Zilliqa Project Update #27 — Entering A New Era
Happy Lunar New Year! As you already know, we went live with the first iteration of the Zilliqa Mainnet last week, where we became the first public blockchain in the world to implement sharding. The Zilliqa Mainnet is currently in bootstrap phase, whereby no transactions of value can be processed, so that we can increase the hashing power necessary to properly secure the network. You can read more about the details of the bootstrap phase here. Zilliqa is a new type of blockchain architecture that has never been publicly tested before, so we do expect some slight bugs along the way that we will also be adjusting during the bootstrap phase.
Mining on Zilliqa is now open to the public and is showing a healthy geographic distribution around the world. One of the features of Zilliqa is that you can dual-mine on our network alongside Ethereum. Check out our Github article or the mining channel on forum to learn more.
On February 1st we conducted a community AMA to answer questions from our community. We’re happy to report that we have compiled all of the questions and answers into one PDF available for viewing here.
We’re excited to begin on this new era of Zilliqa and we know that in many ways our work has just begun. As we fully ramp up our mainnet over the coming month we will begin testing some of the flagship applications that will run on our network, namely Project Proton and the recently announced Hg Exchange. Stay tuned.
As always, please feel free to connect with us in any of our social channels:
Discourse Forum: https://forum.zilliqa.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/zilliqachat
Slack: https://invite.zilliqa.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/zilliqa
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/zilliqa/
Github: https://github.com/Zilliqa/zilliqa
Gitter: https://gitter.im/Zilliqa/ (Dev-related topics including the Ecosystem Grant)
Upcoming Events
We are happy to share that we will be attending a slew of events across Asia, Europe, and the USA in the first half of the year, and will be adding more to this list as they get confirmed.
February
- ETHDenver | 15–17 February | Denver, CO
- Developer Week | 20–22 February | San Francisco, CA
We will be hosting a 2-hour developer workshop during this event, hope to see some of you there!
March
- Blockchain Technology World | 12–13 March | London, UK
- Token 2049 | 13–14 March | Hong Kong
- Money 20/20 Asia | 19–21 March | Singapore
April
- Paris Blockchain Week | 13–19 April | Paris, France
- FiNext Conference | 25–26 April | Singapore
May
- Consensus 2019 | 13–15 May | New York
Tech Updates
Notable Core Updates
In the final two weeks leading up to the mainnet launch, we were able to introduce more fixes — both functional and for security — that should further improve the reliability and performance of this revolutionary blockchain design.
Along the security front, we updated our cryptographic primitives in the Schnorr code to prevent situations where uninitialized key copying was previously allowed. Upon the recommendation of our contributors, we also (1) pended storage of the state deltas from the received Final Block until the state deltas were properly checked, and (2) added checks for the sender of consensus messages. Both code changes help prevent putting the node in a wrong state. Finally, we added more checks to our Protobuf serialization code to ensure that deserialization results are dutifully checked before being accessed.
There were some significant functional improvements as well, most of which were done in the area of transaction processing. First, we enforced checking on both the size of transaction packets as well as individual transactions. Additionally, we improved the node timing and checks (in particular, on the epoch number) for when transaction packets should be processed. Furthermore, it appeared that the DS committee was unable to share transactions within themselves when a view change had occurred. Also, upon double-checking our coinbase rewards algorithm, we noticed the lookup reward percentage was slightly off due to rounding errors. Both bugs have now been fixed. Finally, we have also added a target DS Block number as an alternative criterion to the difficulty level for when the blockchain will begin accepting transactions for processing.
Other noteworthy code changes include modifying the adjustment algorithm for the DS difficulty level to be based on the number of DS winners (instead of the size of the DS committee), adding missing PoW solutions proposed by the DS committee leader to the backup’s local PoW list (after verifying, of course), and stopping further PoW solution processing unnecessarily once DS Block consensus has already started.
Zilliqa in the News
A snapshot of coverage on our mainnet launch:
- Finder, Zilliqa mainnet launches into month-long bootstrap phase
- Crypto Briefing, Zilliqa CEO: Mainnet launch shows sharding works
- Ethereum World News, The Zilliqa (ZIL) mainnet is now Live and could soon implement zkSNARKs
- Invest in Blockchain, Zilliqa (ZIL) launches mainnet: First cryptocurrency to successfully implement sharding
- Crypto News, Zilliqa launches first public sharding blockchain
A snapshot of coverage on Zilliqa powering Hg Exchange:
- CoinDesk, New exchange claims it can tokenize shares of AirBnb, Uber, SpaceX (also on Yahoo! And Investing.com)
- Tech in Asia, Hg Exchange to launch blockchain-powered marketplace for startup shares
- Bitcoin Exchange Guide, Zilliqa and MaiCoin create new security token trading platform Hg Exchange to tokenize assets
Xinshu gives an in-depth interview, covering everything from our technology and mainnet, to how we’re engaging the community now and in the future:
