Zilliqa ZIL / Zilliqa

What Is Zilliqa (ZIL)?

Zilliqa is a widely recognized layer-1 blockchain now evolving toward credentialed infrastructure for institutional finance. The Zilliqa upgrade introduced a more capable foundation, and the Mediation Layer checks whether two parties are permitted to transact before any settlement proceeds. Through this infrastructure and the ecosystem of ventures building around it, Zilliqa aims to make regulated, real-world activity native to public blockchains.

Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet.

The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.

Who Are the Founders of Zilliqa?

Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Saxena and several students in the School of Computing published a paper in 2016 that outlined how a sharding-focused blockchain could improve network efficiency and speed.

Around the same time, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital alongside Max Kantelia, a lifelong finance and tech entrepreneur, and Juzar Motiwalla, former president of the Singapore Computer Society. The company incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017 to develop the Zilliqa network, bringing on Dong Xinshu as its CEO, Yaoqi Jia as its chief technology officer and Amrit Kumar as its chief scientific officer. All three previously worked as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.

What Makes Zilliqa Unique?

Zilliqa claims to be the world's first public blockchain to rely entirely on a sharded network. This allows it to achieve high throughput and a high rate of transactions per second, which it says solves the scalability issue. Because each shard processes transactions individually, as the network grows and the number of shards increases, the number of transactions that can be processed per second also increases. As well, records are immediately added to the Zilliqa blockchain after being processed, meaning that no additional time for confirmation is required.

Zilliqa seeks to become the blockchain of choice for large-scale enterprise use, including among the advertising, gaming, entertainment and financial services and payments industries. In its 2018 position paper, its team states that the platform "aims to rival traditional centralized payment methods such as VISA and MasterCard."