What is Zilliqa ? A Beginner’s Guide To Zilliqa Blockchain

Zilliqa Blockchain: Solving Scalability Issues

Zilliqa is a scalability-focused, blockchain-based payment processing and Decentralized application (dapp) platform currently in advanced development. The core feature allowing Zilliqa to scale beyond what is possible with rcxisting similar platforms, such as Ethereum, is “Sharding”

Sharding refers to dividing the blockchain network into smaller subnetworks that can process transactions and execute computing operations in parallel (at the same time).

Zilliqa fundamentally changes how a blockchain reaches consensus. Their sharding solution scales with the size of the network. Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of transactions Zilliqa could process per second. Practically, however, depending on the number of nodes on the network, Zilliqa could process tens or hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

It also promises to support smart contracts. Running smart contracts on a sharded network is a major technical challenge for Zilliqa. In this article, we’ll explore how they’re approaching scalability for transactions and smart contracts.

What is Zilliqa?

Zilliqa claims to be the world’s first high-throughput

Zilliqa Roadmap

On one recent test on their testnet, Zilliqa executed 2,488 transactions per second with 6 network shards running only 3,600 nodes (network servers that process and confirm transactions) total, compared to Ethereum’s 10 or so transactions per second using four times the number of nodes.

Zilliqa Solving the Scalability Problem

<strong><span id=">Network Sharding</span></strong></h4> <p><strong>Network sharding</strong> refers to the process by which the network is broken up into subnetworks. The network sharding protocol uses a consensus algorithm called <strong><em>Proof of Work (PoW</em>) </strong>to choose and continually update what is called a<em><strong> Directory Service Committee (DS committee)</strong></em> and to carry out an identity validating process for nodes entering the network. The DS committee coordinates the sharding process and validates blocks of transactions proposed by shards.</p> </p> <h4 id="-4"><strong><span id=">Atomic Transaction Sharding</span></strong></h4> <p>Zilliqa also uses what is called an <strong>Atomic Transaction Sharding Protocol</strong>, which means it allows transactions to be confirmed by the network in a final operation as if there were no sharding.</p> <p>This is done through Zilliqa’s <em><strong>“account-based design</strong></em>” in which transactions are sharded based on the accounts sending the transaction. This ensures the same shards can prevent double spending or replay exploits from a given account, while also allowing transaction commits to happen without cross-shard communication, which would make network communications slower and more costly. The same mechanisms allow transactions to be processed at the same time as consensus processes of the blockchain.</p> <h4 id="-5"><strong><span id=">Computational Sharding</span></strong></h4> <p>The third way that Zilliqa uses a sharding process is through a computational sharding framework that allows resource intensive dapps to be run on the network very efficiently.</p> </p> <p>Computational sharding refers to the ability of the Zilliqa network to run more than one instruction at once, in contrast to other dapp and smart contract platforms such as Ethereum that allow only one instruction at a time to be processed.</p> <h3 id="how-does-zilliqa-achieves-consensus-zilliqa-proof-of-work-and-consensus"><strong>How Does Zilliqa Achieves Consensus? | Zilliqa, Proof-of-Work and Consensus</strong></h3> <p>No, Zilliqa does use use <em>Proof-of-Work alrgortihm for consensus. </em>Zilliqa only leverages PoW to establish mining identities. This process defends against sybil attacks and is also used to perform network sharding. PoW is performed only at larger intervals, not by every miner on every block.</p> <p>Zilliqa employs Elliptic Curve Based Schnorr Signature Algorithm (EC-Schnorr) with multi-signing or signature aggregation. This means that the size of the signature stays small even when a lot of miners sign a block. Moreover, by leveraging efficient network topology, Zilliqa’s consensus scheme reduces the communication complexity to O(N), i.e., linear to the size of the network.</p> <h3 id="-6" class="><strong>What Features Does Zilliqa Offers To dApps</strong><strong> And Miners?</strong></h3> <div> Besides providing a blockchain platform for dApps that scales to thousands of transactions per second in throughput, Zilliqa offers several other features to dApps and miners, including:</p> <ul> <li>More stable payout to miners with lower variance</li> <li>Low joining cost for miners with compatibility with Ethash</li> <li>Better energy utilization by leveraging PoW only for identity establishment</li> <li>Quantifiable security for dApp users with different budgets for secure computation</li> <li>Secure and dataflow style smart contracts</li> </ul> <h2 id="zilliqa-team"><strong>Zilliqa Team</strong></h2> <p><iframe loading=">

Zilliqa team is comprised of learned cryptographers, developers and marketers who really exist. Here is a sneak peek into the team’s composition. They also have a strong peer-reviewed concept of sharding being applied on their blockchain for achieving security as well as high throughput.

Zilliqa Advisors

Following are the advisors to Zilliqa project:-

Zilliqa Blockchain: Solving Scalability Issues

What is Zilliqa?

Zilliqa Roadmap

Zilliqa Solving the Scalability Problem

Zilliqa Advisors

Zilliqa Token Distribution