My Background
Computer Science degree, and skeptic of ICOs - I am also lazy - - so I invest in ICOs for long term or a flip if I have time to do that. These are my thoughts on the TECHNOLOGY behind Zilliqa. Their ICO details have not been released at the time of writing. I'll post my ICO thoughts later but the only information known is that there is 20 BILLION ZIL tokens up for grabs. That's right. A huge amount. Below is a technical summary of the whitepaper and my thoughts on it.
ZILLIQA (ZIL)
Elevator Pitch
Zilliqa is the world's first high-throughput public blockchain platform - designed to scale to thousands of transactions per second.
Current Status
- There have been claims of 1000+ transactions per second with their private test using Amazon Web Server accounts.
- Testnet coming end of this year, which is by their own estimates an ambitious goal
WHY IS ZILLIQA UNIQUE FROM EXISTING BLOCKCHAINS
- As nodes increases, the speed of the network increases. This is achieved by dividing up blockchain data and processing it AT THE SAME TIME by all the nodes. This is known as sharding
- The Zilliqa network is divided into two separate blockchains to streamline work.
- DS-Blockchain - holding miners
- TX-Blockchain - ledger
- They have already claimed to have a private network working using AWS, which is ahead of the other technologies it borrows. We don't know if the claim is true or not.
Slack Channel
As of Oct 25th 2017, the channel has about 1100 members.
What is the upper limit of scalability? This was answered on their Slack channel
In theory, throughput in Zilliqa increases with the increase in the number of nodes. However, in practice, if the network size grows really large say 1 million nodes, then broadcast becomes an issue. Hence, in practice, there is a sweet spot until which the throughput can linearly increase before running into broadcast bottleneck. We are still running experiments to know that sweet spot.
Posted in #generalOct 22nd at 7:23 PM
** Team **
The team seem very responsive on slack and can answer all questions tech related. I haven't done in-depth research per member yet.
Concerns that the team want to eventually resolve
- Finding a secure PoS method of running zilliqa on. There currently does not exist a secure PoS way of running a blockchain
- Cross-Chain linking blockchains. Zilliqa will aim to integrate multiple blockchains
- Eventual bottlenecks: All nodes need a common virtual memory space to interact, and all nodes will be constantly updating the global values.. which will lead to bottlenecks. Zilliqa will need to find to sort these out before they actually become a problem as the system scales.
My thoughts
It's a very promising tech and I got a feeling that a lot of the new blockchain ICOs will be based on sharding - and a lot of the ICOs will compare themselves to bitcoin rather than to other projects such as EOS or IOTA. However we will need to wait until December until the code is released on Github.
Other future projects to keep an eye on, that Zilliqa borrowed ideas from
At the moment the below are only whitepapers, but no doubt in the next few years we will see these come to fruition. Zilliqa has been working on this project for 2 years now and will soon deploy their testnet.
- ByzCoin
- Elastico
- Bitcoin-NG
- OmniLedger
The technology is amazing though! So keep your eyes peeled on it.