What is Zilliqa?
Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform is home to many decentralized applications , and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet. The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.
Who are the founders of Zilliqa?
Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Saxena and several students in the School of Computing published a paper in 2016 that outlined how a sharding-focused blockchain could improve network efficiency and speed.
Around the same time, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital alongside Max Kantelia, a lifelong finance and tech entrepreneur, and Juzar Motiwalla, former president of the Singapore Computer Society. The company incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017 to develop the Zilliqa network, bringing on Dong Xinshu as its CEO, Yaoqi Jia as its chief technology officer and Amrit Kumar as its chief scientific officer. All three previously worked as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.
At present, Amrit Kumar is president, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Zilliqa.
How many Zilliqa coins (ZIL) are there in circulation?
Zilliqa has a fixed maximum supply of 21 billion tokens. ZIL was first made available for sale as an ERC-20 token as a part of a token generation event that concluded in January 2018. The tokens were subsequently transferred to the Zilliqa mainnet in a token-swap event that concluded in February 2020.
Before launching, Zilliqa generated 60% of all tokens (12.6 billion ZIL) to be distributed at the token generation event, and the remaining 40% (8.4 billion ZIL) will be created through the mining process. Ten percent of all tokens (2.1 billion ZIL) were reserved for Anquan Capital, 12% (2.52 billion ZIL) for Zilliqa Research, and 5% for contemporary and future Zilliqa team members all of which were announced to be distributed quarterly over a three-year period.
Zilliqa is designed such that all tokens will be minted within 10 years, with the block mining reward slowly decreasing. According to its whitepaper , the project aims to have 80% of the tokens (16.8 billion ZIL) mined within the first four years and 20% (4.2 billion ZIL) in the remaining six years.
What is network sharding?
Zilliqa network uses a concept called Sharding where the transactions are grouped into smaller groups and divided among the miners for the parallel transactional verification. Developing smaller groups for transactional verification means the Consensus can be reached faster and hence a higher number of transactions can be processed in a given time frame. The capacity of the network linearly increases in other cryptocurrencies as the number of people joins the network, but in this case, the capacity is increased at a higher variable rate than the number of members joining the network.
By incorporating the Sharding Technology, it can completely revolutionize the smart contract functionality too.ll, network sharding or just sharding is a mechanism that allows the Zilliqa network to be divided into smaller groups of nodes each referred to as a shard. Simply put, imagine a network of 1,000 nodes, then, one may divide the network into 10 shards each composed of 100 nodes.
Network sharding is the secret sauce that makes Zilliqa truly scalable. Imagine our example network of 1,000 nodes. Zilliqa would automatically divide the network into 10 shards each with 100 nodes. Now, these shards can process transactions in parallel. If each shard is capable of processing 10 transactions per second, then all shards together can process 100 transactions per second. The ability to process transactions in parallel due to the sharded architecture ensures that the throughput in Zilliqa linearly increases with the size of the network.
Ziliqa has few pros as it has a great new technology. Zilliqa is the first platform to use sharding technology. This puts it ahead of the rest of the market. It's a completely new kind of blockchain designed to solve the problem of scalability. Third-generation platforms like Zilliqa could be the big winners in the future of cryptocurrency.
Where should you store ZIL?
A crypto wallet is essentially software that stores public or private keys and engages with a particular blockchain platform to enable users to send, receive and trade cryptocurrency, and keep a close watch on their asset balances. Storing your $ZIL in wallets that are secure, user-friendly and accessible is of the utmost importance. Wallets come in several types such as hardware, software, desktop.
What is Zilliqa staking?
The ZIL token is the native token of the Zilliqa ecosystem. The token completed its ICO on January 4, 2018. Staking ZIL tokens is supported by several platforms. Some of them include Zillacracy, Atomic Wallet, Frontier , and the Moonlet Wallet. Zilliqa's fast-growing ecosystem further makes its governance staking token profitable. Though not as popular as other top cryptocurrencies, ZIL stakers, however, are earning remarkable rewards on their stakes.
gZIL tokens are ZRC-2 compliant fungible tokens. Interestingly, the token is earned alongside ZIL staking rewards. Users receive them as rewards when ZIL staking rewards are withdrawn from specified SSN operators. According to reports, for every 1,000 ZIL staking reward, 1 gZIL will be issued.
The idea behind gZIL issuance is to help the platform identify long-term holders of ZIL tokens. Subsequently, providing them with access to participate in important decision making on the Zilliqa ecosystem. This is quite similar to the DAO structure, where governance token holders cast votes to reach a decision on community project.
What is Scilla smart contract language?
Scilla (short for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language) is a safe-by-design smart contract language developed for the Zilliqa blockchain. Scilla provides a clean separation between the communication aspect of smart contracts on a blockchain, allowing for the rich interaction patterns, and a programming component, which enjoys principled semantics and is amenable to formal verification.
Scilla imposes a structure on smart contracts that will make applications less vulnerable to attacks by eliminating certain known vulnerabilities directly at the language-level. Furthermore, the principled structure of Scilla will make applications inherently more secure and amenable to formal verification.
First, due to the immutable nature of blockchains, smart contracts cannot be updated. Compare a smart contract with a traditional software, where, if a bug in the software is found, it is possible to fix it and release a new version. Smart contract bugs are hard to fix (possible only through a hard fork). The impossibility to update contracts is a serious limitation considering the fact that smart contract platforms drive an extremely large blockchain-based economy. Ethereum alone has a market capitalization of around USD 201 billion (as on Feb 2021).
Secondly, smart contracts differ from traditional programs in the sense that they have a gas mechanism to pay for computational costs. Hence, while writing a contract, a developer must make sure that every function therein will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed to due gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems. We will come back to this point in the coming sequel of this series.
As a result, it is extremely important to ensure that a smart contract deployed on a blockchain is bug free and safe. Safety of smart contracts is particularly critical because they are run in a Byzantine environment, where, every party involved with a contract can potentially be malicious. For instance, a malicious user interacting with a contract may want to steal money, a miner may want to order transactions in a block to produce some unexpected outcome or the worst being the case where a user calls a contract that in turn calls another contract (such as a library contract) which is under the control of an attacker and hence behaves maliciously.
For more information on Zilliqa, check out my blog at https://sites.google.com/view/zilliqazebra
or my YouTube channel at https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCqOw-wrlBRJjKoai_na5MZw
