Zilliqa interview [video]: from dissertation to unique crypto token

What started as Prateek Saxena's dissertation at the National University of Singapore (NUS) grew in 2017 out to become the project we know today as Zilliqa.

Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at NUS, along with five other academics described in the paper how blockchains were plagued by their limited processing speed. For example, the Bitcoin network can only process an average of 7 transactions per second. They described a principle they called “sharding” that would finally solve that problem.

An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) was held between December 27, 2017 and January 4, 2018. It raised $22 million, which would signify the first investment in the team and its framework. The team consists of several academics from various branches of computer science, security and cryptography.

Zilliqa Head of Metaverse & NFTs Sandra Helou

Invezz had the opportunity to speak with one of Zilliqa’s most prominent board members, Sandra Helou, Head of Metaverse & NFTs. Watch the video below to learn more about Zilliqa’s ever evolving space and which role NFTs and the Metaverse are playing in it.

What is the use case of ZIL?

The main use case of Zilliqa is the solution of the scalability problem. The sharding technique allows for a division of nodes as soon as a certain number of them are reached. A new shard is formed every 600 nodes, which forms a kind of blockchain in the blockchain.

The transactions that happen in that shard also only need to be verified in that shard. This ensures a distribution of the workload and a much faster transaction speed. It even ensures that the transaction speed increases as more nodes and shards come on the ZIL blockchain.

Zilliqa achieves all this without compromising on security. Which sometimes dares to happen with other projects that have tried to increase scalability.

The Zilliqa network is mainly smart contract oriented. That makes them a direct competitor to the big Ethereum. Ethereum has had a scalability problem since its inception. They are now trying to tackle this step by step. Here too, sharding is part of the solution, which must guarantee an increased transaction speed and an ever-growing volume. Zilliqa thus has an edge in terms of scalability.

The Zilliqa team has developed its own language for its smart contracts. “Scilla” short for “Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language”. It has a strong security focus and automatically identifies security vulnerabilities. That is also an answer to what can sometimes be a problem with Ethereum smart contracts.

What about tokenomics?

The ZIL coin currently has a hard cap of 21 billion coins. So there will never be more than that amount in circulation. At the moment, there are just over 11 billion coins in circulation and just over 3 billion are in the hands of the team or major investors, among others. 

The Ziliqa white paper describes how it is planned that all ZIL coins will be put into circulation during the first ten years. 80 percent during the first four years and the remaining 20% ​​during the next six years, thanks to an ever-decreasing block reward.