Zilliqa is a blockchain company based in Singapore developed out of a thesis project written at the National Unversity of Singapore on Blockchain. In a Whitepaper in 2016, Prateek Saxena and Loi Luu shed light on the idea of sharding for use in blockchain infrastructure.
In June 2017, Amrit Kumar, Yaoqi Jia, and Xinshu Dong took it upon themselves to make this idea come reality. All of them have extensive experience in Computer Science and engineering. The PhD-bearing team convinced investors of the validity of their blockchain and raised 12 million ETH by the end of 2017. Thanks to the rise of the ETH price, they ended up with $20 million that was put to use to create Zilliqa.
In short, Zilliqa is a smart-contract network with sharded architecture that solves the scalability issues experienced on other blockchain networks such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
How Zilliqa works
Unlike other Blockchain networks where all nodes try to solve the same riddle to verify transactions, on Zilliqa, the network is divided into so-called shards. Each shard consists of a sub-set of randomly selected nodes who solve a portion of blocks in synch with other blocks.
Sharding is a database splitting method that’s commonly employed by blockchain developers to increase scalability. Ethereum plans to implement sharding once it’s successfully moved to Proof-of-Stake, some time in 2022.
That’s similar to splitting a big group into smaller teams to work on a bigger task — we all know that brainstorming in a big group can consume a lot of time with little outcome. Similarly, splitting transaction load across shards makes things quicker and more efficient. It also allows for scalability: the more nodes join the network, the more shards are created, and the more transactions can be executed. The network throughput increases linearly as the network expands.
Sharding also enables Zilliqa to strike the difficult balance between security, decentralization, and scalability — three concepts that together are often described as a trilemma in the blockchain.
To achieve excellent working of the native blockchain, the network relies on two different layers:
- Shard layer: this is the layer that acts as a preparation layer for the formation of blocks. Shard nodes process micromodules and only require access to a limited amount of data. Therefore, they don’t need to connect with other shards. Once micro modules have been processed, they’re moved to the next layer.
- DS layer: On the DS layer, a DS committee consisting of a set of randomly chosen nodes joins macroblocks to form a single block and decides if it’s true or not. The DS layer has direct access to the main chain and can make final decisions.
Consensus
Zilliqa builds consensus with a hybrid of Proof of Work and practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance.
Proof-of-Work is used to establish mining identities and to divide the network into shards. It also protects the platform from Sybil attacks — attacks where a malicious node creates various identities and tries to stir decisions a certain way. However, Proof-of-Work is energy-intensive for building consensus, which is why, Zilliqa relies on practical BFT (pBFT), guaranteeing higher throughput and finality.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance is based on the Byzantine general’s problem in 1982 by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. In the thought experiment, a group of several generals is surrounding a city. They can either all attack the city or all retreat — however, they must coordinate their action because problems will arise if they fail to do so.
To communicate, they only have one messenger through whom they can send one message at a time. It’s also a possibility that some generals might act disloyally.
Based on that, byzantine fault tolerance describes the ability of a protocol to still function despite disagreement. On Zilliqa, pBFT, an optimized version of BFT, focuses on providing a technical stack that tolerates malicious actors by assuming independent node failures. It’s a more energy-efficient way to verify blocks and, unlike Bitcoin, results in transaction finality.
If you ever sent a transaction on Bitcoin or Ethereum, the chances are that you’d have to wait through several block confirmations before you receive your money. On Zilliqa, each block added is final. Therefore, you won’t have to wait for further confirmations.
dApps and Token
As a native blockchain, Zilliqa has developed its own programming language: Scilla. Scilla is safe by design and enables developers to create safer smart contracts. The name is short for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level language.
Developers building decentralized Apps on Zilliqa benefit from safety and high scalability.
The native token of Zilliqa is called ZIL. It’s used to pay for transactions, execution of smart contracts, and mining rewards.
With scalability issues plaguing other networks and popular chains such as Binance Smart Chain lacking an element of decentralization, Zilliqa could capture more demand, especially from sectors such as gaming.
Zilliqa is now trading on FMFW.io with BTC and USDT pairs.
