Zilliqa is a scalable, secure, high-performance public blockchain platform designed for creating decentralized apps. This is the first platform of this kind to implement the sharding technology which aims to resolve the scalability issue inherent to all the Ethereum and Bitcoin-based projects. The platform is fueled by a native utility token Zilling (ZIL) that participants pay for processing transactions or running smart contracts. It is available for trading on top exchange platforms including Kraken, Bitfinex, Binance, and Huobi. The total supply of ZIL equals to 21 billion. The ICO started at the end of December 2018 and raised its full cap of 22 million USD worth of ether in a matter of a few days in a private funding round. One of the biggest investors was Danhua Capital, a famous Chinese venture capital firm. The team decided to cancel its plans for public token sale after that. But the community interest motivated them to allocate 4445 ETH worth of ZIL for a public sake which helped them double the raised amount - in a matter of a few days as well. An interesting fact is that Zilliqa’s team mostly comprises of computer specialists with the academic background. The idea emerged as an R&D project developed by a group of enthusiasts from the National University of Singapore. Before conducting an ICO, they had spent two years of hard work creating a functioning blockchain. The project’s CEO Xinshu Dong and Chief Scientific Advisor Prateek Saxena stepped aside from active roles at the project and joined the Board of Directors in May 2019. The former Crypto Lead and a co-founder of the project, Amrit Kumar, took the position of President and Chief Scientific Officer after that. The project was initially launched on the Ethereum platform with ERC-20 tokens because the public mainnet had not yet been released by that time while the team needed funds to make their plans a reality. Zilliqa conducted a token swap in January 2019. Token swap is a mechanism that helps token owners convert ERC20 ZILs from the Ethereum network to native ZILs on the Zilliqa network at the rate of 1:1. The ZIL token can be stored on a number of wallets with the Moon Wallet as the top recommendation from the developing team. It is blockchain agnostic and supports both Zilliqa and Ethereum chains. ZIL tokens are available for mining using a hybrid Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus protocol. It means that the regular PoW is used to establish identity only when you start mining and in the specified timed intervals. The rest of the time the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and an Elliptic Curve Based Schnorr Signature Algorithm with a discordant abbreviation of EC-Schnorr will be utilized. Zilliqa launched its mainnet on January 31st, 2018, claiming that the new blockchain would be 1,000 times as fast as Ethereum that is only capable of verifying 19 transactions per second at the maximum. First transactions on the platform were enabled in Q1 2019 with the smart contracts following quite soon after that in Q2. The release of smart contracts’ functionality made it possible for developers to write and launch their own pieces of code. Ethereum-based projects are based on the programming language named Solidity which has proved to be very complex and led to numerous mistakes in the dApps’ code and money losses (take the ill-famous DAO hack, for example). To address Ethereum’s security issues and vulnerabilities, Zilliqa has invented its own language named Scilla. Scilla-based smart contracts come with the following benefits: The new language comes with the built-in functionality that helps developers conduct regular checks to ensure that there are no bugs in the code and that it works just as planned. The built-in library of standard operations facilitating the developing progress. Different operational components such as communication with other contracts and computations are segregated in a pretty clear way. This helps to protect dApps from hacking incidents similar to the one that happened with DAO. It’s worth saying a few words about the sharding technology as well. This is a scaling solution that implies splitting a database (a blockchain) into parts or shards and spreading the load across multiple servers. One of the key issues, that Bitcoin and Ethereum ran into in 2017 with the drastic surge of cryptocurrencies’ popularity, was related to scalability. These networks and all their derivatives are built in such a way that every transaction has to be confirmed by all the nodes running the network. As the network grows, more verifications are needed which makes the system clumsy and inefficient. The main idea behind the sharding technology is that each transaction does not necessarily have to be confirmed by all the nodes. It’s enough to get confirmation from a limited number of participants. A transaction confirmed by, let’s say, 100 participants (that make up a shard) will be just as secure as the one confirmed by 10,000. Once a shard completes its job, the new transaction is linked to the main network. This helps to verify transactions much faster and significantly reduces the network fees. In theory, such an approach may help to verify a limitless number of transactions every second. Although Zilliqa was the first one to implement it, it’s no longer the only one in the industry. While Ethereum is slowly moving towards its final stage Serenity, many other projects have emerged and the scalability race is getting harder to win with every day.