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Review on Zilliqa by Bradley Wright
Higher throughput: The unprecedented throughput of the Zilliqa blockchain…
Higher throughput: The unprecedented throughput of the Zilliqa blockchain implies that the processing fee pertransaction can be very low. Since miners reach consensus on several blocks with a single PoW, Zilliqa ensures a much more stable payout with low variance. Furthermore, In many of today’s popular blockchains, users have to compete for the few transactions processed per second. As a result, transactions with low or insufficient fees experience delays in processing. Such issues will be significantly alleviated in Zilliqa as the number of transactions processed per second becomes several hundred times more and beyond.
Pros
- Redesign from scratch: Zilliqa’s solution is a redesign from scratch and has been under research and development for over 2 years. The cornerstone in Zilliqa’s design is the idea of sharding — dividing the mining network into smaller consensus groups called shards each capable of processing transactions in parallel. If the mining network of Zilliqa is say 8000 miners, Zilliqa automatically creates 10 sub-networks each of size 800 miners, in a decentralized manner without a trusted co-ordinator. Now, if one sub-network can agree on a set of (say) 100 transactions in one time epoch, then 10 sub-networks can agree on a total of 1000 transactions in aggregate. The key to aggregating securely is to ensure that sub-networks process different transactions (with no overlaps) without double-spending.
Cons
- Consensus not based on PoW: Zilliqa does not employ PoW to achieve consensus. Therefore, PoW can be performed after, say every few hundred blocks. As a result, the high energy cost often associated with PoW will not apply in Zilliqa. In fact, the estimate cost ofrunning a Zilliqa node will be about 1/10 of running an Ethereum node today.
