. In this case, transactions are assigned to shards based on the sender address. This ensures that each shard handles a portion of the network transactions, further improving performance.
• Computational sharding. Additionally, Zilliqa also employs computational sharding, where the computation required for smart contracts is distributed among the shards.

This first stage allows Zilliqa to be able to divide its work between different nodes, to then organize all that work and continue building the blockchain history necessary for the network to function correctly. Thanks to this, Zilliqa is able to handle large volumes of transactions quickly, guaranteeing access to computing resources to its users regardless of the number of transactions and congestion generated within the network.

Proof of Work and PBFT, the consensus within Zilliqa

Of course, splitting the network makes organizing work between all its parts complex, and to solve that problem, Zilliqa uses a solution that is both innovative and proven. First of all, Zilliqa's consensus algorithm uses two tools that we already know:

• Proof of Work or Proof of Work. In this case, Zilliqa relies on the ETHhash algorithm, the same one that once supported Ethereum mining, and in which you can participate openly with a GPU miner.
• Proof of Stake using a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) model

This hybrid scheme allows Zilliqa to use Proof of Work (PoW) to establish node identities and prevent Sybil attacks, and at the same time, achieve consensus within each shard using PBFT, ensuring fast transaction finality and low energy footprint.

However, with the arrival of Zilliqa V2, some changes are coming to this system that will affect the Proof of Stake part of Zilliqa. The change, more than anything, will provide greater speed to Zilliqa, since the PBFT algorithm will be changed to Fast-HotStuff, the latter is a derivative of HotStuff, a BFT algorithm that has given life to blockchain projects such as Diem/Libra and Aptos, for example. name a few. Either way, this will be a huge step forward in Zilliqa's scalability, because Fast-HotStuff can easily handle over 100k transactions per second, compared to the 10k that PBFT can safely handle.

Scilla, a tailored language for Zilliqa

Another important part of how Zilliqa works is its programming language, Scilla. Scilla (acronym for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level LAnguage) is a programming language of smart contracts that has been developed specifically for the Zilliqa blockchain. Scilla is a functional language inspired by OCaml (which is also a very secure and formally verifiable language), making it suitable for formal verification and security of smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain.

Thanks to this, developers have taken special care not only when creating structures that facilitate the development of smart contracts, but they have maintained a high level of security in their implementation, thus preventing small errors from becoming real catastrophes for decentralized applications. that are deployed. This has made it possible to eliminate certain known vulnerabilities directly at the language level, making applications less prone to attacks.

In addition to this, Scilla is developed along with the formalization of its semantics and its integration into the Coq testing assistant. Coq is an advanced tool for mechanized testing of program properties, based on type-dependent theory. It has been successfully used to implement certified compilers, concurrent and distributed applications, including blockchains.

The ZIL token

ZIL is the Zilliqa native token and is used to execute smart contracts, reward miners and staking. In addition, it acts as a medium of exchange to cover the costs of transactions on the network. Users can participate in the governance of the platform by staking ZIL, giving them voting power in ecosystem decisions.

The tokenomics of this cryptocurrency is made up of several key aspects:

Initial Distribution of ZIL Token

• The initial launch of the ZIL token occurred on August 31, 2017.
• The initial distribution of ZIL is divided as follows:
  • 30.00% is allocated to Early and Community Contributions.
  • 40.00% is allocated to Mining Rewards.
  • 30.00% is allocated to the Company, Team and Agencies.
• Maximum Supply and Emission Schedule:
  • The maximum supply of ZIL is limited to 21.000.000.000 tokens.
  • Zilliqa has followed an inflationary issuance model since its genesis.
  • ZIL supply is expected to be fully purchased by June 2029.

In short, ZIL is used to pay transaction fees and the execution of smart contracts on the Zilliqa network. Additionally, users can stake their ZIL tokens to become node operators, validating transactions and maintaining network security. Its tokenomics reflects a focus on scalability, security, and active community participation.

Projects built on Zilliqa

All this development behind Zilliqa has meant that more than 250 projects have a space on the Zilliqa blockchain as their home. Applications ranging from Web3 games, to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, to the metaverse. Prominent projects like ZilSwap, a decentralized exchange platform, and various applications in the NFT space, are just a few examples of Zilliqa's broad utility as a blockchain.

In fact, some notable projects built on the Zilliqa platform include:

• XSGD: A stablecoin backed by Singapore dollars.
• UnstoppableDomains: Offers decentralized domains on the Zilliqa blockchain.
• Moonlet: A cryptocurrency wallet for Zilliqa and other networks.
• Carbon – A well-known staking platform based on Zilliqa.

Zilliqa continues to innovate and expand its ecosystem. Improvements in performance and security are expected with the arrival of Zilliqa V2, as well as the development of new dApps and services by the community. In conclusion, Zilliqa is presented as a robust and cutting-edge solution in the world of blockchains, offering superior performance and a focus on security and scalability. With a strong community and a very active development team.