In the Crusher of the Month series, we will write about a coin/token that we have the most conviction in each month. The time frame will be around 1 month, or until we publish the next Crusher of the Month. In March 2018, our Crusher of the Month is Zilliqa, ticker ZIL.



Zilliqa is a high-throughput public blockchain platform designed to scale to thousands of transactions per second.



At the end of 2017, we published our prediction of 3 trends for the blockchain space in 2018. One of the trends is the focus on scalability as more and more decentralized applications (dApps) are launched.



Zilliqa is one of the few blockchains that has demonstrated a high transaction throughout in the range of thousands of transactions a second using common servers (AWS EC2).



There are quite a few “blockchain 3.0” where they hold a lot of promises. So why do we like Zilliqa in particular right now? We will share the reasons below.

Why do we like it?

Demonstrated On-Chain Scaling Capability

For blockchain to achieve mass real-world adoption, it needs to match or even exceed the throughput of current payment networks like Visa or MasterCard, which is capable to performing a throughput of up to 4,000 transaction per second (TPS).



However, the popular blockchain platforms currently has a very low throughput (Bitcoin at 3-7 TPS, Ethereum at 7-15 TPS) because each node stores all states (account balances, contract code and storage, etc.) and processes all transactions.



So far, Zilliqa is the only blockchain with a working implementation of sharding which allows the platform to achieve TPS in the thousands.



Sharding attempts to split the blockchain's data into more manageable parts, so that each node doesn’t have to validate all transactions. Ethereum is also actively researching on sharding and has sharding in its roadmap, scheduled to be implemented after the Casper hard fork.



Zilliqa has demonstrated a 2,488 TPS running AWS EC2 servers with 6 shards and 3,600 nodes. It has also shown that the more nodes the blockchain has, the more TPS it can handle. Therefore, sharding doesn’t only work in theory, but is proved to be doable on testnet.



Zilliqa is scheduled to release the initial version of testnet by the end of March 2018, and roll out its mainnet by Q3 2018.

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Strong Team and Advisors

Zilliqa’s development activities has been very active, with over 10 contributors on GitHub. They also provide bi-weekly update on their development progress on their blog.



It has a stacked team and advisors working on the project, which gives us confidence that the team can achieve its vision. Below is a summary bio of the key team members and advisors.



Team members:

Xinshu Dong, CEO – PhD, National University of Singapore, led the development of Anquan’s public and private blockchain infrastructure.

– PhD, National University of Singapore, led the development of Anquan’s public and private blockchain infrastructure. Prateek Saxena, Chief Scientific Advisor – PhD, UC Berkeley, research professor in computer science at National University of Singapore, recipient of Top 10 Innovators under 35 (MIT TR35 Asia) in 2017.

– PhD, UC Berkeley, research professor in computer science at National University of Singapore, recipient of Top 10 Innovators under 35 (MIT TR35 Asia) in 2017. Yaoqi Jia, Head of Technology – PhD, National University of Singapore, research focus on web security/privacy, network security and distributed system security.

– PhD, National University of Singapore, research focus on web security/privacy, network security and distributed system security. Amrit Kumar, Head of Research – PhD, Université Grenoble-Alpes, research focus on security, privacy and applied cryptography.

Advisors:

Evan Cheng , Engineering Director at Facebook, ACM Software System Award winner for his contribution to LLVM (2012).

, Engineering Director at Facebook, ACM Software System Award winner for his contribution to LLVM (2012). Dr. Ilya Sergey , Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).

, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL). Loi Luu , CEO of Kyber Network, PhD, National University of Singapore.

, CEO of Kyber Network, PhD, National University of Singapore. Alexander Lipton, CEO of StrongHold Bank Labs, Connection Science Fellow at MIT and an Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at NYU.

Relative Valuation in the Current Market Environment

We are currently experiencing a bear market, which actually provides opportunities to pick up quality projects at a discount.



Zilliqa’s current market cap is at $281 million, comparing to EOS at $3.7 billion, Nano at $1.2 billion, RChain at $413 million, and aelf at $156 million (which is our earlier Crusher of the Month).



Compared to the incumbent Ethereum, which has a market cap of $59 billion, Zilliqa’s market cap is 0.5% that of Ethereum. Even though we are bullish on Ethereum, we also believe there can be multiple winners in the race to scalability. When it comes to reward versus risk, we believe Zilliqa has great long-term potential.

Other Tidbits about Zilliqa

They provide frequent updates on their blog, which is a great medium to stay on top of the project. From the updates, you can see that they are very active on the development as well as the community building front.

It is revealed that NEO has invested in Zilliqa.

In the most recent update published on March 16, 2018, they are on track to release the initial version of blockchain by the end of March 2018.

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