Zilliqa (ZIL) has seen a spectacular decline in 2019, much worse than most other altcoins. This is largely due to the fact that the team has taken an extra cautious approach which has not been helped by the departure of the project’s CTO and CEO.

In 2018, Zilliqa (ZIL) was bursting with high hopes. Not only was it among the first blockchain networks to implement partial-sharding with a proof-of-work component, but it also claimed to scale much better than Ethereum. Overall, it seemed to be a contender for one of the top smart contract platforms, with many comparing it to NEO.

However, things have been more unclear for Zilliqa for much of the year. As crypto-reporter Dovey Wan recently pointed out, the CTO of Zilliqa recently left the project. “Now it’s fully decentralized,” Wan jokingly tweeted.

It seemed that the signs were already in the air last month when the CEO and co-founder recently stepped down from his post to head the Board of Zilliqa. Ultimately, the project is struggling with selling itself in this highly-competitive market which makes it difficult for an altcoin to differentiate itself. One of the few dApps intended to be built on ZIL, Bolt Global, was also ported over to Binance Chain and it’s currently unclear when it will launch on Zilliqa, if at all.

As James McCue (@jamestmccue) wrote in response to Wan’s tweets, Zilliqa was an ‘honest project’ that simply did not have the technical ability to make their vision a reality. The project now, he claims, is in its ‘death throes.’

After all, as McCue added, sharding is hard or else Ethereum would have had been able to do it already. Yet, this doesn’t mean that emerging platforms can’t achieve this themselves, but it would be difficult for Zilliqa to assert itself now considering it’s been in this market this long without gaining any traction.

At the time of writing, ZIL is trading at around $0.007 with a market capitalization of around $61M. This is a long ways away from where it was in May 2018 when ZIL reached a market capitalization of around $1.4B and hit a price of $0.20.

It seems, though, that the project is now in uncharted territory. For now, investors might want to wait for confirmed support if they still want to bet long-term on this project’s uncertain future.

Do you agree that the Zilliqa project is in its ‘death throes?’ Can it ever recover? Let us know your thoughts below in the comments.

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