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Review on Zilliqa by Poppy Stewart
Zilliqa is the first public blockchain to implement sharding. Sharding is a…
Zilliqa is the first public blockchain to implement sharding. Sharding is a concept that has existed for distributed systems for a long time, where it is used to improve scalability, performance, and I/O bandwidth. However, the concept has not yet been implemented on any public blockchain. Sharding is the process of automatic splitting of a network of nodes into parallel chains called ‘shards’, where each shard processes a small portion of all transactions in conjunction with other shards, resulting in a microblock from each shard. These micro-blocks are then merged into one complete block that is added to the blockchain. Zilliqa is now leading the way in implementing this automatic network parallelization for public blockchains.
Pros
- Zilliqa is linearly scalable. Linear scalability means that as the number of participating nodes in the network increases, the transaction throughput also increases at an almost linear rate. Although it may sound intuitive, the fact is that, for most blockchains, the opposite is actually true, i.e. as the number of participating nodes in the network increases, each transaction now has to be broadcasted to a greater number of nodes before being validated and added to the ledger, thereby limiting transaction throughput. This is the reason why many solutions to increase transaction throughput depend on restricting the number of participating nodes on the network, which comes at the cost of a reduced degree of decentralization.
Cons
- Although Zilliqa’s team does not see the other existing public blockchains as competitors, and rather takes a more open approach towards them, facilitating a healthy environment of learning from each project and developing on it, I use the term ‘competitors’ here in the conventional sense to be able to compare Zilliqa head-to-head against the existing blockchains.
