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.