Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — December 2019
As we transition into a larger and more adoption-focused company, it is important that our programmes evolve simultaneously as well.
Hello all,
We’re pleased to bring you the second Zilliqa newsletter which recaps all our activities in December 2019.
Let me start with an important action item for all those reading — please swap your tokens immediately, as we are just a month away from the deadline — 15 February 2020. If you do not get your ERC 20-ZILs converted to main-net ZILs by then via exchanges, you will lose them forever! Protect your investment and swap now.
The New and Improved ZILHive: At a Glance
As we transition into a larger and more adoption-focused company, it is important that our programmes evolve simultaneously as well. At this juncture, Zilliqa has decided to merge its ecosystem programme, accelerator initiative and education projects into one master project which will henceforth be referred to as ZILHive.
We believe that the new ZILHive will be a more standardised platform through which we can cater to everyone involved in growing Zilliqa — and driving the blockchain forward.
The remodelled ZILHive cells can be broken down into ZILHive Education, ZILHive Grants and ZILHive Accelerator.
- You may know ZILHive Grants as the Ecosystem Grant Programme, which has been operational since August 2018. We’ve done tremendous work supporting 61 fantastic global projects from a total of 21 countries — but this doesn’t stop now! We will continue to identify and support promising developers looking to #BuildOnZIL
- ZILHive Education will take initiatives like the Blockchain A-Z workshops and LearnScilla forward and look for new avenues through which we can expand our outreach to up-and-coming talent and blockchain enthusiasts, budding developers and aspiring entrepreneurs
- Under ZILHive Accelerator, we will manage our upcoming ZILHive programmes such as the one hosted alongside LongHash in 2019).We will bring in high-performing and promising start-ups into a ‘structured incubation set-up’ and guide them on applying their idea on blockchain with the right tools, resources and mentors. We will bring them in as ‘incubees’ and provide them with a network through which they can access further funding to grow their ideas
To read more on this, check out this page. If you’ve got an idea you believe in, don’t forget to apply to the sixth wave of our ZILHive Grant funding!
After 12 weeks of intense preparation, brainstorming, pitching, refining, and team building with LongHash and Zilliqa, our five chosen teams — ButtonWallet, Soundario, MintableApp, Brightree and Depos did us proud! Each had a unique idea — one that could accelerate blockchain adoption into the mainstream. Through demo days in Singapore and Shanghai in December, these teams left a trail of venture capitalists of blockchain industry leaders impressed!
New Partner: Hummingbot
One of our most recent partners Hummingbot, the open-source crypto market-making platform, has introduced something called “Liquidity Mining,” which is a new method to earn yield on your crypto assets via collaborating exchanges.
So now, you too can benefit and get liquidity for your $ZILs, and also earn rewards using exchanges such as Binance, 0x Mesh, and Huobi Global!
Zilliqa Climbs up Industry Rankings yet again!
Many consider the number 13 to be quite unlucky, but we can’t deny that it’s certainly been good to us last month!
Chinese tech workgroup “The Center for Information and Industry Development” (CCID) issued its 15th Global Public Blockchain Technology Assessment Index in December 2019. In these latest rankings, Zilliqa had moved up considerably to 13th place, from occupying #19 in the 14th update, and #24 in the 13th update. Thanks to our technical infrastructure’s robustness and constant improvement, we have been steadily climbing up the ranks, and could not be prouder of our tech and Scilla experts for making this possible.
Weekday Crypto Puzzles — Here’s a fun little activity to break your week (and this newsletter) and learn some facts in the process! Go ahead and try it..how many answers can you get without ANY help from our friend Google?
Down — 1.State in a mountainous region which has introduced several blockchain-friendly regulations (7)
2. The last name of a female crypto CEO and a game of thrones family (5)
3. First name of the daughter of a famous poet of the Romantic era, who was recognised as one of the world’s foremost computer programmers (7)
Across- 4. A tool that improves the balance between integrity and data privacy (8)
5. Controversial ‘cutlery’ which can split a crypto into different versions so that they can run in parallel (4)
6. A dApp/tool which facilitates operational management in global, decentralised businesses (6) (Hint: Sounds like the name of the ‘ranger of the north’)
Community Engagement Recap
- Our first-ever Discord-based and tech-focused AMA took place in December. This was the first time Zilliqa held an AMA on this platform and it was a positive experience, with a very good turnout and well thought-out questions around the version
6.0.0upgrades and our 2020 technical plans. Around 45 people participated in this session, co-hosted by some of our core tech and Scilla experts Amrit Kumar, Jun Hao Tan, Vaivas Nagaraj and Antonio Nunez. At the end of the session, we recognised and rewarded Digamma89 for “Best Question.” - We also hosted a live session with industry experts Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, and Tarun Chitra, CEO of Gauntlet, for a friendly chat with Zilliqa and its community on staking, collateralization, on-chain lending, decentralised finance (DeFi) and leveraging blockchain for financial inclusion. @dsearcher was recognised for ‘Best Question’ for this session.
- In the 20th December Developer Call, we introduced the ZRC-2, a standard for fungible tokens, inspired by the ERC-777 standard. Cameron Sajedi, a community member, introduced the ZRC-3 which is an improvement on ZRC-2 replacing operators with tellers, and using meta-transactions.
Technical Updates
Upcoming version 6.1.0 — What to expect
The next version of Zilliqa is nearing completion and is targeted for introduction into the mainnet within the month. This upgrade contains the following:
- Additional checks in transaction creation to quickly report back to a user any gas limit-related errors
- Bug fix for the contract address in multi-message contract calls
- Several other functional and infrastructure-related bug fixes and improvements
As you know, we ended 2019 on a very positive note — having recorded 2 million transactions and doubling what we achieved in a record two months! We’ve come a long way since we started the year launching our mainnet and observing our first transaction only on 2nd April 2019.
As we celebrate 2019 and gear up for 2020, do take some time to read more about our achievements, upcoming plans and what we see as promising areas of growth. This blogpost by Amrit provides a good outline. You can also check out our latest interviews on Nasdaq, ValueWalk, or Money FM 89.3.
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