Zilliqa is the first public blockchain that uses High-Throughput (HTC, the use of many computing resources for a long time in order to complete a task). It designed to scale to 1,000nds of transactions per second.
Advantages in design:
- Enable secure data-driven decentralized apps (Dapps).
- Meet the scaling requirements of machine learning
- and financial algorithms.
Overview
Like many other cryptocurrencies, Zilliqa is also a payment conducting and Decentralized Application platform based on blockchain technology.
It emphasizes mostly on resolving scalability issue. The prime feature that differentiates Zilliqa from other platforms which share the common purpose is sharding. This particular term means splitting the blockchain into a number of sub-chains, which enable simultaneous processing of transactions and execution of computing operations.
In case of other similar platforms, continuous growth of the network gradually decreases the rate of transactions. But the processing power of Zilliqa moves proportionally to the growing network, as the number of network nodes also increases at the same pace. Zilliqa development team has expressed that it will be able to touch MasterCard and VISA in terms of transaction speed but being decentralized and charging lesser fees.
Little about Zilliqa
The development of Zilliqa started on 1st June 2017 and the first testing network was available for trial on 1st September 2017. The network was open for public use on 1st December 2017. Since then, a lot of projects have come into existence such as sharding protocols, a smart contract language, and framework, a test network wallet, purposeful data storage etc.
With 6 shards and running only 3,600 nodes, Zilliqa has performed 2,488 transactions per second on a recent test run of the network.
Network Scalability
It is mentioned earlier that the rate of transactions will increase with the growth of the network and this fact is totally obverse of other blockchain platforms. Because of more nodes joining the network, block data have to take a longer trip to be transmitted to the whole network. Simply, distribution of information takes place among a larger number of computers. Though clearances are provided, private blockchains are bounded by certain limitations in this regard. Such ability of scaling is known as ‘linear scaling’, thanks to sharding protocol.
Though the concept of sharing is being researched for quite a few days, for the first time ever, Zilliqa has implemented it in its platform. In three ways, it executes sharding: Atomic Transaction Sharding, Computational Sharding, and Network Sharding.
Blockchain Consensus and Mining
The consensus protocol of Zilliqa is known as EC-Schnorr which stands for Elliptic Curve Based Schnorr Signature Algorithm. It employs a kind of Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. This PBFT protocol is able to find out malicious movements within the network and thus, ensures scaling.
Zilliqa adopts Proof-of-work consensus mechanism just to establish network node identity, but it is not applied on every block. It is very much efficient and surprisingly decreases the network’s energy footprint compared to those blockchains implementing PoW for general blockchain consensus.
Mining Incentives
A miner is awarded newly created coins when a block of transactions is mined successfully. The token of this platform is named ZIL. As planned, the total supply of ZIL will be 21 billion. In the first four years, about 80 percent of total volume will be mined and the rest will spread over the following six years.
Purchasing and Storing
ZIL is available in different exchanges Huobi, Binance, Gate.io, and IDEX. The tokens can be stored in ERC20 wallet including MyCrypto, MyEtherWallet, Coinfy etc.
Conclusion
Zilliqa has come out with a great solution of scalability which, many platforms are still suffering to renovate. Hopefully, it will go further with relentless development.
