Zilliqa (ZIL)

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Layer-1 smart contract blockchain

Zilliqa
Total supply12.600.000.000

Basics

"Zilliqa is the most well-known project that shards processing but not storage. Sharding of processing is an easier problem because each node has the entire state, meaning that contracts can freely invoke other contracts and read any data from the blockchain. Some careful engineering is needed to make sure updates from multiple shards updating the same parts of the state do not conflict. In those regards Zilliqa is taking a very simplistic approach, which I analyze in this post."

"Since this is a test phase, theoretically anybody can participate, although to become a seed node it is necessary to meet both hardware and ZIL requirements for staking: this involves a minimum threshold of 10 million ZIL which, at the current exchange rate of $0.004, is a little more than 40 thousand dollars, hence an investment not affordable for all users."

History

  • Started out because of Ethereum's scaling issues.
  • From this article (23-10-2018):

"The project’s name is apparently a play on “silica” that means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.” The company was founded by a group of researchers from the National University of Singapore including Xinshu Dong (CEO), Yaoqi Jia (Head of Technology), Amrit Kumar (Head of Research), and Prateek Saxena (Chief Scientific Advisor), and others. Saxena had worked with Loi Luu (founder and CEO of Kyber Network and advisor to Zilliqa) and other researchers at NUS on the ELASTICO protocol for sharding permissionless blockchains. The ELASTICO paper would serve as the basis for Zilliqa’s sharding technology."

Audits & Exploits

Bugs/Exploits

  • From their Twitter (8-5-2024):

"Around 03:12 PM UTC, a slowdown in mainnet block generation was detected. To delve deeper, transaction processing was halted at 04:00 PM UTC, permitting the network to clear the transactions in the mempool and self-recover. After 30 minutes, normal operation resumed. Presently, we await the new epoch to ensure full data synchronization before re-enabling transactions, expected in about 20 minutes, while monitoring block generation for continued proper functioning."

Two days later the network was back online.

  • The Zilliqa Network halted at block 3,428,511 at around 6:18 AM EST on Dec. 18, 2023. The Zilliqa Core Team has advised all partners to temporarily halt deposits and withdrawals to the network while the issue is investigated.
  • From Blockthreat (20-10-2021):

"Zilliqa patched a vulnerability in its gossip protocol which could trick shard members into signing arbitrary transactions."

  • Had a transaction processing error (3-2-2021) which caused the network to sop processing cross-shard transactions, forcing Zilliqa to conduct a full network recovery to reboot the network. The network was offline for four hours according to Messari (31-3-2021).

Governance

"Zilliqa Improvement Proposal (ZIP) 10 intends to introduce support for an on-chain portion of network governance that enables miners to cast Proof-of-Work (PoW) submissions as votes on proposals. The off-chain process of Zilliqa Research or the Zilliqa community discussing and coordinating on specific improvement proposals will remain intact. This new system will give miners the decision-making power to pass or reject proposals brought forth by the community. There is no timeline for when Zilliqa might accept and implement this change."

View on centralization

"Amrit Kumar, the president and Chief Scientific Officer of Zilliqa, told Crypto Briefing that Ethereum’s vision of decentralization is “too pure, and very ideological." "You can’t have pure decentralization,” said Kumar. “That doesn’t mean [decentralization] doesn’t have merit, but we need to bridge the gap with traditional finance.”

This stance is, in part, how the Zilliqa team is taking on DeFi. From stablecoins to decentralized exchanges (DEXes), Kumar wants to bring just a bit of centralization to experiments on distributed ledgers. “We need to mix, not all activity can happen on blockchains,” said Kumar."

Admin Key

DAO

Treasury

Token

Launch

"Zilliqa incorporated in Singaport on June 1, 2017. By September 1 the team had launched its first testnet (v0.1), and on October 12 announced that the testnet (v0.5) had achieved a peak throughput of 2,488 transactions/sec. On December 1 the testnet (v1.0) was opened to the public, and in January 2018 the code was open sourced."

Token allocation

Utility

Token Details

Stablecoin 

  • Via the StraitsX initiative, Xfers and Zilliqa are rolling out  (22-4-2020) XSGD; a cryptocurrency pegged to the Singapore Dollar.

Tech

Transaction Details

How it works

"In Zilliqa’s first, payment only implementation, each transaction is assigned to a shard based on the rightmost bits of the sending account’s address. For example, in a network of 16 shards numbered (in hex) 0…f, the last hex digit of the sender’s account would identify the shard a transaction is assigned to. Assigning all transactions originating from the same account to a single shard is the simplest and most efficient way of preventing double spends in a sharded blockchain. All shards can run in parallel since miners don’t have to worry about a potentially conflicting spend being mined on another shard. An account can receive funds on any shard, but can only spend them on their assigned shard and only after the receiving transaction has been immutably hashed into a final block on the main chain.

Zilliqa’s sharding implementation consists of two consensus layers. At the bottom layer, miners in the individual shards create micro blocks of the transactions assigned to their shard. The header and signature of each micro block is sent to a Directory Services (DS) committee at the top layer, which aggregates the headers into final blocks that make up the global ledger for the system. For simple transaction sharding the DS committee does not process the individual transactions, just the micro block headers. Doing otherwise would eliminate the benefits of parallel processing and defeat the whole purpose of sharding. The DS committee assumes that the lower layer consensus process has correctly validated all transactions in its micro blocks. Thus secure shards are key to overall system security.

To reach consensus on blocks, Zilliqa employs a Byzcoin-inspired, optimized version of the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol that achieves about 415 TPS per shard. The primary optimization is to replace message authentication codes with aggregated Schnorr signatures. This greatly reduces the number of messages required to reach consensus (from quadratic to linear in the number of nodes) and makes it practical to implement shards with hundreds of miners. A nice property of PBFT that greatly simplifies the sharding implementation is instant finality. Once consensus on a micro block is achieved, the block can be immediately processed by the DS committee without having to wait for confirmations since chain reorganization in the shard is impossible.

The safety and liveness of the PBFT protocol requires more than 2/3 honest nodes in each shard and some bounds on message delivery time (i.e. partial synchrony of the network). Achieving this in an open, public network where anyone can participate in consensus requires some defense against Sybil attacks, in which an attacker can subvert consensus by creating a large number of nodes. To deter Sybil attacks, Zilliqa requires each node to generate a proof of work (PoW) before it can participate in either the DS or shard consensus process. PoW is not used to qualify each block produced (as in Ethereum), but only to qualify nodes to participate in a consensus process. Once a node has qualified for participation it can generate blocks as fast as possible without having to perform PoW again until it needs to re-qualify (much like the Bitcoin-NG algorithm used in æternity). This allows the protocol to achieve high transaction throughput with a low energy footprint."

Fees

Upgrades

Mining

"The PoW algorithm used by Zilliqa is Ethash, Ethereum’s PoW algorithm. Ethash is designed to be ASIC-resistant; however, Bitmain is currently shipping an Ethash ASIC miner that could be used to mine Zilliqa. Whereas the first generation miners were marginally more efficient than GPU rigs, the next generation will likely deliver significant gains in energy efficiency that could lead to centralization of mining power. Zilliqa has an opportunity to avoid this issue (at least for a while) by choosing a different memory hard algorithm for which no ASIC currently exists."

Liquidity Mining

Different Implementations

Interoperability

Other Details 

Their Other Projects

Game Console

"Zilliqa is preparing to dive into the world of Web3 gaming, with the launch of a hardware console and gaming hub. Zilliqa’s engineers spent six months in the research phase, designing and testing the console with the intent of seamlessly integrating Web3 aspects—crypto wallet, mining software, blockchain tech—into a recognizable gaming experience.

Players will be able to to earn Zilliqa (ZIL) tokens through the completion of in-game “skill-to-earn” missions, tasks and quests. In this case, the tokens can be regarded as similar to coins or rewards in traditional games, but with the added functions of blockchain technology. Additionally, Zilliqa noted that “players will be able to mine ZIL tokens”, a process that they anticipate will “lead to further decentralization of the Zilliqa blockchain by expanding the number of miners globally.”

ZilSwap

"The stablecoin also lays the groundwork for the rise of a DEX. In yet another cross-party collaboration, Zilliqa has tapped Switcheo, a NEO-based project, to build out the team’s non-custodial exchange. The DEX will allegedly resemble Uniswap."

Oracle Method

Privacy Method

  • Has a partnership (10-1-2020) with Incognito.  Like Ethereum’s Aztec protocol, users can deposit ZIL tokens on Incognito’s sidechain, and pZIL tokens are minted after. 

Roadmap

  • Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

Projects that use or built on it

  • Ethermon, however it's usage is low (22-4-2020)
  • As of 20202 Q1, it has 3 Dapps, 3 of which are active, 0 were new and about 156 active users.

Competition

Coin Distribution

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Team, investors, etc.

Team

Funding

"Zilliqa raised about 20 million USD in private funding in the Fall of 2017, and then raised another 2 million USD during the one week (December 27, 2017 to January 4, 2018) ICO for its ZIL token."

Partners

"In recent months it's aggressively pursued efforts to expand its influence in the gaming sphere, joining the Blockchain Gaming Alliance (BGA) in April this year, and forging partnerships with esports teams MAD Lions, RRQ, and more recently Alien Worlds and XBorg."

 (:

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