What is Zilliqa? (ZIL)

A blockchain platform for smart contracts is known by the moniker Zilliqa. Sharding is a mechanism that Zilliqa utilises to increase the number of transactions that may be processed simultaneously.

Additionally, Zilliqa employs a novel consensus technique that combines proof-of-work and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PoW and pBFT).

The Zilliqa coin, often known as ZIL, is the native cryptocurrency of the Zilliqa blockchain. For blockchain transactions, ZIL is utilised as payment. The nodes that carry out the calculations necessary to run the blockchain are rewarded with these fees.

Founders of the initiative were a group of academics from the National University of Singapore, which launched it in 2017. Later, the group established Zilliqa Research as a business to oversee the creation of theTo increase the amount of transactions that can be confirmed per second, Zilliqa uses sharding. The blockchain also employs a novel consensus method. Below, these ideas are described in a little more detail.

Zilliqa Sharding

A group of accounts’ balances and transaction histories are tracked in a blockchain. A huge number of separate computers (referred to as nodes) that are sharing this information must concur on all of the specifics. All nodes first determine if a new transaction is fraudulent before adding it to their copy of the record.

It is feasible to split this record down into smaller, easier chunks that are quicker to add to. A shard is any little piece of the larger record.

Each shard is assigned a group of nodes, who carry out the same functions—adding and verifying new transactions—as before. A different set of nodes merges the records from each shard on a regular basis to unify the data before sharding it again.

Shards enable the network to effectively access balances and transaction data without forcing each node to maintain a massive copy of the full record on its own. The nodes only manage the shard to which they have been allocated.

Zilliqa Consensus

Independent nodes can agree on the same “truth” via a blockchain consensus process. To have identical balances and transaction histories for every account on the blockchain, to put it another way.

Consensus can take many various forms, but they all function by making it difficult or expensive for one node (or a small group of nodes) to persuade the rest of the network to accept fraudulent transactions.

Without a centralised authority, consensus enables all parties to uphold good behaviour.

Because it would demand a lot of computational power, PoW makes it challenging to mislead other nodes. Only if it was the first record (block) proposed does the new record (block) get added. An award in ZIL is given to the first node to successfully propose a new block.

Since every node must concur in order for the new block to be added, pBFT makes it challenging to deceive other nodes.

It would be impossible to add false transactions without simultaneously controlling every node. A tiny portion of the block reward goes to each node that participated in the unanimous decision.

According to the Zilliqa team, PoW and pBFT together produce a safe system that permits mining with less expensive computers. A pBFT

Primary Features of Zilliqa

Blockchain for smart contracts, Zilliqa. Developers can now create decentralised applications (dApps) that work with Zilliqa.

The features of Zilliqa are as follows:

Cheap Cost – Sharding permits a high volume of transactions per second, resulting in a low cost per transaction.

Sharding also makes the blockchain scalable, allowing its capacity to be raised when more users begin to use it.

Cost-effective mining – Because pBFT requires unanimity, even hardware with lower processing power can participate in the block reward. Due to the fact that a node can receive a reward even if it never proposes a block first, mining ZIL is now more cost-effective.

How to Use Zilliqa Coins

On the Zilliqa blockchain, transactions are funded using Zilliqa coins. To use Zilliqa coins, just like any other cryptocurrency, you will need a crypto wallet that is compatible with Zilliqa.

You can store, transfer, and even stake your ZIL using more than a dozen various software and hardware wallets.

Only a few of the wallets that are compatible with ZIL are listed below:

Ledger (hardware)

Belief Wallet

Nuclear Wallet

ZilPay.

Paper or software wallets are typically less secure than hardware wallets, which are also more expensive. A trustworthy hardware wallet is a great investment in the security of your crypto assets if you can afford one.

Many cryptocurrency wallets work with various blockchains. Because of this compatibility, you can store a wide variety of coins, tokens, and other assets without having to manage numerous wallets.

ZIL is automatically used as payment for transactions on the Zilliqa blockchain.

The account from which the transaction is being sent must have a starting balance of ZIL that is not zero.

Your wallet software will let you know how much ZIL the transaction will cost and how much it would cost in USD before you confirm the transaction.

Upon confirmation

Pros and Cons of Zilliqa Coin

ZIL, or Zilliqa coin, has various benefits and drawbacks that users and owners should be aware of. Below is a summary of them.

Pros

Low price – In December 2021, 1 ZIL costs less than 0.10 USD, indicating that there is a chance for profit if Zilliqa attracts many users and the demand for Zilliqa coins rises.
Stake-able — ZIL can be staked (using a crypto wallet that is compatible with Zilliqa) so that you can earn more ZIL while holding the coin.
Support for wallets – More than a dozen cryptocurrency wallets, including well-known brands like Ledger and Trust Wallet, are Zilliqa-compatible.

Cons

Newness: Compared to, say, Ethereum, Zilliqa is a considerably more recent project. This implies that, if it ever occurs, widespread adoption may be quite gradual. It can be dangerous to invest in ZIL in the hopes that its value will rise as more people use it.
Availability: ZIL is currently not listed on any significant U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges, while being accessible on foreign platforms like Binance and liquid.com.

To increase the amount of transactions that can be confirmed per second, Zilliqa uses sharding. The blockchain also employs a novel consensus method. Below, these ideas are described in a little more detail.

A high-throughput blockchain with the capacity to scale to thousands of transactions per second is called Zilliqa. By improving transactional throughput, the initiative aims to address the scalability problem that has plagued Layer 1 networks like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). In order to do this, the Singaporean blockchain project will use sharding as a Layer 2 scalability technique.

Co-founders Amrit Kumar and Xinshu Don created Zilliqa in June 2017. At the National University of Singapore, both were researchers. The testnet went live nine months later. And the Zilliqa mainnet was ultimately going live in January 2019.

The goal of rival blockchains like Zilliqa is to develop an ecosystem of decentralised applications (DApps). The Zilliqa team’s position statement for 2018

HOW DOES ZILLIQA WORK?

Zilliqa has a number of characteristics typical of cryptocurrency networks, including the capacity to issue tokens and settle transactions and smart contract functionality. But Zilliqa is distinct from Ethereum in that it has a far higher transactional capacity.

The protocol’s whitepaper claims that every time a few hundred nodes are added to the network, its design enables it to double the rate at which transactions are processed. The network can currently process 2,500 transactions per second, which is 2,500 times more than Ethereum can.

Zilliqa alone depends on a sharded network to attain this high throughput. The core of Zilliqa’s architecture is sharding, which divides its network into smaller consensus groups known as shards. These can all handle transactions simultaneously on an equal basis.

To put it another way, sharding makes use of a structural mechanism that divides the network into a number of smaller units, or shards, and then distributes portions of the transaction load across the nodes.

With a number of nodes given, each shard functions as a separate network. These nodes function to execute transactions, store data, and contribute fresh “microblocks” to their particular shard chain. The Zilliqa mainnet receives microblocks after they have been combined into transactional blocks by DS (Directory Service) nodes. It’s crucial to understand that the shard nodes do not hold the complete history of the network, simply a portion of the Zilliqa blockchain.

This structure can be demonstrated using the following example: Assume the Zilliqa protocol has 20,000 nodes. Each of the 25 shard chains that Zilliqa automatically generates will have 800 nodes. Then, all the shard chains carry out transactions concurrently and in parallel. Large-scale computations can be conducted concurrently using this sharded architecture.

Additionally, Zilliqa includes its own proprietary language, Scilla, which enables developers to create decentralised applications and perform smart contracts. The sharding design of the underlying blockchain is directly leveraged by Scilla to create a massively scalable and incredibly effective processing network.

A Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance protects Zilliqa (pBFT). In order for a record to be added to the network, at least two-thirds of the nodes must concur that it is accurate, thanks to the consensus mechanism provided by pBFT.

A network of nodes is required by each shard chain in order to confirm a microblock. Once all of the shards have reached consensus, a transaction block is created and added to the main network. Zilliqa secures its consensus method using elliptic-curve cryptography.

To create shards and assign node IDs in Zilliqa, the pBFT consensus method is paired with a proof-of-work process.

ZILLIQA AS A SCALING SOLUTION

The main objective of the Zilliqa project was to create a blockchain with scaleable smart contract capability from the beginning. A modified proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism that delivers less expensive transactions than Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum was developed in part to achieve this (ETH).

But it was Zilliqa’s initiative to apply sharding to their network that gave it popularity. As a result, it became one of the first protocols to adopt sharding on its mainnet and support smart contracts.

Sharding enables parallel calculations to accomplish the high transaction throughput on the Zilliqa network, as was previously discussed. In contrast to unsharded, linear networks, where transactions are performed through a single, long chain, parallelization provides a quicker and more economical alternative.

ZILLIQA’S TOKENONOMICS

Zilliqa’s native ERC-20 token, ZIL, was made available in 2017. The coin was provided as part of the Zilliqa token generation event (TGE), which finished in the first quarter of 2018. The tokens were then exchanged as part of a token swap in 2020 to be added to the Zilliqa mainnet. In this way, Zilliqa developed into a standalone blockchain with a unique native token.

There is a set 21 billion coin maximum supply for ZIL. The initiative intends to mine around 80% of all ZIL in the first four years, and the remaining 20% in the next six years, according to the Zilliqa whitepaper. This indicates that there is a hard cap on the number of tokens that can be mined by 2027.

In actuality, the block reward will decline over a ten-year period. Given that block rewards won’t reduce much after a certain number of blocks, the token issuing procedure will be straightforward. In this manner, as the reward steadily declines over time, the network hash rate will remain constant. Therefore, one could contend that these traits will guarantee ZIL’s long-term deflationary nature.

On the Zilliqa mainnet, ZIL is utilised for transactions as well as a way to reward miners with block rewards. There is also the gZIL coin, which serves as the protocol’s governance token. It enables users to actively suggest protocol modifications or enhancements. A fixed 722,000 gZIL coins are available, and they can only be acquired by staking your ZIL tokens.

WHAT IS METAPOLIS?

Recently, Zilliqa released Metapolis, a metaverse as a service (MaaS) platform that lets users create the virtual worlds they want. Users will be able to create and maintain their own metaverses thanks to the infrastructure and technology provided by Metapolis. The protocol will dramatically lower the high cost barrier that plagues conventional metaverse services, making it simple for small entities to access the virtual world realm.

The Metapolis, “whose suffix means ‘city’ in Greek, is envisioned as a cutting-edge extended reality (XR metaverse) — an amalgamation of AR and VR — and is powered by Zilliqa’s scalable and secure blockchain technology,” according to a blog post by the Zilliqa team from December 2021.

Due to its hyper-realistic graphics and capacity to engage people through gamification, e-commerce, and NFTs, Metapolis has drawn notice. To provide a richer user experience, Zilliqa is trying to draw many brands to Metapolis with the help of partners like Agora (a photo-sharing app).

Zilliqa’s Sandra Helou, who is in charge of the metaverse and NFTs, says, “We are excited for this relationship as we can bring creativity to life within the metaverse and allow borderless access for creatives all over the world to connect in the digital world. Agora, Zilliqa, and Metapolis’ collaboration places us at the forefront of Web3 innovation.