N.B: The following Coin Report on Zilliqa is a Sponsored Post.

Welcome to the 44th Coin Report. In today’s report, I will be assessing the fundamental and technical strengths and weaknesses of Zilliqa. This will be comprised of an analysis of a number of significant metrics, an evaluation of the project’s community and development and an overview of its price-history. The report will conclude with a grading out of 10. I hope you enjoy the read!

Introduction

It has been a short while since I last published a Coin Report and I have been eagerly awaiting this one. In today’s report, I will be covering Zilliqa, which is a project that has been around for years now, having, rather unfortunately, been launched at the beginning of the bear market. It is one of those projects that has only known life within a bear market; as such, I am keen to determine the progress they have made despite the unfavourable conditions in which they have had to operate. Prior to researching this report, I actually knew rather little about it other than that it was involved in some way in smart contracts and that ZIL – the token – had never experienced a bull cycle since inception. The latter fact naturally intrigued me and I was thrilled at the prospect of publishing some deeper research on the project. We shall soon discover whether ZIL is a speculative opportunity with real fundamental strength or just another ICO that never got anywhere…

I hope this report will prove objective where it must be and fair on more subjective matters. For those who’d like to learn a little more about Zilliqa prior to reading this report, here are some primary links:

Fundamental

General:

Name: Zilliqa

Ticker: ZIL

Algorithm: ERC-20 (Token Swap occurring 15th Feb 2020 to Mainnet, which is currently live with Proof-of-Work on Ethash hashing algorithm)

Sector: Smart Contracts Platform

Exchanges: Binance, OKEx, Huobi Global, Kucoin, Bittrex, Gate.io, Upbit, Bitmax, HitBTC, Livecoin, Bithumb & MXC (and more)



Launch Overview

Zilliqa was conceptualised in 2017 and had its original whitepaper published late that year, culminating in a crowd-sale for its token generation event in December 2017. This occurred in conjunction with a private sale and altogether the project raised its entire hard-cap of $22mn, in exchange for 6.3bn ZIL of a maximum supply of 21bn ZIL. The ZIL token was created on the ERC-20 standard for the purposes of the crowd-sale. In January 2019, Zilliqa launched its mainnet with a native ZIL token, although both remain in existence until the token swap on February 15th, 2020. The mainnet operates using Proof-of-Work on the ethash hashing algorithm and has a 10-year mining period, during which 8.4bn ZIL will come into circulation.

Price-History Overview

As Zilliqa has been in existence for over two years, there is a great deal of price-history available to analyse. That said, given that its initial listing on exchanges occurred at the beginning of the 2018 bear market, it has only experienced a single distinguishable bull cycle during its existence.

Whilst I will dive into the price-history of the token a little later, for now it will suffice to say that it formed its all-time high against Bitcoin at 2,500 satoshis in April 2018 and its all-time low at ~50 satoshis at the turn of the New Year, in January 2020. Against the Dollar, its all-time high came in around the same time at $0.23 and its all-time low is $0.0043.

Project Overview

Zilliqa is a project that operates within one of the most competitive sectors of the industry: smart contracts. Since the inception of Ethereum, there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of projects that have attempted to improve upon the functionalities of a smart contracts platform by increasing throughput without sacrificing the decentralisation of the network or its security. Most have either failed or remain uncertain in their capacities. Zilliqa is attempting to solve the core issues found with smart contracts platforms by utilising sharding to increase throughput without the requisite loss of a decentralised network.

As stated in its Position Paper:

“Zilliqa is a new blockchain platform that is designed to securely scale in an open,

permissionless distributed network. The core feature that makes Zilliqa scalable is sharding

— the division of the network into several smaller component networks capable of

processing transactions in parallel. As a result, the transaction rate in Zilliqa increases as the

mining network expands. Zilliqa aims to rival traditional centralized payment methods such

as VISA and MasterCard. In fact, with a network size of 10,000 nodes, Zilliqa will enable a

throughput which matches the average transaction rate of VISA and MasterCard with the

advantage of much lower fees for the merchants.

…

Zilliqa will support a smart contract platform with a formally verifiable language that is

sharding-friendly, i.e., it will allow users to compute programs in parallel, harnessing the full

computational capacity of the mining network. For instance, the Zilliqa platform will allow

users to build distributed advertising networks, decentralized exchanges, conduct parallel

auctions, deploy MapReduce-style trading algorithms, run a shared economy, etc.“

The ambition of the project is of the highest order, particularly concerning its aims to compete with VISA and Mastercard for payments. I look forward to assessing its progress in this regard.

Let’s begin with some Metric Analysis:

Metric Analysis:

Below are listed a number of important metrics, all of which are accurate as of 7th February 2020. For anyone reading this who has yet to read a Coin Report, it might be worth reading this section of the first report, where any potentially unfamiliar terms are explained. For any terms or metrics specific to this post, I will provide explanations besides the figures.

Metrics:

General:

Price: $0.0073 (75 satoshis)

Circulating Supply: 9,872,413,808 ZIL



Total Supply: 13,163,880,961 ZIL

Exchange Volume: $11.589mn ($1.496mn excluding likely wash volume)

Network Value: $72.294mn (7404 BTC)

Maximum Supply: 21,000,000,000 ZIL

% of Max. Supply Minted: 62.69%

Network Value at Max. Supply: $153.78mn

Exchange Volume-to-Network Value: 16.03% (2.07% excluding likely wash volume)

Category: Largecap

Average Price (30-Day): $0.0051

Average Exchange Volume (30-Day): $6.937mn

Average Network Value (30-Day): $50.192mn

Average Exchange Volume (30-Day)-to-Network Value: 13.82%

Volatility* (30-Day): -0.0207

Average Daily On-Chain Transactions (30-Day): 13,364



Average Daily Transactional Value (30-Day): $857,000 (source: Flipside Crypto via Zilliqa team)



NVT (30-Day): 84.36

% Price Change USD (30-Day): +52.9%

% Price Change USD (1-Year): -55.7%

USD All-Time High: $0.23

% From USD All-Time High: -96.8%

Premine % of Max. Supply: N/A



Premine Location: N/A

Liquidity (calculated as the sum of BTC in the buy-side with 10% of current price across all exchanges): 137.15 BTC

Liquidity-to-Network Value %: 1.85%

Supply Available on Exchanges: 285,802,845 ZIL



% of Circulating Supply Available on Exchanges: 2.89%

*Volatility is calculated by taking the average price over the given time-period, calculating the difference between it and the highest price and it and the lowest price over that same time-period, and multiplying those figures together. The closer to 0, the less volatility during that period, and vice-versa. Read this for more on volatility.

Supply Emission & Inflation:

Block Reward Schedule: Smoothly decreasing block rewards over 10-year mining period, with ~80% of rewards mined in first 4 years. (source)



Average Block Time: 45 seconds

Current Block Height: 413,473

Annual Supply Emission: 837,698,630 ZIL (628.27 BTC at current prices)

Annual Inflation Rate: 8.49%

Circulating Supply in 365 Days: 10,710,112,438 ZIL

ICO:

The following details were taken from here and here.

ICO Period: December 2017 – January 2018

Total Coins: 21,000,000,000 ZIL

Coins Available For Sale: 6,300,000,000 ZIL

Coins Sold: 6,300,000,000 ZIL

Total Raised: $22,000,000



Average ICO Price Per Coin: $0.0035

ICO Breakdown: 40% of max. supply (8.4bn ZIL) reserved for future mining; 30% allocated to public sale (6.3bn ZIL); 12% to Zilliqa Research (2.52bn ZIL); 10% to Anquan Capital (2.1bn ZIL); 5% to the founders (1.05bn ZIL); and 3% to other supporting agencies (630mn ZIL).

Distribution:

Address Count: 191,771 (Mainnet)

Supply Held By Top 10 Addresses: 55.47%

Supply Held By Top 20 Addresses: 66.36%



Supply Held By Top 100 Addresses: 84.56%

Inactive Address Count in Top 20 (30 Days of No Activity): 5*

*Excluding team-owned addresses

Analysis:

There’s quite a lot here for me to unpack, but unfortunately I was unable to find any data sources for on-chain transactional volume, which would have been extremely insightful in determining the non-speculative demand for the blockchain. I was able to find the Average Daily On-Chain Transactions figure, however, which was a whopping 13,364 for the past 30 days; now, of course, this is not altogether illuminating without the transactional volume to accompany it, but this is obviously a significant number of daily transactions.

*Update: The Zilliqa team were able to provide on-chain transactional volume data, which came out to be ~$857k daily, giving Zilliqa a NVT of 84.36; roughly equivalent to that of Bitcoin and clearly indicative of non-speculative demand for the blockchain, as well as undervaluation of the network itself.

Following this, before we move on to more substantial metrics, I’d like to briefly highlight Zilliqa’s 30-day Volatility of -0.0207. This is the 7th-lowest degree of volatility found among prior reports and is suggestive of a potential accumulate range, at least against the Dollar.

Now, let’s take a look at the remaining General metrics before moving on to Supply Emission and concluding with Distribution:

Some of the most significant metrics to evaluate for speculators are those related to buy-side and sell-side Liquidity. I found Zilliqa to have buy-side Liquidity of 137.15 BTC within 10% of spot price across all listed exchanges, equating to an immense 1.85% of its Network Value. This is the highest degree of buy-side liquidity ever recorded in these reports, despite Zilliqa having one of the largest market caps (or network values) among those. This is very promising, as there is clearly demand at current prices.

Concerning sell-side Liquidity, Zilliqa was found to have 285.8mn ZIL available for purchase in the orderbooks across all listed exchanges, equating to 2.89% of its Circulating Supply; placing it in the top third for sell-side liquidity, although not particularly high among those. This suggests to me that, whilst there is clearly some desire for holders to sell their ZIL, there is a clear imbalance here and, from a speculator’s perspective, purely based on the liquidity metrics, this seems like a golden opportunity thus far.

Zilliqa traded $11.59mn of Exchange Volume in the past 24 hours, equating to 16.03% of its Network Value; an exemplary figure, if only it were real. Given that Zilliqa is listed on a plethora of exchanges, there is undoubtedly some washed volume being traded here, and, when we account for this, the real figure is closer to $1.49mn, equating to a still impressive 2.07% of its network value.

More importantly, its Average Daily Volume for the past month was reported to be $6.94mn, equating to 13.82% of its Average Network Value for the same period; again, when we account for washed volume, this is closer to $892k, which equates to 1.77%. Still, there is a clear sign of sustained interest in the token.

Moving onto Supply Emission, I calculated that 837,698,630 ZIL will be minted over the next year (611,52 BTC-worth at current prices). This gives Zilliqa a modest annual inflation rate of 8.49%.

However, more significant is the relationship between this Supply Emission and the Volume metrics mentioned above:

Given that 837m ZIL will be minted annually, we can work out that the average daily supply emission is 2.295mn ZIL, or 1.73 BTC-worth at current prices. This equates to $16,808 of daily supply emission. As Zilliqa traded ~$1.49mn of real volume over the past 24 hours, and an average of $892k of real volume daily for the past month, we find that Zilliqa’s average daily supply emission is covered 88.6x by its 24-hour volume and 53x by its Average Exchange Volume. Further, Liquidity of 137.15 BTC covers the average daily supply emission by 79x. Clearly, there are no real headwinds for price growth with regards to emission.

In short, any decreases in price are undoubtedly driven either by distribution from larger holders or distribution from smaller holders, and not from the daily emissions being dumped on the market.

Finally, let’s take a look at Distribution:

I was very impressed to find that there are 273,176 active addresses on the Zilliqa mainnet. This is the highest address count of all coins previously reported on (and is exclusive of addresses on the ERC-20 network, which amount to a further 29,071).

With regards to concentration of supply, the top 10 addresses control 55.47% of total supply; the top 20 control 66.36%; and the top 100 control 84.56%. This is excluding the #1 address, which contains the ~8bn ZIL that are reserved for mining rewards and are gradually being added into circulation at present. Moreover, among the top 5 addresses, 3 are either team-owned or owned by entities from the private sake, with the tokens in these subject to vesting.

Within the top 20 addresses (excluding the team-owned addresses and #1), 5 were inactive over the past 30 days, indicating that a quarter of the largest holders are content with their position sizes. Most significantly, 9 of the remaining addresses have been increasing position size over the past 30 days, with only 1 address net distributing during that period.

And that concludes this section on Metric Analysis. Onto the Zilliqa Community:

Community:

There are two primary aspects of community analysis: social media presence and Bitcointalk threads. I’ll begin with the former before moving on to the latter.

Social Media:

Concerning social media presence, there are four main platforms to examine: Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and Discord.

Zilliqa is present on three of the four platforms; all except for Facebook. To begin, let’s look at the various social metrics that I calculated from the Zilliqa Twitter and Facebook accounts:

Twitter Followers: 67,639

Tweets: 1,408

Average Twitter Engagement: 0.29%



Facebook Likes: N/A



Facebook Posts (30-Day): N/A



Average Facebook Engagement: N/A

As usual, I will be using RivalIQ‘s social benchmark report for evaluation purposes.

Twitter:

Whilst the Zilliqa Twitter account does have the third-largest audience of any coin previously reported on, its engagement rate is not quite as strong at 0.29%; a common problem, however, for accounts with vast audiences. That said, in RivalIQ’s report, we find that the average Twitter engagement rate across all industries is 0.048%, which means that Zilliqa’s engagement rate is currently 6x greater. Relative to other coins, Zilliqa’s engagement is 9th-lowest among prior reports.

Facebook:

There is no Facebook page for Zilliqa. This is quite surprising, particularly for a project that ran a crowdsale, as I have often found the largest Facebook communities for cryptocurrencies revolve around these.

Discord:

There are 695 members in the Zilliqa Discord group and it is used primarily for technical discussion by those who build on the platform and the core team. As such, I will focus my attention on the Telegram group (detailed below), where the Zilliqa community resides.

Telegram:

The Zilliqa Telegram group has 19,212 members, which is relatively large, and appears to be a hive of activity, with constant discussion on a daily basis.

Beginning with the pinned message, (dated 4th February – nice to see that this appears to be updated regularly), I found that Zilliqa just released their new website, which I will cover at length in a later section. The pinned message does not contain any important links for potential new users, however.

Regarding the content of the group, it would genuinely take hours to read through the past week’s worth of discussion alone; such is the engagement of the community, clearly (and it is certainly no bad thing). That said, I have endeavoured to summarise the main points of discussion below, to highlight what precisely we can determine about Zilliqa based on the interactions of its community:

There is deep, substantial discussion on the benefits and disadvantages of third-party development (which Zilliqa employs as an open-source, decentralised project); the degree to which I have honestly not seen from a Telegram group before. Very promising. One of the core benefits discussed here is allowing for the core team to focus on the building of internal infrastructure whilst simultaneously organically growing the ecosystem through contribution; contribution creates community.

There will be a final token swap for all ERC-20 ZIL to mainnet ZIL with a deadline of 15th February 2020. Following this, only mainnet ZIL will be valid. Exchanges such as Binance are supporting the swap. There is no manual swap; all ERC-20 tokens must be deposited to supporting exchanges.

Recently, Lucidity (a blockchain-based verification platform) announced that it will be joining Aqilliz (Zilliqa’s digital marketing platform) and will be utilising Zilliqa. Lucidity has Toyota, Saatchi and Saatchi and GameStop as current clients for digital advertising. This is subsequent to PepsiCo utilising Zilliqa via Mindshare in 2019 for its marketing campaign, culminating in a 28% increase in supply chain efficiency directly due to smart contract execution.

Anquan Capital is the parent company of Zilliqa and Aqilliz.

Regarding Aqilliz, clients of the advertising platform will not directly buy ZIL in order to use their services. Instead, Aqilliz will charge a fee and use the fee to buy ZIL on the market in order to use the Zilliqa blockchain to execute the smart contracts.

The team engage with the community consistently, answering queries and actively involving themselves in discussion. Some things remain obscure, naturally, as certain aspects of development must remain under wraps until they are publicly released in full.

Zilliqa and Xfers are working on a stablecoin dubbed XGSD for the Singapore Dollar which will operate using ZIL. It is currently in testing.

BitcoinTalk:

The Zilliqa BitcoinTalk thread was created on September 30th, 2017, though it is an unofficial thread. It has since generated 1031 posts spanning 52 pages in 857 days. This equates to 1.2 posts per day, on average. However, in the past 90 days, the thread has had 123 posts via 26 individual posters, giving an average of 1.36 posts per day; an increase on the historical average, which is extremely rare to see.

As the thread is unofficial, there is no announcement but merely a link through to the website and a summary of the project.

Regarding the content of the thread across the past 90 days, I found the following:

Xfers, a fintech company based in Singapore, are working on a stablecoin called StraitsX pegged to the Singapore Dollar and operating on the Zilliqa blockchain. The Monetary Authority Singapore have approved this stablecoin.

The team have been attending conferences and events to market Zilliqa and its XSGD stablecoin. This will be the first MAS-approved stablecoin in the Southeast Asia region.

Zilliqa partnered with Elliptic, a fraud and risk management firm from London.

Zilliqa has ~2,400 active nodes on the network.

And that concludes this section on the Zilliqa Community.

Let’s take a look at some development:

Development:

For the following Development analysis, I will be evaluating project leadership, the website, the roadmap, the whitepaper, the wallets and finally providing a general overview:

Project Leadership:

There are 23 core team members listed on the website and 47 employees on LinkedIn. There do not appear to be any vacancies at the moment.

Zilliqa was founded by Max Kantelia, Prateek Saxena and Amrit Kumar and is a subsidiary of Anquan Capital; a group of tech companies based in Singapore.

Regarding the core team listed on the website, there are members for Usability, Language, Platform, Marketing and Growth; all relevant fields are covered here. Moreover, Zilliqa has advisors including the co-founder of BOLT, the Head of ICO at Bitcoin Suisse, the Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College and School of Computing, the Director of Blockchain Engineering at Facebook and the CEO of Kyber Network.

Website:

https://zilliqa.com/

The Zilliqa website is brand-new, having just been released this week. It is very much modern in its design, with relatively distinct branding and smooth UI/UX. The navigation menu is clear and comprehensive.

In this section, I will cover, at length, the information that can be found on the website regarding Zilliqa and whether it serves as a useful resource for potential new users or speculators. As readers of my reports will know, I feel that a website is the primary hub for new users seeking to learn more about a project, so it is essential that this is fit for purpose.

Beginning with the homepage, we find Enterprise Ready emblazoned as the site’s tagline, with a brief overview of Zilliqa beneath it, describing it as “a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” Subsequently, we find Zilliqa at a glance, where the core aspects of the project are outlined, including the fact that Zilliqa was conceptualised at the National University of Singapore; has had its mainnet live since January 2019 and was the first public blockchain to successfully utilise sharding for scaling; employs Scilla as its smart contract language (created by the Zilliqa team to be safe-by-design); applies sharding to scale the throughput of the platform linearly; has over 60 project teams from over 20 countries working on Zilliqa’s ecosystem; and utilises dual mining to reduce carbon footprint, where “only 1 minute out of every 2-3 hours is needed to mine ZIL.” Overall, this is quite a concise and informative overview of the project, although perhaps something regarding current usage of the blockchain could be included here to prompt further interest.

Moving down the homepage, we find a link to an article detailing the imminent token swap, which is set for February 15th 2020. We also find links to the ZILHive, which awards grants and hosts accelerators for developers, and to the Viewblock explorer, with a brief statement on crossing 2 millions transactions in December 2019. There is also a link to learn more about Xfers, who are a fintech company based in Singapore that are developing XSGD with Zilliqa (as mentioned previously), as well as a short video on Unstoppable Domains; a Dapp for blockchain domains that has significantly increased on-chain demand for Zilliqa.

Now, looking more specifically at the informational pages on the site, let’s begin with Our Platform: here, we are given the three core aims of the Zilliqa blockchain, namely, scalability, security and decentralisation. Historically, only two of these three was simultaneously achievable for a smart contracts platform, with one almost inevitably being sacrificed (usually scalability or decentralisation). Zilliqa utilises sharding to scale linearly as demand for the blockchain increases, thus allowing for all three traits to co-exist. Further reading on this is provided via the whitepaper. We also find some interesting graphics on Zilliqa’s technical capabilities, with one showcasing its throughput of 2,800+ transactions per second against legacy blockchains’ 7-15 tx/ps. We also see how the throughput scales as the network grows, with 1,200 tx/ps possible at ~1800 nodes and 2,800 tx/ps possible at 3600 nodes.

Moving onto Language, here we find more information on Scilla, the smart contract language developed for Zilliqa specifically. It is peer-reviewed, created for user-friendliness and security (with built-in sanity-checkers and type-checkers) and is formally verifiable. Further reading links are provided here, also.

Turning to Ecosystem, we discover Zilliqa’s collaborators, including Aqilliz (a digital marketing platform), Xfers (a fintech company), Hg Exchange (a securities exchange, currently being developed) and ChainSecurity. Further, we find a list of Dapps, including Unstoppable Domains, Ocean Rumble and Depos. Zilliqa also have integrations from Chainlink and Moonlet, as well as Viewblock, Hummingbot and Ledger.

Finally, looking at About $ZIL, we find more detail on the token itself. More specifically, ZIL is a utility token that “powers the Zilliqa blockchain.” It is critical to the execution of smart contracts, as well as being used to reward miners and to cover transaction fees. Links are provided here to exchanges that support the token, as well as to the innumerable wallets available for storage. Some greater detail here on the current and expected future usage of the token would be well received by visitors, I would imagine.

There is also a relatively detailed FAQ and a News and Events page that contains updates on the recent happenings within the Zilliqa ecosystem.

Overall, thorough in most areas and very much useful for a potential new user.

Roadmap:

https://zilliqa.com/research-and-development-roadmap

The Zilliqa team is currently working on 14 different projects within their 2020 roadmap, which is detailed on their website. The roadmap also includes a Project Lifecycle, where we are told the process by which new developments progress, beginning with a problem and an objective, followed by research and ideation, the drafting of a proposal (Zilliqa Improvement Protocol), a review of the ZIP, approval, implementation, testing and culminating in a mainnet release.

Regarding the roadmap for 2020 itself, rather than being presented as a chronological timeline or map, we are given individual goals with a brief description, segmented by sector within the Zilliqa ecosystem. There are no dates provided nor further reading, but progress is indicated visually, with completed goals ticked off. The first section of goals is related to the core infrastructure of Zilliqa and includes the following:

Improving robustness

Efficient backend for persistent storage

Decentralisation of storage layer

System fuzzing (bug testing)

Efficient smart contract sharding

Support for zk-SNARKS (privacy)

Cross-chain solutions (interoperability)

Staking mechanisms (incentivising participants)

Layer 2 (off-chain or state channel infrastructure)

Among these, the improvement of the network robustness, support for zk-SNARKS and Staking Mechanisms are effectively completed, though not publicly released as of yet, The only fully completed goal is the improvement of storage efficiency.

The following section is on Scilla, the smart contract language native to Zilliqa and created by the team. Here, we find that all three goals are close to completion and include an efficient backend for Scilla to improve speed, high-level language constructs to improve user friendliness and formal verification of Scilla contracts.

Finally, under Other Projects, there are two goals, both close to completion also: SDKs and developer toolchains and system documentation.

This roadmap was up-to-date as of the 4th February 2020.

Whitepaper:

There is a highly-technical whitepaper, published in August 2017, which can be found here. This whitepaper is unfortunately beyond my means of comprehension as a technical Neanderthal, but for those that wish to learn about the precise mechanisms that comprise the Zilliqa platform in granular detail, check it out.

Wallets:

As ZIL is currently available as an ERC-20 token, it can be stored on Ledger hardware wallets, the Trust Wallet and other web and local wallets. Following the token swap on February 15th, only native ZIL will be valid and these must be stored in addresses beginning zil. These will include exchanges, web wallets and local wallets.

Further, the Trust Wallet, Moonlet, Ledger Nano S, Zillet and Zilliqawalletbot on Telegram are all native Zilliqa wallets that users can use to access native mainnet ZIL beyond centralized exchanges.

Technical

ZIL/BTC

ZIL/USD

*This analysis is from February 4th, 2020.

As can be observed from the charts printed above, Zilliqa has been traded for almost two years at this point, but the vast majority of this time has been spent in a macro downtrend, as the token was created at the beginning of the multi-year bear market that began in 2018.

Beginning with ZIL/BTC, we can see that price began with a bull cycle (coincidentally, the only one of ZIL’s entire existence) from a base of 35o satoshis, rallying to all-time highs of 2,500 satoshis in May 2018, before beginning the bear cycle that remains in play even today, over 18 months later. Price crashed hard from these highs, falling back to bear the origin of the cycle at 350 satoshis by August 2018, where it consolidated for a couple of months, peaking again and forming a double top at range resistance ~690 satoshis in early 2019. Price continued to fall from here, capped by the 200-day moving average, breaking through the 350-satoshi floor to new all-time lows, culminating in the current bottom at 53 satoshis. Price has now been range-bound between this bottom and 95 satoshis for exactly 6 months and is only just beginning to poke back above the 200MA. This is textbook for altcoin cycles, as they often flatten out for months, tightening and consolidating, whilst larger holders buy incrementally to increase position size at the lows. As we found with the earlier rich-list analysis, most of the top 20 holders are either flat or accumulating over the past month, which is a promising sign. If price is able to break out above the range resistance, I would expect an imminent test of the 360MA and former support turned resistance at 213 satoshis. I am a buyer in this range, as I believe it presents an excellent speculative opportunity for 2020, with a stop-loss on a Daily close below the all-time low.

Turning to ZIL/USD, though the pair did follow its BTC pairing in experiencing a bull cycle upon initial trading, we can quite clearly see that the entire price-history of the pair has been a macro downtrend, beginning with the all-time high at $0.23 in May 2018. Price has been falling for over 18 months since, breaking new lows periodically. The pair has also failed to trade above its 200MA for more than a couple of weeks since inception. Further, having put in a lower-high and a triple top at $0.027 in June 2019, price bled to all-time lows at $0.0043 in late 2019. Despite making lower-lows throughout Q4 2019, RSI was beginning to diverge, but every bounce was capped by range resistance at $0.065. Since the turn of the New Year, ZIL has rallied back towards $0.0065 and is looking to close the Daily above the 200MA for the first time since June 2019, with trendline resistance looming overhead. If ZIL is able to close convincingly above $0.0075, well clear of the overhead resistance, I would expect continuation towards $0.012, where the 360MA lies in wait, as does prior support.

And that concludes this Coin Report on Zilliqa!

Conclusion

This report is now over 5,000 words, and it is time to draw it to a close.

My final grading for Zilliqa is 9 out of 10.

Here, you can find my grading framework, for reference.

Lastly, here is a link to a Google Sheets file with any significant data from previous reports compiled for cross-comparative purposes. I will keep this updated as I continue to write these reports.

I hope this report has proved insightful and that you’ve enjoyed the read! Please do feel free to leave any questions in the Comments, and I’ll answer them as best I can.