Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — January 2020
We have had a very promising start to 2020 here at Zilliqa! We’re growing into a stronger team with key new hires, and continue to make our platform robust to enhance user experience on our platform.
Greetings everyone,
We have had a very promising start to 2020 here at Zilliqa! We’re growing into a stronger team with key new hires, and continue to make our platform robust to enhance user experience on our platform. We are also making strides in applying blockchain for a more authentic digital marketing industry through our sister company Aqilliz’ efforts. All in all — we’ve got much in the pipeline to look forward to. But before we delve any deeper into these updates, the most important and time-sensitive reminder is the token swap deadline, which is 15 February 2020 — just 9 days away!!
You’ve heard this song before — but we’ll say it again. If you miss out on exchanging ERC-20 ZILs for mainnet $ZIL by this date, your tokens will be frozen forever.What are you waiting for? The clock’s ticking. Get moving to keep your assets safe! Visit this page for further details.
Welcome to the team, Saayan!
We’re thrilled to announce the appointment of Saayan Choudhury who has joined us as our new Chief Technology Officer. Saayan fills a critical position at a time of rapid growth and will be leading the Platform Team’s efforts to continuously enrich our technical architecture, keeping it competitive and ensuring that it is robust, resilient, and adaptable for enterprise use. As we continue our journey into payments and the wider financial services space, ensuring that our infrastructure is supported with the necessary capabilities will be crucial to our success.
As a seasoned leader in the technology sector with 20 years of international experience,Saayan brings a wealth of knowledge and a global perspective to this role. Having held various senior software development and R&D positions across Singapore, Australia, and India, he possesses a deep-domain understanding in areas spanning blockchain, cybersecurity, DevOps, and e-commerce.
In 2004, Saayan founded a successful computing outsourcing company,Versine, bringing with him a keen understanding of the entire lifecycle of software product development and what it takes to cultivate an idea into a full-fledged product. With his first-hand experience as an entrepreneur, Saayan understands the needs and pace of a high-growth tech start-up.
Most recently, Saayan was the Lead Engineer at GroundLabs in Singapore, where he played an instrumental role in developing GroundLabs’ flagship Enterprise Recon cybersecurity software .
Saayan holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from RMIT University in Australia and an Executive MBA from INSEAD in France, and a Bachelors of Engineering (Honours) in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani.
All you need to know about the Incognito Partnership
Privacy tools are central to real-world usability of blockchain, and generating more trust in the crypto-sphere. Alongside security, we have been prioritising privacy features on Zilliqa by joining hands with industry wizards, so that our users can participate, trade and transact without any concerns.
- The objective: Aiming to provide our users with a more secure transaction experience, Zilliqa has recently collaborated with Incognito, an open-source, blockchain-agnostic privacy solutions provider
- The benefits: ZIL token holders will now benefit from completely confidential asset transfers secured by cryptographic algorithms. With the goal of enabling complete anonymity for transactions made using the platform’s native ZIL token, Incognito will allow traders, developers, and users to benefit from a range of privacy-oriented enhancements on the network. This will include access to pZIL, a 1:1 private version of the ZIL token, and immediate liquidity for pZIL which will be listed on Incognito pDEX, a decentralised exchange
- How simple is this?! pZIL can be stored, sent, received, and traded with complete privacy where transactions are obscured from any public ledger. To turn off these privacy features and withdraw their pZIL, users simply need to send pZIL to their ZIL wallet of choice
Lucidity and Aqilliz jointly drive #BlockchainforMarketing using Zilliqa’s high-performance platform
Aiming to eliminate ad fraud and bring more authenticity to the digital marketing environment, our sister company Aqilliz has joined hands with Lucidity, a leading blockchain-enabled digital advertising verification platform.
This project will integrate Lucidity’s existing technology with our blockchain infrastructure, and will be capable of aggregating and processing large quantities of data from multiple sources with assurances of utmost security and scalability — which are two of our expertise areas!
This product will be designed to consume and analyse data points from various sources through smart contracts in near real-time, allowing for greater cost-efficiencies and reducing the need for third-party intermediaries.
Leveraging the insights gained during Project Proton, we are thrilled to support Aqilliz and Lucidity, and take a step further in disrupting the digital ad industry. Read more here and here.
Community Engagement & Education
- Singapore meet-up and panel this evening: Join us if you’re in town! We are hosting a community meet-up today themed around “Digital Assets in ASEAN: The Next Stage” with our partners Xfers, CoinHako, Mintable and Elliptic, and industry leaders. If you are in Singapore, please join and show us your Zilliqa spirit! Register here: http://bit.ly/zilliqasg
- OpenNodes Academy Workshops: As part of our ZILHive Education’s vision to constantly educate and upskill talent, we have teamed up with OpenNodes Academy to host tailored workshops for skilled developers and aspiring tech leaders. Following the application period this January, we will be selecting 16 candidates to part of the workshop with a full scholarship! These candidates will get a chance to get hands-on coding experience with real projects built on the Zilliqa platform, alongside mentors who have developed our protocol! The workshops are scheduled to run through February and March 2020, and we hope to identify people who can join our growing $ZIL family or push the industry forward with creative application ideas.
New Listing — Tokocrypto
$ZIL is now available on Tokocrypto, Indonesia’s leading exchange — with supported trading pairs in ZIL/IDR. ZIL is available for trading immediately with supported trading pairs in ZIL/IDR.
As one of Southeast Asia’s established enterprise-grade blockchain platforms, the listing on Tokocrypto comes at an excellent time as Zilliqa aims to further engage with the region’s users and help drive its crypto ecosystem forward. Tokocrypto recently ran a trading contest for all its registered users, rewarding them with a total of Rp25 million!
Technical Updates
Platform Developments
- Zilliqa version
6.1.0has been released. This version mainly fixes some functional bugs to multi-message smart contracts, which was a recently introduced feature in version6.0.0 - The latest version addresses the problem of tracking internal transactions (i.e., transactions executed within contract calls) by adding a new “transition” field in the contract transaction’s receipt. Please refer to the release notes and API documentation for more information about this update
- The mainnet has now been upgraded to Zilliqa version
6.1.0and Scilla version0.5.2 - We have also reduced the number of Zilliqa Research-hosted shard nodes (i.e., shard guards) by 180, in line with our work to enable more miners to participate in the network
Scilla Updates
- Preparation (code movement and refactoring) for separating out scilla-base as a separate package is now installable with opam
- Work on the compiled execution framework for Scilla is progressing, with a subset of pure expressions now being able to execute end-to-end (compilation from Scilla -> LLVM-IR -> JIT compile on VM -> execution)
- Bug fixes have also been included
Events
Our Head of Growth and Strategy Kenneth Bok recently spoke on the promise of decentralised finance, especially in emerging economies and the ASEAN region at the Crypto 2020 Online Summit, hosted by Crypto 101 Podcast. Missed it? Don’t worry — you can still watch the presentation at the below link, at around 5:03:00.
Live - CRYPTO 2020 Summit
CRYPTO 2020 Summit Livestream!
www.crypto2020summit.com
Answer Key to December newsletter’s crossword puzzle
Down 1: Wyoming; Down 2: Stark (referring to Elizabeth Stark of Lightning Labs); Down 3: Augusta (referring to Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron)
Across 4: ZKSnarks; Across 5: fork; Across 6: Aragon
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