Zilliqa is a high-throughput public blockchain platform that scales performance to numbers per second Thousands of transactions are designed to solve the problems of transaction speed and scalability, and are used to solve the first major problem of the current blockchain. It also takes into account safety while speeding up, allowing the two to find a relatively optimal balance. It turns sharding technology from theory to practice, uses innovative cryptography and consensus protocols, provides transaction processing capabilities that continue to improve with network capacity, and provides a running platform for high-throughput on-chain applications to meet requirements such as Necessary expansion requirements for businesses such as electronic advertising, payment, sharing economy and property rights management.
What makes Zilliqa unique?
Zilliqa is mainly based on the concept of Sharding and primarily aims at improving the scalability of the cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The white paper mentions that the transaction speed would be approximately a thousand times more than that of the Ethereum network. Ziliqa is fast, secured and decentralised. Zilliqa’s high throughput means that you can focus on developing your ideas without worrying about network congestion, high transaction fees or security which are the key issues with legacy blockchain platforms.
What is Zilliqa’s Vision?
Zilliqa is building a platform for dApps that utilises sharding technology and it could possibly revolutionise smart contract functionality. It could be achieved by dividing the mining network into smaller pieces, or shards, that process transactions in parallel. By doing so, it would improve the transaction speed and reduce the cost of transactions on the Zilliqa network.
Technical Highlights of Zilliqa
Slices
Sharding simply means dividing the mining network into smaller shards, each capable of processing transactions in parallel. Use a smaller subset of network nodes to validate every transaction instead of waiting for every node in the network. This saves a lot of time, and as the network grows, it doesn't require every node to validate every transaction. The Zilliqa network supports regular payment transactions and shards that call for smart contract transactions. In the first test in September 2017, the development team announced that with 3600 nodes and 6 shards, the transaction volume per second reached 2488TPS. Processing smart contract transactions on a sharded architecture has its own set of challenges.
Detailed explanation: ZIL's sharding strategy is to filter out one node from the entire network DS shard + n working shards. Each shard has m miners. The nodes of the entire network first compete for computing power (in academics, PoW), and the m nodes that win first form DS shards; the remaining nodes compete for computing power for the second time, and win n*m nodes first. Allocated to n work shards. Each worker shard processes some transactions in parallel, forms sub-blocks, sends them to the Boss shard, and the Boss shard verifies, packs, and generates the final block. This way, disjoint transaction shards can be processed in parallel, and eventually, these transactions will be merged into a new block dedicated to the blockchain. Improve efficiency through parallel processing
Scalability
Zilliqa is an on-chain project. Compared with side-chain and off-chain projects, Zilliqa has advantages in security and It is more advantageous in terms of evacuation performance, and Zilliqa can also be integrated with any project on the side chain and under the chain if necessary. Zilliqa has proven efficient scalability. Its throughput can increase almost linearly with the growth of nodes. In the future, it will support cross-chain technology and develop a compiler that can help convert Ethereum smart contracts into Zilliqa smart contracts.
Consensus mechanism
In PoW blockchain, each transaction is part of a certain block, and the creation of each block requires a huge amount of computation, But it also caused a huge waste of resources. An alternative to Zilliqa leverages the advantages of PoW along with the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) protocol. Zilliqa will be one of the few PBFT blockchains currently on the market. The consensus mechanism of PBFT is efficient and gives transaction finality, so no confirmation is required. Miners use PoW to establish their identities on the Zilliqa blockchain. Once identities are determined, miners are assigned to a consensus group in which multiple rounds of PBFT consensus can be run. Performing a PoW writes multiple blocks into the chain, providing a larger guaranteed reward. At Zilliqa, about 12 hours of PoW needs to be performed each month with the graphics card running at full capacity. The rest of the time, the graphics card will run in idle mode, consuming minimal power. Miners will consume less energy, making mining much less expensive than other PoW-based blockchains. Zilliqa brings two other benefits to miners and users. First, as the network scales, the total energy cost per transaction will remain the same. Second, Zilliqa’s transaction fees will be much lower than those of Bitcoin or Ethereum. Whereas miners on the Ethereum network prioritize transactions with higher transaction fees, miners on the Zilliqa blockchain are only incentivized by the size of the transaction that can be processed. Therefore, the transaction fees for users are greatly reduced.
Secure Smart Contract
The Zilliqa protocol comes with a new smart contract language called "Scilla". The language will be a non-Turing-complete language designed to eliminate many known vulnerabilities in existing smart contracts and make it easy to formally verify. It will make it easier for developers to develop secure and scalable smart contract applications. Future features will allow anyone to port their existing Solidity applications to Scilla.
Zilliqa leverages the underlying architecture to provide a large-scale and efficient computing platform. The smart contract language in Zilliqa follows a dataflow programming style, making it ideal for running large-scale computations that can be easily parallelized. Examples include simple computations like searching, sorting and linear algebra computations, and more complex computations like training neural networks, data mining, financial modeling, scientific computing and any MapReduce task in general.
Dual-start eco-friendly mining
For ethash-based PoW blockchains like Ethereum and Zilliqa, dual mining is possible. This is because Zilliqa combines PoW and PBFT, where PoW is only used to protect against Sybil attacks, while PBFT is used to achieve consensus. Since the PoW cycle on Zilliqa only needs to run for 1 minute every 2-3 hours, the energy footprint of mining on Zilliqa is much smaller compared to blockchains that require PoW for every block to reach consensus.
Low variance in block rewards: The Zilliqa protocol employs an innovative incentive mechanism that rewards miners by measuring their contribution to the consensus protocol. Thus, thousands (or more) of miners can be rewarded for a block, resulting in low variance.
Security Mechanism
Like other blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the Zilliqa blockchain network is capable of processing transactions and maintaining the global state of the distributed ledger. Unfortunately, there are some notable differences in potential attackers between different blockchain networks. On one side is Bitcoin, which has grown organically with little or no valuation to begin with; on the other is Zilliqa, which is already quite valuable today. This difference in valuation results in threats to the Zilliqa network when it is still in its infancy, and such threats are not necessarily a serious problem when a network like Bitcoin is just getting started.
With this in mind, the Zilliqa mainnet will be launched with protection mechanisms and conservative models to minimize the chance of attacks on this nascent network.
What is the Project Benefits of Zilliqa?
Zilliqa is the world's first high-throughput public blockchain platform - designed to scale to thousands of transactions per second. As its network expands to increase the speed of transactions, Zilliqa brings the theory and practice of sharding with its new protocol. The performance of existing public chains, such as ETH, has encountered bottlenecks, making it difficult to meet the development of the industry. The project technology is advanced and has been verified by actual tests.
Furthermore, Zilliqa is designed to enable secure data-driven decentralized applications, the platform is designed to meet the scaling needs of machine learning and financial algorithms. The competition of public chain projects is very fierce. The realization of projects such as EOS (which claims to reach one million/TXS) will greatly reduce the actual value of these public chains.
Where to store Zilliqa?
Some of the popular Zilliqa wallets that officially support ZIL tokens are Moonlet, ZilPay or Ledger. If you wish to store your ZIL token in a safer place, you can try to store them in a hardware wallet that supports it. It would be a more secure solution and greatly reduce risk of being compromised.
