Transaction speed
Scalability is the major problem preventing blockchain technology from reaching real-world adoption.
Existing public blockchain platforms like Bitcon and Ethereum are only able to process few transactions per second. These platforms are slow to handle the number of transactions per second that even a single small real-world app would require.
To gain real-world adoption and disrupt all those industries, a blockchain has to process enough transactions per second where there are no waits.
Enter Zilliqa, the world’s first high-throughput public blockchain capable of handling thousands of transactions per second.
There are a few blockchain projects that claim high transaction speeds. NEO and EOS for examples, claims 1000 TPS.
NEO and EOS claim fast transaction speeds (1000 TPS+) but this is only because there are only a few nodes running the entire network. NEO and EOS are not decentralized networks, but rather completely centralized.
Zilliqa is a completely decentralized and permissionless public blockchain. Zilliqa achived 2488 TPS speed with 3600 nodes on the testnet.
Sharding
Zilliqa solves the scalability problem through a version of sahrding called transaction sharding.
The idea behind sharding, as it applies to Blockchain, is to algorithmically split up all the nodes in a network into a smaller collection or subcommittee (called a shard) that process transactions in parallel.
The Zilliqa protocol divides the number of mining nodes on the network into groups of 600 nodes or more. Each group is known as a shard.
Each shard processes its own microblock in parallel with other shards, and resulting micro-blocks are merged into a final one.
Zilliqa utilizes a linear scaling approach where the network’s throughput capacity increases with each new node that joins the network.
This means the more miners who join the network, the faster Zilliqa will be.
Consensus
Zilliqa uses the unique Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm with Collective Signing.
PBFT is a very secure consensus scheme with the assumption that a portion the nodes in the network is hostile (working against the network).
As such, each node must independently verify all transactions and the results are shared between all nodes with a consensus reached by the majority.
Thus the network is protected against hostile nodes or clusters of hostile nodes.
Smart Contracts
Zilliqa will includes a smart contract layer on top of the blockchain layer. This smart contract layer will include a " Scilla " a Solidary-like language.
The smart contracts will be non-Turing complete.
Smart contracts written in a non-Turing complete language are more secure and stable than in a Turing-complete language. Non-Turing complete languages are far more efficient for certain types of applications.
However, it is possible to still write and execute Turing-complete languages on the Zilliqa blockchain.
Features
Ziliqa’s unique POW + PBFT algorithm allow for much lower transaction fees than competing blockchains like Ethereum and NEO.
Along with lower transaction fees, Zilliqa’s PBFT and POS hybrid scheme result in more profitability for miners and incentivizes more new nodes (miners) to join.
Zilliqa has proven transaction finality due to the PBFT consensus algorithm.
Zilliqa will be adding a privacy feature to transactions in the future, giving Monero-like privacy features directly to the Zilliqa chain.
Zilliqa promises to seek out an interoperability layer (alternatively “layers”) in the near future, allowing Zilliqa cross chain communication (talking to other blockchains through some API).