Review on Zilliqa by Fabrizio Zampieri
Zilliqa is a new blockchain platform that is designed to scale securely in an…
Zilliqa is a new blockchain platform that is designed to scale securely in an open, permission-less distributed network. The idea of the Zilliqa blockchain was conceived in the Computer Science Lab at the University of Singapore, based on a paper written by Lui Loo, the cofounder of Kyber Network.
Recently, Zilliqa launched its private testnet. Their current transaction volume is 2,488 transactions/sec with 3,600 nodes in the network. With Zilliqa, as the number of nodes in the network rises, so does the number of transaction per second. With a network size of 10,000 nodes, Zilliqa will enable a throughput which matches that of VISA and MasterCard with much lower fees for the merchants (expected throughput is approximately 8,000 transactions/sec).
Technically, Zilliqa utilizes HTC and uses network sharding – “dividing the mining network into smaller consensus groups called shards, each capable of processing transactions in parallel”, supposedly Zilliqa’s blockchain will process more transactions per second as more mining nodes join the network.
In high level, the Zilliqa framework is built of two main components:
- Shards (An independent group of nodes which are responsible for validating a portion of the transactions. In order to do so, each shard will need to decide on its own consensus. This will be done by another consensus approach named Byzantine Fault Tolerance Algorithm or PBFT protocol. At a high level, for each shard, a leader is selected. This leader will validate a constant amount of transactions and create a new block. Then the block will be validated by the other nodes of the shard. If the vast majority of the nodes in a shard accept the block, it will be addressed to the DS Committee in order for the block to be accepted in the general consensus of the Zilliqa blockchain);
- DS Committee (this is a group of nodes that manage the activity of Zilliqa’s framework. We can divide their role into two main parts: Building the general consensus -the Zilliqa general blockchain-, and maintenance of the Zilliqa framework).
ZIL tokens are the driving force behind the Zilliqa Blockchain, as ETH is for the Ethereum Blockchain.
ZIL are consumed by paying fees to the network nodes. One must hold ZIL in his wallet in order to transfer ZIL or other future tokens to be created on top of the Zilliqa blockchain (Made equivalent to ERC-20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, serving hundreds of ICOs each month).
Pros
- -Team and Advisory Board: the team consists of highly respected PhDs from top universities in the world. The project is on behalf of Prateek Saxena‘s lab at the University of Singapore, which had published award winning papers in the field of cryptocurrencies and blockchain solutions (Xinshu Dong -CEO-, Prateek Saxena -Chief Scientific Advisor-, Amrit Kumar: Crypto Lead, Alexander Lipton, Loi Luu and Stuart Prior -Advisors-). - Project potential: with the rising acceptance of blockchain technology, start-ups are not the only ones building their applications on top of the block-chain. Big companies with millions of active users (i.e. Kik, AIG, Unikrn, EnjinCoin and more) are also doing so. There is obviously a demand for a high throughput blockchain infrastructure and Zilliqa is on the right track to achieve that goal. The more Dapps that are developed on the Zilliqa blockchain will lead to a higher transaction volume and a greater consumption of the ZIL tokens. As there a finite number of tokens to ever be created (21B), one must assume that if the Zilliqa platform succeeds, the value of the token will rise. - Project status: Testnet is live with 3,600 Nodes enabling 2,488 transactions/sec (approximately 10-15 times the max transactions/sec on ETH/BTC blockchains). The mainnet went to be live on Q2 2018 and Dapps development will start on Q3 2018.
Cons
- - Competition: Zilliqa is competing with top smart contracts blockchains like Ethereum, EOS, and other upcoming projects. The Ethereum blockchain has been live and tested for around 3 years, the community behind Ethereum is huge and there is great development to come, with the aim of addressing issues like scalability, power consumption and more. Though, the ecosystem is expected to grow so there is likely room for blockchains to live alongside each other.
