Zilliqa has made a handsome entry into the $1 billion club.
This week, the first public blockchain-based cryptocurrency designed to implement sharding secured the feat to become one of just 30 cryptocurrencies that have a market cap above a billion dollars.
As of Thursday morning ET, Zilliqa was ranked at 22nd in the list of cryptocurrencies by market cap. Over the last month, the value of the crypto coin has increased by more than 5 times. It had a market cap of around $280 million on April 10, while today it is hovering over 1.42 billion.
Image Courtesy: Coinmarketcap.com
As the popular cryptocurrency networks like bitcoin and ethereum continue to face major bottlenecks in transaction processing in a timely manner, Zilliqa emerged as a possible solution to the scalability issue. (See also: What’s the Bitcoin Scaling Debate? A Cause for Worry?)
Bitcoin is attempting to solve the problem by implementing measures like the lightning network, which has led to concerns that the cryptocurrency network will get more centralized. (See also: Lightning Network: What Is It and Can It Solve Bitcoin’s Scaling Problem.)
Zilliqa: The Scalable Cryptocurrency Network
Zilliqa uses the sharding solution, which has the capability to scale upward with the increasing size of the cryptocurrency network. Theoretically, it allows for the network to seamlessly process any number of transactions per second. Realistically, the transaction processing will depend upon the number of available active nodes on the network, and given the traction that Zilliqa has generated, it seems to be well positioned to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. Essentially, it claims to be the solution of the scalability challenge. Its white paper claims that “at ethereum’s present network size of 30,000 miners, Zilliqa would expect to process about a thousand times the transaction rates of ethereum.”
Another reason for its popularity is that it is not just a payment-focused network like bitcoin. It also has support for hosting and executing smart contracts on its blockchain, which are the primary feature of the ethereum network. Ethereum, too, is planning to move to sharding some times in the future. (See also: 4 Blockchain Contenders in Competition with Ethereum.)
The virtual token is available for trading on popular cryptocurrency exchanges that include Binance, Huobi, Gate.io and OKEx.
It has gained more than 17% to an exchange rate of $0.1956 over the last 24 hours.
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