Zilliqa is getting a lot of buzz lately so we decided to take a look at what this tech really does.
What is Zilliqa? Zilliqa is basically a high-throughput blockchain. This means that they are focusing more on transactions per second than anything else. For Zilliqa it's all about getting as much information through the blockchain as they possibly can. They will be implementing this by using sharding. On their testnet, they've already got 2488 transactions per second and their achieving this with 6 shards and 3,600 nodes.
For those of you that don't know what sharding is -- to put it simply it's taking the network and breaking it up into small groups. These groups are called “shards.” So if you had 100 computers you could break them up into 10 groups of 10 so that would be ten shards and each shard would then process their own transactions. These are referred to as “microtransactions" and once everybody's achieved their microtransactions then all of those are put together to form a normal block which is then added on to the blockchain. This results in a high throughput transaction speed like I mentioned earlier of 2488.
Now when you compare that to Bitcoin which has on average 7 transactions per second, and Ethereum which averages between 10 and 15, and Visa which is between 6000 and 8000 transactions per second, we are approaching Visa level. When more computers join the network, the number of shards and the number of nodes increase, which means more transactions per second.
Potential use cases for this blockchain are industries that require a high throughput, such as payment network systems; advertising where we're sending cookies back and forth, and advertisement data following people around on the internet; as well as scientific computing where there is a constant stream of information being fired backward and forwards.
Scilla is the programming language for smart contracts, which is supposedly more secure and thorough than other programming languages. I'm not a programmer so I don't know anything about the language; we'll just have to take their word for it.
The mainnet will be launched in Q3 2018. This means they will fully move over to their own blockchain. This is very exciting because we will find out how close they are to achieving the transaction speed they promise. Also, from an investor's point of view, if we look at other tokens that have launched their own mainnet or are approaching their own mainnet, there is a lot of hype and a lot of price activity going on. So that's something to watch.
Obviously, I do have to say I am NOT financial advisor and this is NOT financial advice; this video is purely for entertainment purposes so don't come after me if you lose money. It's not my fault.
Now let’s move on over to Reddit to see what others have to say. The first comment is asking what makes Zilliqa different than other blockchains. The first thing they point out is that the team is primarily made up of scientists. There are quite a few people with “Ph.D.” attached to their name, as well as venture capitalists and, supposedly, world-class marketing professionals.
I don't know if anybody else knows anything about Zilliqa, but there's not a huge marketing push out. It seems to me like the team's more focused on getting the product right before they start pushing any marketing so I doubt whether it's “world-class marketing professionals.” Zilliqa also has a collaboration with MindshareWorld.com. I had to investigate that a little bit -- no loudspeakers, no Lambos, no bullshit, which is always nice in a project. I just really like the way the point of view was expressed. It’s very short, concise, and to the point.
Then we have another Reddit user who talks about sharding and other blockchains that are trying to achieve the same thing but in different ways. We've got lightning, Raiden and, Trinity and this users points out that these are all off-chain scaling solutions where as Zilliqa is on-chain or parallel -- it grows exponentially as the network grows.
One user offered a neutral viewpoint by saying smart contracts may be limited due to the programming language being data flow based and not turing complete. Yes, this could be an issue or will be an issue to start off with, but I think if the team noticed that they are missing out on things or they've missed a niche then they will do their best to find a solution to this.
On the con side, one drawback to sharding is that running a full node requires terabytes of data. If that is the case this could lead to centralization of the network because terabytes -- although we've all probably got a terabyte hard drive in our laptops -- to have several of them on a stand-alone server is costly. The thought is that Zilliqa may get used by corporate entities more so than the average Joe like me or you, which would lead to some form of centralization of the network.
And that’s it from here. I hope you learned something. Do some research, have a look at Zilliqa, have a look at Reddit, go to CryptoPanic for news and pay attention to the charts. Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer:
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