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Zilliqa (ZIL), a very special cryptocurrency

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Zilliqa

At the beginning of the year 2020 when we did not imagine that our lives would change so drastically and at the same time Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies did not seem to wake up from the bear's dream, there was one whose particular behavior in which it went up when the others went down, motivated me to follow its movements more closely. That project I am talking about is called Zilliqa, which even today does not stop following its path to the moon.

Zilliqa is a high-performance public Blockchain platform whose design was intended to scale thousands of transactions in mere seconds. Zilliqa's unique protocol is designed according to a partitioned structure which its creators call sharding, which is why the transaction rate increases as the network grows. On the other hand, the platform is oriented so that dApps can be securely integrated, while meeting the requirements for scaling financial algorithms and machine learning.

Scalability is the hallmark of Zilliqa making it an attractive platform for the DeFi world and especially in NFTs, this is possible thanks to its ability to process more transactions when more mining nodes are added to the system, something that is extremely complicated if analyzed from a technical point of view, considering the fact that it has never been possible to do something like that before. That way Zilliqa's unique consensus protocol solves this difficulty is what generates so much interest in the cryptosphere.

Because of its scalability, Zilliqa supports dApps that need higher transaction fees than Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain can offer, expanding the options for developers. The team responsible for this project expects the platform to be used for the development of dApps such as those arising for high-volume parallel auctions, payment networks and digital advertising supply chains among others.

Zilliqa implements a model based on a hybrid protocol, which according to its developers is the reason why it allows it to process more transactions at the same time as more nodes join the network. Theoretically this work-splitting procedure is the reason why it works so fast. However, in practice, there have been problems with transmission at times when the network exceeds one million nodes. Still, that number of nodes is a respectable number that only Zilliqa has been shown to achieve.

The scalability problem is solved by Zilliqa through a technology called sharding, whereby the protocol divides the number of mining nodes in the network into groups of 600.

Each shard processes a fraction of the transactions generated in the network. In practical terms, if we have 6 shards, each shard will process 1/6 of the transactions in the network. The more shards are present, the more the network divides the consensus load among them, which allows to keep the computational demands relatively stable. The shards process their respective assigned transactions in a micro-block acting in parallel with the other shards. At the end of the parallel processing period, known as the "DS epoch," those microblocks are combined into a single complete block that is added to the blockchain.

Zilliqa uses a hybrid consensus mechanism, integrated by the Proof-of-Work: PoW protocol and Byzantine Fault Tolerance: BFT. The PoW protocol provides computational power, which guarantees that a machine operates with a node. It thus helps Zilliqa to establish a single identity, making it impossible for malicious actors to make multiple identities to confuse the network (Sybil attack). It should be noted that this protocol does not use PoW for consensus.

Once a node has proven its identity, it is assigned to a shard. Within the shards, Zilliqa uses the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) consensus. This is a higher performance consensus mechanism that has finality, meaning that most of the nodes in the shard must agree on the mini-block. When a block is confirmed by the shards and the "DS committee" (a group of nodes that manages the shards), it is the only block that can reference the previous block.

Like Ethereum, Zilliqa's ZIL token is used as a mining incentive as a gas for the implementation of smart contracts and of course to make payments of transaction fees. At its inception, ZIL was conceived as an ERC-20 token within the Ethereum blockchain, but currently the public Zilliqa mainnet has recently launched so it already acts independently, so it is now possible to exchange native Zilliqa tokens.

At its initial launch in 2017 Zilliqa raised around US$ 12 million in ETH in a private funding round near the end of 2017. After that, the rising price of ETH caused the project to quickly reach its proposed fundraising ceiling of US$ 20 million. Currently Zilliqa has maintained steady price growth resulting from its foray into DeFi, coupled with the fact that it is the subject of NFT investor preference thanks to its low cost of gas.

The ZIL token is currently trading at US$0.2116 and can be purchased on Binance, Huobi, OKEx, Bithumb, EtherDelta, HitBTC, among many others. It is worth noting that the team behind Zilliqa is largely made up of computer science academics and professionals led by Xinshu Dong, CEO of the Singapore-based company.

There is no doubt that Zilliqa presents one of the most ambitious projects of the moment in the cryptosphere. Its sharding protocol is presented as the first of its kind to work effectively on the blockchain, achieving significant performance compared to other projects considering also that it has a team with a recognized reputation in the crypto world.

Against Zilliqa weighs the fact that there are a significant number of projects and protocols within the parameters in the line of high-profile blockchains. On the other hand, Zilliqa looks weak when it comes to advertising the work it does, so it needs to strengthen its usability to offer confidence to those interested in investing in its services, but being a young and well-run project it seems that it is very likely that this detail can be solved.

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