Altcoin News: Is Ethereum (ETH) Too Late? Zilliqa Mainnet Shows That Sharding Works
February 1st, 2019 by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
Yesterday’s launch of Zilliqa (ZIL) Mainnet was announced as the first successful implementation of sharding technology in a blockchain.
The Zilliqa-Mainnet went online on January 31st at 16:00 GMT. It includes a host of new features, including sharding — a scaling solution — used for both regular payment transactions and smart contract transactions.
The Singapore-based project has slowly evolved over the past 18 months, initially as an Ethereum-based test network and now as a dedicated blockchain network. Although the introduction of the Mainnet was originally planned for the third quarter of 2018, Zilliqa has postponed it to the day before. Already in November, the third version of the Testnet was published.
Zilliqa Mainnet shows — Sharding works
A concept that began in academic work, Zilliqa — a play-on-word about “silica” — developed primarily as an implementation of the sharding technology.
Sharding effectively splits the workload of blockchain transactions. Nodes create consensus in smaller groups and make transactions faster and cheaper than if they were processed by the entire network.
Zilliqa’s development team announced back in April that the network can handle up to 2,000 transactions per second (TPS). That’s much more than Bitcoin with 7 TPS or Ethereum without Sharding with 15 TPS. The network’s own, fail-safe Scilla ‘Smart Contracts can also use sharding.
Is Ethereum too late for the party?
In a statement addressed to the crypto media, Zilliqa CEO and co-founder Xinshu Dong said this morning’s release was the first introduction of sharding: an important milestone in the scalability of blockchains.
“Today, we are taking a leap towards our vision of enabling innovative blockchain-powered solutions to real-world problems,” Dong wrote. “With this launch, Zilliqa is now the first public blockchain platform to successfully implement sharding, to address one of the biggest challenges to mainstream blockchain adoption — scalability.”
Many developers from the Ethereum community are currently working to implement sharding on Ethereum as part of the Casper protocol. However, the whole thing will take some time, as Casper is not expected until 2020, according to the current state.
It remains to be seen whether Ethereum will be relevant until then. Recently, more and more dApps have been overflowing on TRON. With the successful mainnet launch of Zilliqa, the blockchain could also be particularly attractive to many dApp developers thanks to its sharding implementation.
Author: Marko Vidrih
Follow us on Twitter, InvestFeed, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and join our Discord and Telegram.
Altcoin Magazine is a popular destination for cryptocurrency enthusiasts and blockchain researchers. We strive to become the largest, most accessible and easy to read a magazine full of news, articles, videos, and podcasts and will be the go-to place for monitoring of coins, crypto companies, projects, products, events, advisors and much, much more.
Read about our upcoming Altcoin Magazine Mastermind Event here.
