$0.002545

Zilliqa is a public blockchain designed for high transaction throughput, aiming to process thousands of transactions per second. It addresses scalability and speed through sharding, a second-layer solution. The platform supports decentralized applications and, since October 2020, staking and yield farming. Development began in June 2017, with a testnet in March 2018 and mainnet launch in June 2019. ZIL, its native token, fuels transactions and smart contract execution.

Zilliqa originated from a 2016 paper by Prateek Saxena, a professor at the National University of Singapore, and his students, outlining a sharding-based blockchain. Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital with Max Kantelia and Juzar Motiwalla, which incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017. The team included CEO Dong Xinshu, CTO Yaoqi Jia, and CSO Amrit Kumar, all former research fellows at NUS.

Zilliqa is the first public blockchain to fully rely on sharding, enabling high throughput that scales with network growth. Transactions are confirmed instantly without additional wait time. It targets large-scale enterprise use in sectors like advertising, gaming, and finance, aiming to rival traditional payment systems like Visa and MasterCard. Both Anquan Capital and Zilliqa Research hold significant ZIL reserves, and the network processes millions of transactions monthly as of 2021.

Zilliqa has a fixed supply of 21 billion tokens. Initially sold as ERC-20 tokens in a January 2018 event, they were swapped to the mainnet by February 2020. Before launch, 60% (12.6 billion) were allocated for the token event, with the rest mined. Allocations included 10% for Anquan Capital, 12% for Zilliqa Research, and 5% for team, distributed quarterly over three years. Mining is designed to complete within 10 years, with 80% mined in the first four years and 20% in the remaining six.

Zilliqa uses practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT), requiring two-thirds node agreement for record addition. Nodes in each shard confirm transactions, then a second group validates shard results. Elliptic-curve cryptography and multisignatures enhance security. A proof-of-work algorithm assigns node identities and creates shards. Smart contracts use Scilla, a safety-focused language that identifies vulnerabilities and supports formal verification.

ZIL is available on major exchanges like Binance, Huobi, Bitfinex, and Bithumb, tradable against fiat, stablecoins, and other cryptocurrencies.