— Token Swap, Education Outreach

Greetings everyone.

With Zilliqa now entering post-mainnet launch phase, we are turning our efforts towards the next phase of Zilliqa. We plan to continue to innovate on the technology side since we have some of the top minds in the world of blockchain. On the community and marketing side, we are ramping up efforts around adoption and education.

As part of those efforts we will be changing the format of our bi-weekly updates. Now, we will be producing a community, social and marketing focused update followed by the technical focused update the following week. Technical and developer marketing is a priority for Zilliqa moving forward, so we feel it is best to separate the technical content which allows us to share this directly with our developer and partner network, cutting through the noise.

The Zilliqa Blog will also be undergoing some structural changes as we begin producing more technical content focused on both the future innovations of Zilliqa as well as technical documentation, articles, and guides around Scilla. Soon, the Zilliqa Blog will become a hub for articles about Zilliqa, technical guides, use cases of Scilla and much more.

For further information, connect with us on one of our social channels:

• Discourse Forum
• Telegram
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Github
• Gitter

Token Swap

You might have been reading a lot about token swap on our community and social media channels. Token swap is a mechanism that will help you convert ERC20 ZILs from the Ethereum network to native ZILs on the Zilliqa network at the rate of 1:1. This is crucial for all token holders as the trading of ERC 20 ZILs will eventually stop permanently.

Zilliqa has chosen to facilitate token swap through reliable top exchanges for reasons of convenience and security — and the process has already begun. While we have recommended swap mechanisms to all exchanges we are liaising with, some may vary in the methods they use and their timeline for swaps. Nevertheless, the basic principle remains the same — using these platforms, users can:

1. Deposit their ERC20 interim ZILs on the exchange
2. Get native ZILs in return when withdrawing from the exchange

By using mainnet address generated by supported wallets (recommended list below), you can withdraw the ZILs parked in the exchange addresses after the token swap phase and store them safely for future use:

• Moonlet — Blockchain agnostic wallet that supports both Ethereum and Zilliqa chains. Recommended as it has been audited by BitSentinel and has gone through a bug bounty programme on BugCrowd
• ZilPay — A dApp interactive wallet that allows Users to deploy/call contracts easily
• Zillet.io — A Progressive Web Application (PWA) web wallet that allows Users to interact with their accounts either in a browser setting or on their Desktops
• ZHIP — The world’s first iOS wallet that supports Schnorr signature for Zilliqa

Please follow @zilliqa announcement channel on Telegram to get regular updates regarding the list of supporting exchanges and the exchanges’ status with regard to the token swap.

Reflections on our recent educational outreach programme

Over the last few years, top global universities have begun offering blockchain and crypto-related courses to their students, in response to industry growth and a subsequent surge in interest from students studying a range of disciplines — including computer science, engineering, social sciences. Research is becoming a priority in many such universities, who are investing more time and building talent capable of contributing to this new technology. As you all know, Zilliqa was borne out of academic thinking as well — it is a legacy each of us is extremely proud of. What’s more — we’re hoping to do our part to empower more students and learners — across all age groups — and hand them tools to help them within this field. This is a key reason that Zilliqa has been committed to building our educational outreach since the mainnet launch.

To develop a robust blockchain-based application, one must be knowledgeable about blockchain, smart contracts, security and business use cases. Until now, the market does not have an abundance of comprehensive resources which cover such topics in a credible and easy-to-understand fashion. The result is that many beginners in this space are left assuming that is unreasonably tough to developing a good blockchain-based application.

Saiba Kataruka, our developer marketing lead, wanted to change this perception and show them that they could do it! He recently hosted an A-Z Blockchain Workshop at King’s College London, in conjunction with student group KCL Blockchain Society. Over the four weeks, this project showed tremendous value across the board — for students, professionals and employers.

While we did expect the response to be positive, the level of interaction with the students still came across as a very pleasant surprise. On the final demo day, students pitched applications that were impressive in terms of business plan and technology. Currently, we are encouraging some of them to develop their ideas and apply for the USD 5 million grant programme which could help them to make their project visions a reality.

Apart from the students, it was also a great learning experience for us. The live feedback that we got from the students regarding the course material was incredibly useful. We are now busy using that feedback to further improve the workshop material for the upcoming workshops and to find better ways to connect the workshops with the Ecosystem Grant Programme.

For the next stage — the goal is increased accessibility. We want to ensure that the program is offered to the community for free. This is a big undertaking and will take some time, but we’re committed to investing in resources that will help students understand the crucial aspects of developing blockchain-based apps. Zilliqa firmly believes that free education is essential to realise the true potential of the blockchain, which is still in its infancy.

Here’s a sneak peak of what’s in store for our expanding educational outreach:

Community highlights

• User guide to Moonlet and its features: https://medium.com/moonlet-xyz/moonlet-user-guide-and-its-key-features-1f7bea49a871
• Deploy smart contracts with one-click using a simple form:
  https://medium.com/coinmonks/test-and-develop-dapps-on-zilliqa-with-zilpay-52b165f118bf?sk=2a60070ddac60677ec36b1234c60222a
• The sharding difficulty level has briefly hit 39.125 last week (translated to 49.125 in Ethereum terms), meaning we have achieved roughly half of Ethereum’s difficulty level (50.72)

Zilliqa in the News