What is Zilliqa?
Zilliqa is a blockchain platform for enterprises with high-level security and great performance. It's the world's first public blockchain built on a sharded architecture for creating next-gen apps. The network architecture is able to process transactions without a trusted coordinator making the platform fully decentralized. Anyone can make P2P payments and create decentralized applications.
Zilliqa history
ZIL coin was designed and created by the National University of Singapore(NUS). The developers decided to risk and put the Sharding technology as the digital coin basis. The team created a fully working blockchain that has been tested for almost two years before they launched ICO. The Zilliqa cryptocurrency was created as an ERC-20 token. ICO took place over nine days, the project was able to achieve the established hardcap and raised $22 million with a total of 21 billion ZIL issued.
How Zilliqa works
Zilliqa's core infrastructure is composed of the network and the consensus layer. The main feature of its mainnet is high throughput increasing with the network scalability. The key goal is to achieve the massive use of the platform by creating decentralized exchanges, launching high-performance applications, conducting scientific calculations and automated auctions. To reach it, the developers applied Sharding technology and implemented their own consensus algorithm.
Consensus Protocol
Zilliqa developers have created their own unique consensus protocol for network maintenance. This is a hybrid solution based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Byzantine fault tolerance (pBFT). The main processes are carried out by the BFT protocol. The PoW protocol is used only to verify identification data and prevent Sybil attacks (a type of attack in a peer-to-peer network, when the victim connects only to the nodes controlled by a hacker). Using PoW protocol only for data verification saves Zilliqa from mining energy high costs.
Only nodes that are not under the hackers’ control decide to create new blocks. The developers used an additional “view change protocol”, which is intended to replace a hacker-leader. Each Node can declare a desire to change the Shard leader and if all nodes decide that the requirement is justified, a replacement is made.
The time between block creation is not limited. Zilliqa transactions are completed from the moment of the creation, they do not require confirmation and time-wasting. Zilliqa protocol reduces the risk of ZIL double-spending and increases network speed.
Zilliqa ecosystem
dApps
Several dapps are currently live on ZIL mainnet and many more are in development. Integrations come in different forms such as exchange and wallet support and other types of services.
ZILHive
To grow, develop, and expand reaches of the ecosystem, the team developed a program called ZILHive. To encourage the development of dApps that are built on Zilliqa, a pool of $5 million USD will be given to start building tools and applications and conduct research for the Zilliqa platform.
Staking
Stake to fuel the circular economy of Zilliqa. You have an incentive to stake and #HODL over the long term as the ecosystem gains in value. Rewards are offered to $ZIL HODLers for delegating their tokens and stake.
