What is Zilliqa?

Zilliqa is a publicly accessible blockchain, which uses a PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus algorithm, and is designed to process a huge amount of transactions in a short amount of time. Like any project in the crypto industry, it tries to solve a problem and thus create value. The developer team behind Zilliqa is trying to tackle the problem of blockchain scalability and speed. The key element in achieving this ambitious goal is the revolutionary “sharding” technology. Zilliqa is also the first blockchain to implement sharding, making them one of the leaders when it comes to scalable and fast blockchains. Other cryptocurrencies that use sharding are: Polkadot (DOT), NEAR protocol (NEAR) and with the arrival of Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum (ETH) will also use sharding. The Zilliqa (ZIL) token is an ERC-20 token by origin, which means that it used the Ethereum blockchain. However, shortly after the mainnet's launch in 2019, a year-long token swap took place during which the ERC-20 tokens were exchanged for the Zilliqa (ZIL) tokens on its own mainnet. Furthermore, Zilliqa makes it possible for developers to build trading platforms, marketplaces and other decentralized applications (dApps) on the platform. A few examples of these dApps are “Unstoppable domains”, “Ocean rumble” and “Krypton”. These are intended, among other things, to encourage the use of the platform.

To understand sharding properly, it is useful to show you an example. Take, for example, a “normal” blockchain that uses a PoW (Proof-of-Work) consensus algorithm, such as Ethereum as of now. In this network, a single block of transactions can only be carried out when all miners have processed this block. Suppose there are 20,000 miners active, so a block must first be verified by all those 20,000 miners. Network sharding enables these 20,000 miners to be split into “shards”. These are sub-networks of, for example, 2,000 miners per shard. These shards can now process blocks independently and as you can imagine this process is 10 times faster, in this case. 10 different subnetworks can now independently process blocks instead of one block that first has to go through all 20,000 miners. Sharding itself is not a new concept. It can also be compared to dividing students from the same year into different classes. In this way, the learning process is a lot more efficient and the students are easier to manage. Sharding is also an established technology in the gaming world, for example dividing players into different servers in order to better manage network traffic. Zilliqa has thus made use of an old concept and introduced it to a new industry.

The Zilliqa project was founded in 2017 by a group of scientists from the National University of Singapore. The 2 official founders are Amrit Kumar and Max Kantelia. Amrit Kumar obtained a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science and later also completed a Master's degree in Cryptology at the University of Grenoble. He then continued as a researcher at the University of Calgary in Canada and then transferred to the University of Singapore. Max Kantelia is a true entrepreneur who has come a long way with his “Entrepreneurship” degree from the London Business School and a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. He is the CEO and Co-founder of Anquan Capital. A parent company of Zilliqa and Anqlave, among others. This company mainly focuses on “deep technology”. Zilliqa's team to date has 49 employees who are focused on building an open, interoperable blockchain that can lead the way in open finance across the world.