Zilliqa is a public blockchain platform best known for its early implementation of sharding, a scaling solution that breaks transaction validating nodes in blockchain networks into smaller components or “shards.”
These shards validate “microblocks’ simultaneously with other shards, and the microblocks are subsequently combined to create a single block on the blockchain. This is intended to increase the speed of the blockchain’s transaction processing.
Based in Singapore, Zilliqa launched in June 2017. The project was co-founded by Amrit Kumar, its president and chief scientific officer; Yaoqi Jia, its chief technology officer; Xinshu Dong, a board member and the project’s former chief executive officer; and Max Kantelia, an adviser and board member.
Zilliqa raised $22 million worth of ether through an initial coin offering (ICO) that concluded in January 2018. The total supply of Zilliqa, the platform’s native cryptocurrency, is 22 billion zillings (ZIL). The tokens originally launched on the Ethereum network as ERC-20 tokens and were swapped out for ZIL tokens at the mainnet launch, in January 2019.
In 2019, Zilliqa launched its mainnet and enabled transactions within the first quarter.
In the second quarter, it launched smart contract creation on its platform, meaning developers can write and launch the contracts using the blockchain’s own programming language, Scilla.
Through sharding, Zilliqa claims the transaction throughput of its blockchain corresponds to, and increases, with the number of nodes in the network. For example, the project claims users will see roughly 1,218 transactions per second when 1,800 nodes are operating, a number that will jump to 2,488 transactions per seconds when the number of nodes doubles. It claims to have achieved over 2,828 transactions per second on its testnet.