Brad Chillum
Zilliqa is a public blockchain platform that aims to disrupt the industry by offering scalability without sacrificing security or decentralization.
Zilliqa employs a technique called sharding, whereby the mining network is divided into several consensus groups, each capable of processing transactions in parallel. The use of sharding ensures that the throughput increases roughly linearly with the network size. Although the theory of sharding is being researched for a while now, including by Ethereum research team, lead by Vitalik Buterin, Zilliqa claims to bring it to practice much sooner.
According to their website, the Zilliqa testnet now supports aprox. 2500 transactions per second, compared to around 15 transactions per second for Ethereum. Even if these values are obtained in a test environment and there is no guarantee we will see them in practice on a multibillion dollar network, it still gives us hope that we are going in the right direction and getting closer to the dream: blockchain platforms going mainstream and revolutionizing the world we live in.
As a consensus protocol, Zilliqa blockchain implements the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance scheme (PBFT), which assumes that a portion of the network’s nodes are hostile. PBFT has every node verify transactions independently, then share the results in aggregate, thereby reaching consensus. Furthermore, in order to secure the network and prevent a group of nodes from being the victim of a dedicated attack, Zilliqa will implement the Proof-of-Work protocol. In a recent blog post, the team noted, “Miners use PoW to establish their identities on the Zilliqa blockchain. Once the identities have been established, miners get assigned to a consensus group wherein multiple rounds of PBFT consensus can be run. Performing one PoW in turn writes multiple blocks to the chain, and thus provides greater and guaranteed rewards.”. The team estimates that only 12 hours of PoW will be needed each month, which will result is an electricity cost about 9 times smaller than mining Ethereum.
Zilliqa recently had their Token Generation Event (TGE), where they raised 48,889 ETH. The total supply of Zillings (ZILs) is 21 billion tokens, distributed as follows:
– 40% of the tokens (8.4 bil) were not generated during the TGE, but will be created by miners as part of the mining process over the next 10 years;
– 30% of the tokens (6.3 billion) were distributed to early and community contributors after the TGE;
– the remaining 30% of the tokens (6.3 billion) will be allocated to various parties: 10% (2.1 billion) goes to Anquan, which will continue to support the Zilliqa project, 12% (2.52 billion) goes to Zilliqa Research, a new entity leading the research, development, community engagement, bounty programs and marketing for Zilliqa, 5% (1.05 billion) goes to the founding Zilliqa team and
3% (0.63 billion) goes to various agencies and advisors, including Bitcoin Suisse. These tokens are mostly vested for 3 years, so they are not part of the circulating supply yet.
ZILs hit the exchanges on January 25th, and is now trading on Huobi, Gate.io, EtherDelta and Idex. According to CoinMarketCap, it is trading at about $0.11, which means about 11 times the price from the TGE, and the trading volume is about $13.5 mil in the last 24 hours, excluding the volume on Huobi of over $34 mil.
Price prediction
It is very likely that Zilliqa will be the first project that will implement sharding, adressing the need for scalability. Also, the team behind Zilliqa has a strong academic background and they intend to build a powerfull community around them.
Taking into account these elements we predict that the price of Zil will reach 1$ in Q2 of 2018.
