Review on Zilliqa by Calvin Warriner

Name: Zilliqa
Item: Zilliqa
Rating: 4

September 19, 2018

Alongside sharding and a new programming language, Zilliqa offers some…

Alongside sharding and a new programming language, Zilliqa offers some upgrades in the mining and voting protocols as well. PoW is only used to establish and perform sharding, which reduces the computational burden of each transaction and reduces the possibility of the network being exposed to a Sybil attack. Consensus reaching is handled through Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), as opposed to other blockchains which rely on PoW algorithms for both mining and consensus achievement.
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Zilliqa team is currently working on the Q2 testnet 2.0 launch with smart contracts alpha (beta will be released in Q3). After that comes the actual mainnet launch which should be ready for the Q3 of 2018. Anchor dApps are planned for Q4 with a 5 million USD grant to motivate developers and further work on privacy, interoperability and storage solutions (one of the biggest issues with sharding is the amount of disk space required for it to function) in 2019.
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Meanwhile, preparations are being made to create a solid user base at launch by acquiring valuable partnerships and investor support. Trading volume is on a constant rise as more and more exchange platforms keep adding the coin. Venture capital interest seems to be continually evolving and rising as well.
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Pros

Zilliqa is an open-source blockchain project that initially presented itself to the crypto market back in 2017, when its crowdsale was successfully held. It caught many investor’s interest by designing a smart contract-based platform meant to allow users to run dApps in a blockchain-enforced virtual environment. This means that Zilliqa is gunning directly at Ethereum, the current granddaddy of the smart contract-like blockchain platforms. And with the way the project development has been going so far, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Zilliqa might just be THE project to successfully gun down its role model and claim the “Ethereum Killer” moniker in action and not just in word.

Cons

By using sharding, Zilliqa gets to solve two crucial issues that plague currently accessible blockchain technology: scalability and security. Most importantly, the functionality of this technology on the Zilliqa platform has already been tested and confirmed. A progress event was held by Zilliqa team on May 23rd during which both the Scilla language and the sharding technology were presented to the public for the first time. The platform showcased 6 active shards that managed to clock just over 2800 transactions per second, with the network managing to stay up and keep verifying even after being subjected to a simulated attack.