Zillaqa CEO Xinshu Dong discusses blockchain scaling in an interview with a leading business firm. At present Zilliqa (ZIL) is listed at thirty-two on CoinMarketCap with a market capitalisation of over 270 million dollars. In May 2017 the currency spiked at over $1.6 million. The coin’s sudden rise happened as Bitcoin was around $8,000 level and it has performed well in bear markets.
Zilliqa is an innovative high-throughput blockchain that intents to “process thousands of exchanges per second” with “high security and high decentralisation.” The objective of this high throughput is that creators “can focus on evolving their ideas without worrying about high transaction fees, network congestion or security which are the important issues with legacy blockchain platforms.” The website has a graph comparing Zilliqa’s throughput to that of existing blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Dong said this does not mean other blockchains cannot practise higher transaction volumes. However, they obtain this end by having a little more centralised architecture or even by having some exchanges running off the blockchain. He also said that the Zilliqa team “believes in the original spirit of the blockchain,” that means they “process things on blockchain itself and maintain a very high level of decentralisation.” Most of their execution developments happen either through sharding or working on their algorithm to be more effective.
Further, he explained that how it varies from Ethereum and Bitcoin. With the Ethereum and Bitcoin having 10,000 and 20,000 nodes all are processing every transaction. However, this method is very secure but not certainly efficient. On the other hand Zilliqa is making sure not every node have to handle every transaction, but instead, a large number of nodes are involved in obtaining decentralisation. The way this is procured at Zilliqa is through sharding.
Sharding means distributing transactions over a number of different nodes so that not every node is doing every transaction. There are different types of sharding, and the sharding Zilliqa is utilising is called network sharding and which is different from state sharding used by Ethereum.
Xinshu goes on to discuss state sharding, and many problems such as Ethereum’s proposed executions do not permit for cross-shard communication in phase 1 which means a smart contract existing in one shard cannot call the contract on another shard. And on the other hand at Zilliqa every node has a view of the global state which makes sharding more practical.
The Zilliqa team is seeing state sharding as a long-term part of their implementation and they will make sharding live by 2020. Another thing Dong said as a key component to his achievement was his history with the team. He also said that he’s been operating with a number of team members for years. For example, the team’s CSO Prateek Saxena had been working with him for the past seven years. They recently announced the first batch of grant winners who would be working on various dApps with the zilliqa team.
The team is scheduled to launch its mainnet by the year-end or early next year, and with its present market capitalisation, it will be viewed closely in the Cryptocurrency world.
