Today, Portal Network is revealing the Zilliqa Name Service that we have been working on top of the Zilliqa blockchain. Our ZNS (Zilliqa Name Service) standard will fully support all the features and the services provided on Zilliqa, including transactions and dApps. In this article, we will discuss what is Zilliqa and what we have been working on with the ZNS standard.

What is Zilliqa

In short, Zilliqa is a blockchain protocol that supports smart contracts. What makes it different from others is that it is one of the first protocols to apply sharding technology, potentially making it possible to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) while maintaining the decentralized characteristics.

Bitcoin has around 10,000 nodes and can handle up to 7 TPS. Ethereum has around 14,500 nodes and can handle up to 15 TPS. Zilliqa with its sharding technology, can handle 1,200 TPS with 1,800 nodes, and 2,500 TPS with 3,600 nodes (test net environment).

How — Sharding

Zilliqa uses a technology known as sharding, which will divide the mining nodes in Zilliqa network into groups of 600 nodes. Each group is known as a shard, and will process the transaction in the network evenly. For instance, if there are 2,400 transactions and 2 shards, each shard will be in charge of 1,200 transactions.

This solution provides a proportional correlation between the number of nodes and the number of transaction, meaning the more nodes we have in the network, the more transaction it can process, making the computing demand for each shard relatively stable.

What is Zilliqa Name Service (ZNS)

ZNS is a Blockchain Name Service (BNS) standard that will govern the naming service of dApps built on Zilliqa blockchain. The major function of this name standard is to change the default complex address like ‘cc02a3c906612cc5bdb…’ into human-readable text like ‘yourname.zil’.

With ZNS, both regular and technical users can use, create and experience decentralized application with a more simplified manner. For instance, users can manage their Zilliqa token at an address like “myname.zil”, access dWeb through address like “myweb.zil”, and develop or interact with contracts at address like “mycontract.zil”.

Development Progress

Zilliqa is a blockchain designed to scale based on its sharding technology, or sharding layer. In order to allow communication (check variables, states, etc.) between each shard, they use a smart contract language known as ‘Scilla’. Utilizing Scilla, we are developing the ZNS protocol on the protocol layer with 3 major components: Registry, Registrar, and Resolver.

We will bring more insight of the ZNS technical stack in our future updates, so stay tuned!

At the moment, we have started interacting with the Zilliqa testnet through library and node provided by the Zilliqa team.

Thank you for reading.