Zilliqa

 

What is Zilliqa?  

• Zilliqa is a public blockchain platform that rely entirely on sharded network to process transactions. Each shards process transactions individually resulting in a minimum queue on the transaction broadcasted to the network that as a result improves the number of network performance (transaction per second).
• Zilliqa’s network is secured by a pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus mechanism. The pBFT is equipped with an elliptic-curve cryptography to provide security and allows for multisignatures. 
• Zilliqa developed its own programming language called Scilla (Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language) to improve security of the smart contract. The language is designed to limit attack exposure on the blockchain by eliminating certain known vulnerabilities directly at the language-level. Research paper about the language was accepted at the OOPSLA 2019 conference.
• Zilliqa network consists of 2,400 nodes that are spread across four different shards. Every transaction processed and broadcasted to the network needs to be validated by 600 nodes (¾ pBFT mechanism).       

Key Metrics

Ticker	ZIL
Asset Name	Zilliqa
Total Token Supply	21,000,000,000
Current Circulating Supply	See CoinMarketCap
Market Capitalisation	See CoinMarketCap
Token Creation Date	January 2018
Can it be mined?	No

Who is behind Zilliqa?  

Zilliqa is currently led by ex-Microsoft researcher Dr. Ben Livshits along with Dr. Amrit Kumar as President and Chief Scientific Officer who previously acted as Crypto Lead during Zilliqa early days in 2017 ICO. However, Zilliqa project was founded in 2017 by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Sexena also co-founded Anquan Capital who invested on ZIL token and is reported to still hold a significant amount of ZIL on their portfolio.

What is the purpose of Zilliqa?  

ZIL acted as the native token on the Zilliqa blockchain network with several utilities such as network transaction fees, staking mechanism, and incentives to reward nodes.

Insights 

• Zilliqa was among the first public chains to introduce and implement sharding mechanisms. And was developed from an academic environment meaning investors could consider that the technology implemented including the programming language was well researched and reviewed. 
• Zilliqa has been able to host 2,400 nodes since it’s mainnet launch in early 2019 until today. This is an important variable for investors to note considering not all scalable blockchains are decentralized by default. 
• With that scale of decentralization, Zilliqa network is charging its users a convenience transaction fee resulting in an impressive network usage statistic with more than 100,000 smart contracts deployed. However, recent public chain competition since 2021 makes the Zilliqa platform usage and adoption decrease.   

Risks

• There is a strong risk of rivalry from another public blockchain platform that also has a similar level of scalability.  
• Token economic design of ZIL relies on the network user adoption including staking, and usage of the platform. A decrease in users activities in the past few months could result in the risk of the platform economy and token being devalued.    

Disclaimer
All investments are speculative and involve substantial risk and uncertainty. Investors should understand the nature of digital assets including the terms of return and the risk of assets. We encourage investors to fully understand the assets and the risk associated with them before making any investment.