Blockfolio Signal from Zilliqa (ZIL) by Xinshu Dong, CEO:

“Dear All, We are thrilled to announce that the Zilliqa (ZIL) mainnet has launched! This is a monumental milestone for the team and community. You may visit the block explorer at explorer.zilliqa.com. For mining on the Zilliqa mainnet, please refer to github.com/Zilliqa/Zilliqa/wiki/Mining.”

First blockchain team to implement sharding, with 2,828 transactions/sec.

PBFT-style efficient blockchain gives finality to transactions so that confirmations are not required.

Efficient mining process reduces electricity consumption, has more distributed rewards and allows for dual-mining.

Safe smart contracts on sharding architecture eliminates vulnerabilities and enables formal verifications for contracts.

Token swap from ERC20 to native ZIL token to begin in March.

Significance: Zilliqa becomes the first public blockchain platform to successfully implement sharding. Zilliqa is claiming initial speeds of 2,828 transactions per second. This compares to Ethereum’s capacity of just a few dozens transactions per second and further closes the cryptocurrency gap with Visa’s 8,000 transactions per second. Zilliqa’s mainnet launch comes just 15 months after releasing their original whitepaper.

Zilliqa’s use of sharding addresses one of the key issues facing the cryptocurrency sector — scalability. In particular, sharding stands out by allowing a high amount of on-chain transactions, rather than relying on second-layer solutions such as the Lightning network. Zilliqa uses nodes and splits the computational load of transactions, making them faster and cheaper. Zilliqa will be one of the very few PBFT-style (for Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) blockchains, with a consensus mechanism that is efficient and gives finality to transactions so that confirmations are not required.

They randomize nodes between shards, boosting security and making attacks extremely difficult. Their mainnet launch also includes a bug-resistant Scilla smart contract network, designed to eliminate many known vulnerabilities in existing smart contracts and make them amenable to formal verification.

Since the PoW period on Zilliqa will last for just 1 min every 2–3 hours, the energy footprint of mining on Zilliqa will be much smaller compared to blockchains that use PoW to reach consensus on every block. This helps to address a key criticism of cryptocurrency — power consumption. Mining rewards will also be far more distributed than other coins that employ a ‘winner takes all’ model. A token swap will commence in March, with ERC20 ZIL being swapped for native ZIL tokens. Several of the largest exchanges are cooperating with the swap.

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