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Review on Zilliqa by Emiko Nasser
Zilliqa Leadership Team CEO Xinshu Dong (Ph.D. University of Singapore) has…
Zilliqa Leadership Team
CEO Xinshu Dong (Ph.D. University of Singapore) has considerable development and leadership experience. He built secure systems, from web browsers and applications to blockchains, and he was Lead Engineer on the team that developed Anquan, a secure and scalable blockchain for ecommerce applications. He is joined on the Zilliqa team by Chief Scientific Advisor, Prateek Saxena (Ph.D. Computer Science, Berkeley), Head of Technology, Yaoqi Jia(Ph.D. University of Singapore), Head of Research, Amrit Kumar (Ph.D. Université Grenoble-Alpes), and Head of Business Development, Ong En Hui.
The Zilliqa team consists of other well-educated and highly-experienced members.
Zilliqa Target Market
Zilliqa’s use cases put the project in competition with Bitcoin (funds transfer) and Ethereum (smart contract deployment). Since both of these platforms control market shares in excess of $2oo billion, Zilliqa has considerable room for growth. However, Bitcoin and Ethereum have been around for years, so, even though it offers a significant upgrade in scalability, it may take years before Zilliqa upstages the 2 biggest platforms on the blockchain.
During its ICO, 1 ZIL token was worth $0.0038. As of when this post was published, 1 ZIL was valued at $0.143, meaning the token has appreciated in value by over 3663%. This bodes well for the project.
Zilliqa Roadmap
The project released a public testnet in the 1st quarter of 2018 and they plan to launch a public mainnet (with computational sharding for smart contracts) before the end of Q2 2018.
By the 3rd quarter of 2018, Zilliqa aims to be functional enough to deploy DApps.
Pros
- What Problem is Zilliqa Addressing? One of the issues hindering the mass adoption of blockchain technology is scalability. The biggest players in the industry, Bitcoin and Ethereum can only process at most 10/15 transactions per second (tps), and if blockchain technology plans to provide the next mass payment or smart contract infrastructure, this is a real problem. For one, centralized payment platforms process thousands of transactions per second, making them vastly superior to Bitcoin in that regard. On the other hand, a platform that wants to facilitate the development and deployment of hundreds (if not thousands) of decentralized applications, smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies needs to provide a network that can process significantly higher than 15 transactions per second. To become a technology worth reckoning with, the blockchain needs a solution to its scalability problem—and it needs it quickly.
Cons
- Zilliqa Value Proposition Zilliqa plans to launch a blockchain-based platform that can process thousands of transactions in an open, secure, and permission-less distributed network. Furthermore, the project also plans to develop an “innovative special-purpose smart contract language and execution environment” that takes advantage of their network’s underlying architecture to provide an extensive and efficient computation platform. Not long ago, Zilliqa launched their private testnet and they were able to attain a transaction rate of 2,488 tps by leveraging the 3,600 nodes in the network. Since the network was designed such that transaction rates will increase with increasing nodes, if Zilliqa’s network grows as big as Ethereum’s (with ~30,000 nodes), the platform will be able to attain tens of thousands transactions per second. (MasterCard and VISA transact at ~5,000 tps).
