Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — April 2020

Greetings everyone,

Our teams have kept various plates spinning through April, powering through key projects and making sure they can still meet the promised timelines amid the pandemic and new ‘WFH’ routines. We’re especially delighted that staking is now live on test-net. Now is the time for potential partners to review the staking code, documentation, and start building prototype services for testing, and for devs to try out the staked seed node services! You can check on the status here.

In other news — we had two big launches this month. One was of course, for Zeeves, our friendly bot-ler, who has taken up residence in the Telegram neighborhood. The other is for the Crypto Merch store. We’re already receiving tons of appreciation notes from people who are enjoying the Zilliqa products (especially the comfy clothing amid the lockdown) and we look forward to growing the line further.

In addition to all of this, we continue building up awareness and education through video marketing. Thanks to a comprehensive and joint marketing push with our key partners (Ivan on Tech & Binance US), we’ve really been able to tap into a diverse viewership of developers and amateurs who could soon join our growing ecosystem.

And finally — Madison Tang and Mervin Ho came on board the growth team this month, and jumped into action immediately! Undoubtedly, their valuable insights will contribute towards our Open Finance (OpFi) initiatives across our focus markets this year.

All this and more recapped below. Enjoy!

Zeeves the Tipping Bot

We were thrilled to introduce you to Zeeves, a bot that assists you with secure tipping via the platform. Created by our grantee Button Wallet, Zeeves is fantastic, prompt and ever-present! Call upon Zeeves to tip your peers for a range of things — a creative suggestion, some valuable insights, a project well done, or a great question! Instructions on how to set up Zeeves can be found here.

A big thank you to everyone who has taken the time to engage with and provide feedback on such new initiatives — it is really thanks to you that we are seeing such positive activity in the community.

Since its launch and promotional campaign 10 days ago, Zeeves has been downloaded by over 4000 people!

ZILHive Education

Making Zilliqa widely understood, and making Scilla a programming language of choice for developers are both on-going priorities for us. Over the past few weeks, we’ve ramped up video content to better explain core concepts in association with key industry voices. We have also incentivised learning for viewers — who can enjoy the content, attempt the quiz (and refer people in their networks to do the same) and get the chance to win $ZIL!

So far, we have seen a high level of engagement to such tokenised learning modules, which we hope to do more of in the future to give the various people in the ecosystem (with different levels of expertise) all the resources they could possibly need to invest in or #BuildOnZIL.

Binance.US — Learn & Earn Series

• If you haven’t already, you can watch Part 1 and Part 2 of this series explaining the basics behind Zilliqa and certain blockchain concepts like network congestion and sharding. We had great responses from people who took the quiz via the Binance US app. Some of the lucky participants even won $ZIL!
• For part 1, we had over 500 participants, 62% of whom came through the Binance Referral Programme
• Part 2 is on-going, featuring a 2-part reward programme. Check it out using the above link

Ivan On Tech — This educational video series targeted specifically to developers, released three series recently. You can find Video 3 here — you have until 8 May to answer the quiz questions!

New upgrades in effect today

Core updates

• The core team has completed work on Zilliqa v 6.2.0. Release notes can be found here
• Zilliqa v 6.2.0 focuses on improved usability, memory and performance optimisation, and support for staking
• The mainnet is being upgraded to Zilliqa v 6.2.0 and Scilla v 0.7.0 today — you may have seen the alerts on Telegram and Discord

This version will further reduce Zilliqa-owned shard nodes from 520 to 250, in order to allow more community miners to participate

• Projects under development include benchmarking and block time reduction, websockets improvement, seed node decentralisation, and merkle patricia trie optimisation

Scilla Updates

• In addition to bug fixes, the newly released Scilla 0.7.0 includes support for an integer square root builtin
• Our proof-of-concept compiled execution framework for Scilla (Scilla-VM) can now execute a simple map access contract end-to-end and the performance improvements are promising. We will next work on supporting all language constructs and bringing this to production use
• We are also completing work on releasing Scilla as an opam package

Crypto Merch Store Launch

We’d like to think of these t-shirts and sweatshirts as the ultimate wardrobe staples. Whether you are WFH, going into a work or a coffee shop or going for a run — these are cozy, comfortable and they make a personalised statement, don’t you think? Of course, if you’re one of those working in PJs but looking to add some snazz to your workstations — check out the fun mugs or mousepads. Because amid the state of the world right now, we could all do with a bit of cheering up and treat ourselves to something small, am I right?

Fun facts… you can:

• Pay with $ZIL
• Choose from over 400 items
• Enjoy worldwide delivery rates of only $3.95 per item
• Browse our constantly evolving catalogue
• Check out upcoming exclusive deals and limited editions

Buy now via https://www.zilliqa.com/zilmerch

We recently announced the grant awardees of the ZILHive Grants 6th Wave and are proud to have these 7 experts in our ecosystem. Congratulations once again to Unblock Analysis, Torus, Zilon 2.0, Zillet 2.0, Data Timestamp, Button Wallet and the devs working on enhancing SocialPay! Can’t wait to see you build your projects.

Our 7th wave is now open and inviting applications in the area of Open Finance (OpFi) infrastructure and products. If you’ve got an idea (especially in the below focus areas), apply now by clicking on the above image.

• Decentralised Identity (DID)
• Trade Finance
• B2B Merchant settlements
• Lending

Several of our past grantees have gone on to really grow their brands in a big way, making a prominent wave in this competitive industry. Tomorrow, this could be you!#TomorrowStartsToday

Zillacracy Media Survey Findings: We conducted a survey in collaboration with our trusted Zillacracy members to understand your media habits better. We thank the 183 people who completed the survey and wanted to share some key findings with you:

1. Out of 252 respondents, 40% said they spent less than 2 hours on social media per day, whereas almost 20% claimed to spend more than 5 hours. Over 50% of them said they usually logged into social media channels in the evening, post-work hours
2. In terms of news sources, around 65% of 178 respondents said they get their news from chosen news sites, blogs and podcasts. Less than 20% relied on Google Alerts or TV
3. For a majority of the 198 respondents, the most popular content type appears to be podcasts and vlogs
4. From 176 responders, we saw that the majority preferred we share a combination of technical and business updates each month (which we’re currently doing!)

Considering participation vs. completion numbers (based on sample sizes in each question and analytics), we will work closely with Zillacracy on refining the surveys and polls in terms of length and style of questions asked.

On a separate note, as sponsors of the second edition of Future of Blockchain, we would like to congratulate all the talented, budding entrepreneurs who you can read about here. A special shout-out to the Zilliqa Challenge Partner Winners:

• BaseBlock (£3k): This is a decentralised crowdfunding platform that makes it impossible for scammers to steal money. By storing the funds on the Zilliqa blockchain, this technology allows backers’ to vote on the progress of previously determined milestones. The project plans to store the funds in XSGD, and the team is currently working with Xfers to integrate this into the Zilliqa platform.
• RedPay (£2k): This is a fully functioning prototype of a social payment platform for Reddit. It caters to two different types of users: Redditors and Companies. Redditors can authenticate through reddit and register their ZIL wallet address with Redpay. Companies, on the other hand, can deploy their social pay contracts, deposit funds, pay individual users and pay groups of users depending on their rating on the chosen subreddits.
• StreamHarbour (£1k): This is a crypto donation service for streamers. The service accepts crypto and displays donation alerts live on stream.

In the News

• Our President and CSO Amrit Kumar spoke about the DEX we’re designing with Switcheo Network with CryptoNews. He also speaks about his research journey into blockchain and the early days of Zilliqa - what it set out to solve and how we’re doing this today, with Steve McGarry of DIVI Podcast. Finally, following a catch up with Liam Kelly where he spoke about Zilliqa’s USP as compared to other market players, this CryptoBriefing article explored Zilliqa’s current standing and successful use cases
• Co-founder Max Kantelia was among the guests of the Blockchain Insider news shows, which explores the latest in the crypto and blockchain world.
• Our Head of Growth & Strategy Kenneth Bok spoke on the importance of stablecoins and their role in paving the way to a digital economy to Crowdfund Insider
• Our Head of Marketing Colin Miles spoke with Ryan Selkis of Messari about his journey into the blockchain space and all things Zilliqa

For further information, please contact us on:

• Twitter
• Telegram
• Discord
• Reddit
• Github