Zilliqa (ZIL)

High throughput blockchain platform

Zilliqa calls itself a “next-generation, high throughput blockchain platform” and is focusing on scaling so the become the number one scalable ‘sharded’ public blockchain. Zilliqa claims to have pioneered a new design to scale public blockchain throughput with the number of nodes by sharding the blockchain. The word Zilliqa means “silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”

Scalability

The focus for Zilliqa can be summarised in one word: scalability. Zilliqa sees scalability as one of the biggest challenges with existing public blockchain platforms and they see the sharding solution as the most powerful solution to this problem. Zilliqa is still under development and is currently operating on a testnet.

As discussed earlier, Zilliqa uses PoW only to establish identities and prevent sybil attacks. Zilliqa does not use PoW to reach consensus on blocks. This has the following two advantages: 

1. Once the identities are established, nodes can reach consensus on several blocks in a row. As a result, a PoW can be performed after, say every few hundred blocks. This is in contrast with the use of PoW as in Bitcoin and Ethereum where, a new PoW solution is required to reach consensus on every new block. As a consequence, the energy cost often associated with PoW per block will on average be very low in Zilliqa.
2.  Since miners can reach consensus on multiple blocks during an epoch, they are guaranteed more stable rewards with low variance.

Zilliqa is a new blockchain platform that is designed to securely scale in an open, permissionless distributed network. The core feature that makes Zilliqa scalable is sharding --- the division of the network into several smaller component networks capable of processing transactions in parallel. As a result, the transaction rate in Zilliqa increases as the mining network expands. Zilliqa aims to rival traditional centralized payment methods such as VISA and MasterCard. In fact, with a network size of 10,000 nodes, Zilliqa will enable a throughput which matches the average transaction rate of VISA and MasterCard with the advantage of much lower fees for the merchants. 

• ​Xinshu Dong(CEO): Xinshu is a scientist and practitioner in building secure systems, ranging from blockchains to web browsers and applications. He was a technical lead for several national cybersecurity projects in Singapore. The outcome of his research has been published at top international conferences. More recently, he led the research and development of Anquan’s proprietary scalable and secure blockchain, deployed for financial and ecommerce applications. He is currently leading the Zilliqa team for developing a new public blockchain, Zilliqa, for high-throughput applications. 
• ​Prateek Saxena:Prateek Saxena is a research professor in computer science at National University of Singapore, and has a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He works on blockchains and computer security. His research has influenced the design of browser platforms, web standards and app stores widely used today. He has received several premier awards such as the Top 10 Innovators under 35 (MIT TR35 Asia) in 2017. 
• ​Yaoqi Jia: Yaoqi gained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from NUS. His research interests span web security and privacy, network security, distributed systems and applied cryptography. He has proposed solutions to addressing consensus and privacy issues in P2P systems. His work has been published in top-tier security conferences, got acknowledged by various vendors including Google and Apple and has received attention from the media including Dailydot, Gizmodo and Techspot. 
• Amrit Kumar: Amrit holds a PhD from Université Grenoble-Alpes, France and was hosted at Inria's Grenoble center. Prior to his PhD, he obtained an Engineer's diploma from Ecole Polytechnique, France, where he studied Computer Science and Mathematics. His research interests broadly span security, privacy and applied cryptography. 

Zilliqa is currently testing out their sharding solutions on a testnet. Hence the Zilliqa token, with ticker symbol ZIL, currently is an ERC-20 token operating on the Ethereum blockchain. The token sale ended on the 4th of January 2018 and the Zilliqa team gathered $22,000,000, which is 100% of their goal. The token will initially be distributed as an ERC-20 token until the mainnet launch, when the ERC-20 can be swapped for the ZIL protocol token.

The Zilliqa developers claim the Zilliqa blockchain will be able to scale by orders of magnitude, depending on the needs of the people using their offered solution. Zilliqa clearly wants to compete with the Ethereum blockchain, as the team is working on developing a platform for decentralized apps, smart contracts, while guaranteeing quantifiable security.

Zilliqa dynamically splits the network of blockchain nodes into different subgroups, called shards, with each shard formed to process and reach consensus on a subset of transactions. This way, disjoint subsets of transactions can be processed in parallel, and significantly boost the transaction throughput by orders of magnitude. Eventually, such transactions are merged into a new block that is committed to the blockchain.

Sharding has been proposed as a scaling technique by Ethereum. Zilliqa is now one of the first projects to propose a concrete design with an operational testnet processing a couple thousand transactions per second across several shards. Before sharding has been implemented on the Ethereum blockchain, Zilliqa now claims to achieve higher transaction rates than any other blockchain in the world.

Unlike several existing blockchain platforms (such as Ethereum and Bitcoin), Zilliqa does not employ PoW to achieve consensus. In fact, PoW is used only to prevent sybil attacks and perform sharding. As a result, it can potentially be replaced by any other sybil resistance mechanism such as proof-of-stake (PoS). 

Ledger

The Ledger Nano S is currently the only hardware wallet to support the mainnet version of ZIL. The wallet, obviously isn't free and may seem quite pricey for some individuals, but you can't put a price on the security it provides. The wallet can be used for many other cryptocurrencies in addition to ZIL. As for using the Nano Ledger S, the first step towards setting up your device is unboxing it and checking if you have received all the accessories that come with it. Once you have unboxed your device, you need to configure it and initialize it before being able to use it. The process is quite simple and will hardly take about 20-30 minutes post which you will be all set to use your Ledger Nano S device. This video does a pretty good job at explaining how the setup works.

Trust Wallet is one of the most trustworthy wallets amongst the users, especially since the largest exchange in the world, Binance had acquired it last year in June. Trust wallet is frequently updated and advanced with the latest technologies, which makes it effective for all kinds of users. Trust wallet has recently added the mainnet version of ZIL. With not that many other alternatives, and with Trust wallet's high security standard and overall intuitive interface, it makes for a great choice for a desktop wallet.

Ziliqua Light Wallet

Zilliqa Light Wallet is a chrome extension wallet that can be easily downloaded into your device. You can install it easily from the Google Store. Create an account and manage all transactions from one place. The wallet is highly secure as you are in full control of your private keys and passphrase.

Moonlet

Moonlet is a Blockchain agnostic crypto wallet that supports both Ethereum and ZIL coins. The HD wallet has an intuitive interface that makes users easy to manage their accounts. Moonlet has also collaborated with Bit Sentinel that safeguards the platform from cyber-attacks and malware.

Moonlet has also partnered with Zilliqa and joined “Bugcrowd”, a bug bounty program that protects crypto wallets from malware. Moonlet uses open-source code and operates with multiple blockchain platforms.

Zilpay
 

ZilPay is another open-source browser extension wallet for Zilliqa blockchain. Developers can integrate the wallet with smart contract calls that enable the use of dApps into their website. ZilPay allows its users to receive and broadcast Zilliqa transactions into the network.