Aside from the current market price declines, there’s another issue that has occupied cryptocurrency minds. It’s the debate about scalability and how to address its challenges.

And one of the hottest blockchain platforms dominating these debates is the emergence of Zilliqa (ZIL).

It’s clear that the top cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have faced huge challenges with poor scalability.

Blockchain scaling proponents

Various off-chain upgrades are being pursued to help the two improve. However, quite unsurprisingly, there are countless blockchain projects at the moment that have promised to offer the final solution.

Such platforms include EOS, IOTA, NEO, and Cardano. They all have come up with grand suggestions on how to overcome the problems being faced by Ethereum.

Top on the agenda has been how to gain high transactions speeds. For instance, EOS promises higher TPS via its authorized block producers (21 elected nodes).

However, this approach seeks scalability and high performance at the expense of decentralization. It, therefore, isn’t a reliable solution.

IOTA, via its Tangle and DAG protocol, can theoretically scale exponentially. Two nodes must secure and confirm a previous transaction. The problem is that the networks’ security actually guaranteed, as the assumption is that the nodes will be honest.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are all exploring off-chain solutions, which in the end, do not offer real end to the problems due to the fact that the main chain is still slower.

Zilliqa (ZIL) offers the best solution

Zilliqa’s solution is unmatchable as it offers on-chain scalability. What this means is that sharding is live on the network, not an option for the future.

Ethereum also wants to implement sharding, and will likely be ready to do so now that its Casper PoS has been implemented. However, challenges still about and the upgrade may only be available for testing later in 2019.

As such, Zilliqa stands out and has proven its high throughputs with blazing transaction speeds achieved on its open permissionless ledger.

It thus gives any dApps deployed on the network access the faster transactions and dwarfs any efforts made by other platforms.

Sharding and linear scaling

Even though Zilliqa is already miles ahead of the rest and could get even further when its mainnet is released in Q3 2018. By then, users will be able to build on the platform and utilize smart contracts.

As opposed to what other blockchains do when more nodes are added, Zilliqa’s throughput increases with an increase in the number of nodes on the network.

It, therefore, implies that the network becomes faster as more nodes join the network.

Zilliqa’s revolutionary implementation of sharding (still the only one to successfully achieve it), makes scalability a thing of the past.

By way of transaction sharding, the platform is able to avoid slowing down and bloating of the network through data overload.

This is done via parallelization of data as it flows across shards on the network.

The increased throughput is achieved as the number of nodes increase.

As seen above, the network has been able to reach confirmed throughputs of 2,488 with 3,600 nodes. This increase is up from 1,752 TPS where 2,400 nodes and 4 shards are involved.

Transaction finality and pBFT consensus

Zilliqa also offers transaction finality. What this means is that a transaction on the ZIL network doesn’t have to wait for confirmation- like on Ethereum and other blockchains.

This technology helps to achieve two things actually. First, it helps eliminate any risk of double spending. However, it brings out another advantage as it makes transactions clear faster, essentially increasing speed.

The use of practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) improves network security by assuming that a portion of the nodes will turn out to be hostile.

As such, all nodes verify every transaction independently before consensus is reached.

Conclusion

We have blockchain platforms that offer high transaction speeds but what most of them end up doing is to compromise security.

They also have become more centralized instead of the envisioned decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies. Zilliqa remains the only platform to successfully test and deploy sharding.

With its recently launched Scilla language and smart contracts functionality, the ZIL team could be poised to disrupt the crypto industry and put to bed debates on scalability.