Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter — November 2019
We are pleased to present our first-ever monthly newsletter! Over the past few months, we’ve had conversations with many of you in the community and understand your need for more engaging and digestible content
Greetings everyone,
We are pleased to present our first-ever monthly newsletter! Over the past few months, we’ve had conversations with many of you in the community and understand your need for more engaging and digestible content — especially given how much content and data you receive from so many media platforms each day. This newsletter will evolve with time, and we hope you enjoy it! It will provide an overview of the work across all four Zilliqa teams — Platform, Language, Growth and Marcom.
November has been quite a ride with tons of development work on the technology and Scilla side, two key partnerships and several meaningful global meetings under our belt. This will give you a glimpse of everything you need to know. In the coming months, we also hope to include fun contests and giveaways within the newsletters!
For those who you have further questions, we encourage you to participate in the monthly AMAs and get them clarified, or write to us on our Discord channel.
First things first: Swap your tokens!
As you may know, the token swap deadline is on 15 February 2020. After this deadline, you will not be able to swap tokens from ERC 20 ZILs to mainnet ZILs. If you miss this deadline, your tokens will be lost forever. PLEASE make note of this date and swap immediately to avoid issues down the line. You can use exchanges and storage options we’ve discussed in this blog.
An update on our recent partnerships — XFERS and ELLIPTIC
Zilliqa is thrilled to celebrate the early fruits of our partnership with Xfers: the momentous announcement of StraitsX, a stablecoin pilot initiative powered by Zilliqa’s high-performance, high-security blockchain platform.
Starting with XSGD, a token pegged 1:1 to the Singapore Dollar, these stablecoins will increase the level of transparency for transactions, while also reducing friction to accessing financial products.
We’re passionate about this project because of the contribution it is making to financial inclusion. With this stablecoin, Xfers is gone one step further in enabling this, and we couldn’t be happier that they chose to build on us.
In addition to this fantastic news, our new partnership with Elliptic will help strengthen the Zilliqa platform and the tokens being built on it. Thanks to Elliptic’s leading crypto-asset risk management solutions, Zilliqa will be able to mitigate exposure to fraudulent financial activities across the platform, and for tokens built on it. This means that the $ZIL token, as well as $XSGD will benefit from the added layer of compliance and security.
With Zilliqa pushing adoption in the financial sector to drive the digital economy forward, we feel that adding extra precaution layers is of the utmost importance — especially given that financial sector stands on the cross-hairs of risky transactions and illicit activities.
Elliptic was the partner of choice for this task, and it was an easy decision, given their quality solution and their track record of excellence. You can read more about the partnership here.
Global Events
At SFBW, our co-founder Max Kantelia spoke on the panel ‘Scaling in 2020: Layer 1 vs. Layer 2 solutions’. Although the panel was technical in nature, Max focused on the importance of scaling blockchain to suit enterprises needs and propel widespread adoption.
Additionally, our Developer Evangelist Gareth Mensah even hosted a fantastic workshop on non-fungible tokens. Watch it here. All in all, we felt San Francisco was a hotbed of promising ideas and talented people, including our lovely community members who stopped by to support us!
We then flew to the AIBC Summit in Malta, where Max spoke about the potential of blockchain to push the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) marketplace forward. He even spoke to key journalists about our DeFi roadmap and our development plans looking ahead. You can watch CNBC Crypto Trader’s highlights here (Max speaks at around 29:55).
We then made our way to the Singapore Fintech Festival, which was a rather unique participation as we were there with our sister company Aqilliz. We were located very close to our partners Xfers and Elliptic and got the opportunity to talk about our StraitsX project in detail to many attendees and delegates. Amrit recapped the key details of this new partnership at a NASDAQ marketplace interview, in case you’d like to watch it here.
Alongside SFF, our ZILHive programme partner LongHash organised a lab crawl where four of the chosen teams Mintable, Button wallet, Depos, Brightree had the opportunity to pitch their ideas ahead of Demo Day!
Zilliqa Climbs Up the Crypto Health Rankings
Zilliqa has now been recognised with an “A” ranking in the Fundamental Crypto Asset Score (FCAS), which is a comparative metric used to assess the overall health of crypto projects based on variables such as User Activity, Developer Behavior, and Market Maturity. Our Head of Growth and Strategy, Kenneth Bok shared this interesting news at the “The Capital” event hosted by CoinMarketCap in Singapore around the same time as SFF.
As of today, we’ve received 820 out of 1000 points. We’ll share more about these metrics, and why they are important, in a separate blog soon!
Education Updates
It’s good to see blockchain making waves in the academic circles. We really need a variety of thinkers with different skills and experiences to help this industry mature and for crypto to truly become mainstream. And speaking of variety, diversity — on all fronts such as gender, age and ethnicity — is a key part of this.
Our Developer Marketing Lead Saiba Kataruka has been busy shuttling across King’s College London and Oxford University in November, hosting the popular Blockchain A-Z workshops, where he came across smart entrepreneurs, thinkers, developers and ambitious students.
The workshop, as you may already know, covers blockchain essentials from A-Z, and inducts attendees into the process of writing a basic smart contract on our secure-by-design programming language Scilla. While we’re on this subject, you should take a moment to check out learnscilla.com. With this, who knows… you too could learn to #BuildOnZIL!
We were happy with the diverse turnout in these university-based workshops — as blockchain much like all STEM fields, suffers from unequal representation. Zilliqa is keen to shift this pattern in whatever way we can — and our partnerships with OxWoCS and KCL Blockchain Society is just the beginning.
We’ve actually gone a step further by taking awareness-building outside campuses and into a law firm in November! Saiba had the opportunity to speak with Clifford Chance about the legal and technological implications of stablecoins. Not only does this indicate how the wider world is coming to terms with the importance of regulatory evolution, but it is also perfect timing — with Zilliqa now powering XSGD!
Technical Updates
We have recently upgraded to version 6.0.0 of the Zilliqa core — marking our last major upgrade in 2019! Among the more significant changes include:
- Web socket support
- Pending transaction API
- Multi-message contracts.
In addition to the above, the upgrade also includes:
- Reduction of the block time by as much as 30 seconds.
- Changes to our syncing code, which should allow nodes to more quickly rejoin their shard and preserve the stability of the network.
- Various bug fixes and enhancements to existing code. Please refer to our Github repository release notes for the full list of changes.
For Scilla we recently tested contract constraints, which provided functionality similar to a constructor in Solidity. The work on the recently announced Scilla compiled backend is also progressing. We will be releasing a dedicated blog on version 6.0.0, elaborating on all the points.
We will also be hosting an AMA session next week, during which you can ask us anything about the latest upgrade, the newly implemented features and tools, and our technical plans for 2020 — in particular our staking project. Our tech and Scilla experts look forward to speaking with you via Discord on 16 December 2019.
And finally before we wrap this up and head towards the end of the year, I’d encourage you to take some time to listen to Amrit’s podcast on Startup Snapshot, addressing some of the most burning questions from the community, Zilliqa’s vision since Day One, and our evolution as a company since 2017.
Until next time folks!
Cheers, the @zilliqa team
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