I am delighted and honored to announce the launch of smart contracts on the Zilliqa platform. This signals a major step forward not just for Zilliqa, but for the blockchain infrastructure industry as a whole.

This launch enables developers to write and deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain using our safe-by-design smart contract language Scilla. With sharding as our backbone, and talented engineers, entrepreneurs and visionaries on the frontlines, we have realised our vision of a better, easy-to-use and safe smart contract language.

Since the launch of our mainnet six months ago, we have been energised to keep pushing, keep developing and keep progressing. This will not change, and has been the larger vision as we saw through the culmination of the bootstrap phase, on-going token swap and changes to our engineering infrastructure and developer tools. Keeping the community in mind, we worked to build an ecosystem where everyone could benefit, and everyone would thrive.

Let me take this opportunity to tell you a bit about the core features of Zilliqa smart contracts:

Amenable to formal verification: Scilla is designed with a balance between expressivity and tractability, hence enabling formal reasoning about contract behavior.

Scilla is designed with a balance between expressivity and tractability, hence enabling formal reasoning about contract behavior. Static analyzers suite: The language comes with a suite of static analyzers that check for potential bugs and issues in the contract. These are very helpful in detecting bugs in contracts before they go live.

The language comes with a suite of static analyzers that check for potential bugs and issues in the contract. These are very helpful in detecting bugs in contracts before they go live. Clean separation: The language is designed in a way that different operational components of a contract such as computation and communication (with other contracts) are handled in a very clean manner hence eliminating any complex interleaving. This can prevent incidents like the DAO and the Parity hacks.

The language is designed in a way that different operational components of a contract such as computation and communication (with other contracts) are handled in a very clean manner hence eliminating any complex interleaving. This can prevent incidents like the DAO and the Parity hacks. Safe standard libraries: Scilla comes shipped with a suite of standard libraries such as a library that performs arithmetic operations in a safe manner and hence eliminating the need to rely on external libraries such as OpenZeppelin.

Smart contracts will help us further our footprint across a range of sectors — whether it is financial services, media and advertising, or gaming and entertainment. I eagerly look forward to witnessing how this technology unfolds, disrupts and evolves, and how we are able to build on it.

Part of this includes building our global network of developers. Part of this includes attending global events and conferences to engage with this growing community in a meaningful way. This year, we were at Paris Blockchain Week, Malta Blockchain Summit, New York Blockchain Week, ETH Denver and San Francisco Developer Week. Another aspect of this is making sure Zilliqa is leveraging its world-class talent and paying it forward in terms of education and awareness. This has involved running workshops in developer hotspots across the world, in partnership with industry organisations, universities and research centers. The team will keep you posted on all these activities.

The enabling of the smart contract functionalities on our blockchain is a critical step forward on our journey. We will continue working to enhance our platform and make it as innovative, safe, and usable as we can.

I’d like to say once again — We thank you for your support and championing the Zilliqa project with such enthusiasm over the last two years. We look forward to discussing our accomplishments, and our vision for the future in greater detail during the Zilliqa Day celebrations, which will take place on 18 June. See you all soon!

With regards,

Amrit Kumar

President and Chief Scientific Officer, Zilliqa