Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain designed to deliver high throughput, capable of processing thousands of transactions per second. It addresses blockchain scalability and speed issues by implementing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform hosts various decentralized applications and, as of October 2020, supports staking and yield farming. The development of Zilliqa commenced officially in June 2017, with its testnet launching in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform introduced its mainnet. Zilliqa’s native utility token, ZIL, facilitates transaction processing and smart contract execution on the network.

Zilliqa was initially conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. In 2016, Saxena and several students from the School of Computing published a paper detailing how a blockchain focused on sharding could enhance network efficiency and speed. Around the same period, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital with Max Kantelia, a lifelong entrepreneur in finance and technology, and Juzar Motiwalla, the former president of the Singapore Computer Society. In June 2017, the company established Zilliqa Research to develop the Zilliqa network, appointing Dong Xinshu as its CEO, Yaoqi Jia as its chief technology officer, and Amrit Kumar as its chief scientific officer. All three had previously served as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.

Zilliqa is recognized as the world's first public blockchain to fully implement a sharded network. This innovative approach enables it to attain high throughput and a significant transaction rate per second, effectively addressing the scalability challenge. With each shard processing transactions independently, as the network expands and the number of shards grows, the capacity for transactions per second also increases. Moreover, transactions are instantly recorded on the Zilliqa blockchain following processing, eliminating the need for additional confirmation time. Zilliqa aspires to be the preferred blockchain for large-scale enterprise applications, spanning sectors such as advertising, gaming, entertainment, as well as financial services and payment industries. According to its 2018 position paper, the platform aims to compete with traditional centralized payment systems like VISA and MasterCard. Anquan Capital and Zilliqa Research, the entities behind Zilliqa's development, maintain substantial reserves of ZIL. By 2021, the Zilliqa network had become an active network processing millions of transactions monthly. The blockchain has consistently scaled, increasing from an average of over 900 blocks produced daily at the launch of its mainnet to currently generating over 2,500 blocks daily.

Zilliqa has a capped maximum supply of 21 billion tokens. Initially, ZIL was offered for sale as an ERC-20 token during a token generation event that concluded in January 2018. These tokens were later transferred to the Zilliqa mainnet through a token-swap event finalized in February 2020. Prior to its launch, Zilliqa generated 60% of all tokens (12.6 billion ZIL) to be allocated during the token generation event, while the remaining 40% (8.4 billion ZIL) are to be produced via mining. Ten percent of the total tokens (2.1 billion ZIL) were allocated to Anquan Capital, 12% (2.52 billion ZIL) to Zilliqa Research, and 5% to current and future Zilliqa team members, with the distribution scheduled quarterly over a three-year timeframe. Zilliqa is structured to achieve full token mining within 10 years, with a gradual reduction in block mining rewards. As detailed in its whitepaper, the project's objective is to mine 80% of the tokens (16.8 billion ZIL) in the first four years and the remaining 20% (4.2 billion ZIL) over the subsequent six years.

The Zilliqa network is safeguarded by a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) consensus protocol, ensuring that a minimum of two-thirds of all nodes must concur on the accuracy of a record before it can be added to the blockchain. Each shard within the Zilliqa blockchain is dependent on a group of nodes to verify a subset of transactions. Once consensus is reached within each shard, an additional group of nodes validates the collective results of the shards and subsequently appends a new block to the blockchain. The network employs elliptic-curve cryptography to secure its consensus protocol, facilitating multisignatures. Alongside the pBFT consensus protocol that secures transaction records, Zilliqa also utilizes a proof-of-work algorithm for the assignment of node identities and the generation of shards. Zilliqa has developed a novel language called Scilla for its smart contracts. Scilla, standing for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language, is crafted with a focus on safety, aiming to automatically detect and eliminate security vulnerabilities at the language level. Additionally, it is designed to simplify the formal verification of smart contract safety through mathematical proofs.

The native token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is available on several prominent cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Huobi, Bitfinex, and Bithumb. It can be traded against fiat currencies, stablecoins, and other cryptocurrencies. If you are interested in purchasing ZIL or other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC), Eulerpool provides a straightforward, step-by-step guide to help you learn about cryptocurrencies and how to acquire your first coins.