You’ve probably heard of the now common “move over, there’s a new Sherriff in town”. Well, it appears blockchain has one too, a new generation cryptocurrency whose design is a complete game-changer for many altcoins.

The first thing you notice about Zilliqa (ZIL) is its team. It is a super team of top professionals with experience in blockchain technology, business management, and finance. I began with the team because most times, a project is defined by the team behind it.

Bitcoin was defined by the vision of Satoshi Nakamoto; Ethereum (ETH) has Vitalik Buterin, and Litecoin had Charlie Lee. And without singling out anyone, I believe Zilliqa’s team is arguably one of the best out there at the moment.

The goal of this project is to provide blockchain-based solutions on a platform that offers the highest scalability and security. It will provide developers with a platform offering the highest throughput in the blockchain industry.

Other platforms that are trying to compete with Ethereum like EOS, NEO, Lisk and so on, don’t match Zilliqa’s potential to disrupt the old order. And it’s in this respect that ZIL could be taken as a true competitor of Ethereum.

Zilliqa’s implementation of the Sharding technology right from the beginning puts it miles ahead of Ethereum.

Sharding is that concept in blockchain solutions that allow for improved scalability, network performance, and bandwidth usage. Using sharding, the network automatically splits the nodes into “shards”- parallel chains of nodes.

Each shard works independently in processing part of a transaction called a micro-block. These micro-blocks are then merged into a block and added to the blockchain. The result is a much faster network.

We know that sharding is also expected on the Ethereum network, but that hasn’t happened yet. Even if it happens that both have sharding, space will have been opened up, giving developers options. And that’s how Ethereum will lose to the new kid on the block if its own implementation doesn’t happen sooner.

Transaction-wise, Zilliqa’s private testing that is in beta has achieved transaction throughputs of over 2400 tx/second. Below is a testnet of the Zilliqa network using 6 shards and 3,600 nodes.

In comparison, Ethereum’s blockchain can process about 10 to 15 TPS. The 4000tps volume is way higher than what any of the platforms that claim to be fast can offer.

Decentralized Apps running into over 1000 are built on the Ethereum network. Unfortunately, its throughput of just 15 tx/s can’t support increased volumes much further. That is the reason it will find it hard to keep developers from looking in the way of Zilliqa.

When the public blockchain launches, ZIL will be an outright competitor of Ethereum. Developers looking for a high throughput will likely prefer to try the new generation platform.

Zilliqa is poised to eat into Ethereum’s dominance of the smart contracts and dApps market. The key to that will be the differences in programming languages that hands the advantage to the highly rated ZIL network.

Ethereum uses Turing-complete language in writing smart contracts, and its Solidity still isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Contrary, Zilliqa comes in with a revolutionary language that’s not-Turing complete.

The smart contract language employed on the Zilliqa network gives developers an edge over those on Ethereum. The use of Scilla programming language is simpler to use while being more resilient and less likely to be attacked by bugs.

What should we expect from Zilliqa in 2018?

The roadmap provided by the platform doesn’t give much detail, but it is expected that Q2 will see the launch of the very first version of the project’s public mainnet. This is anticipated to be in May. The community is getting excited already at what looks like will be the first warning shot at all platforms whose scalability issues bog them down.

Still, in Q2, we expect to see the release of some kind of sharding details for smart contacts. As this will happen after the mainnet launch, the expectation is that ZIL will continue to experience growth as interest mounts. There are also details to release dApps later on in Q3.

What does this mean? The ZIL token could eventually surge to mirror gains made by other coins whose supply is more else similar to ZIL’s. At the moment, the Zilliqa (ZIL) is trading in the region of $0.09 against the dollar. It’s nicely priced for anyone who would want to get in early.