Happy Lunar New Year!

As we’re heading into the Year of the Dog, we’re making progress on our platform and technology and putting all the pieces in place to build our third-generation blockchain.

Zilliqa aims to be a new blockchain platform capable of processing thousands of transactions per second based on the technology of sharding. Using sharding, Zilliqa has the potential to match the transactions per second of the largest payment processors in the world. Most importantly, Zilliqa transaction rates have been shown to increase (roughly) linearly as the network size increases.

To learn more about Zilliqa or to discuss technical aspects of our project, feel free to connect with us in any of our official channels below:

Telegram: https://t.me/zilliqachat

Slack: https://invite.zilliqa.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zilliqa

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/zilliqa/

Github: https://github.com/Zilliqa/zilliqa

Community Updates

Over the past two weeks we’ve been working towards scaling our team and improving our community engagement. Zilliqa will be an open source, public blockchain, and interaction with our community is something that we see as being crucial to the development and adoption of our technology.

AMA

On February 10, we held our first AMA on Reddit where we invited our community to ask us questions about the project. We answered some great questions and we plan to do this more often in the future, perhaps with a live video component or partnering with a YouTube influencer — stay tuned for details.

In case you missed it, the Q&A is available here. If you still have a burning question, do not hesitate to ask us on our Slack, Telegram or Reddit channel.

Meetup

We gave a talk at the National University of Singapore (organised by the NUS Greyhats community — a group of cybersecurity enthusiasts), a place very dear to us as several of the team members have strong links with the university and the student community there. The talk was developer-oriented and we were delighted to see a large number of students and faculty members interested in Zilliqa.

Xinshu presenting at a meetup hosted by NUS Greyhats

Great engineers and a strong developer community are keys to any open-source project and hence we will continue organizing such meetups to attract them towards blockchain and Zilliqa in particular.

To find out more about careers available at Zilliqa visit here.

Hiring — Saiba Kataruka

Our team is rapidly expanding and the first addition to it is Saiba Kataruka. Saiba previously worked at IBM as a consultant for five years, in the payment technology field, in Asia and Europe. He then left the company to pursue an MBA degree from the University of Oxford.

Saiba will be working on the marketing front and will push the adoption of Zilliqa among enterprises and developers.

He loves reading, writing, public speaking and traveling. He is most interested in the decentralization aspect of the Blockchain technology and in the many ways that it can improve the current social and financial structures.

Partnership with Bluzelle

We are happy to announce that we will be partnering with Bluzelle, a decentralized database provider.

Storage of data is crucial for any real-world application. While, centralized storage infrastructures are popular, they also suffer from a wide range issues such as single point of failure, high cost of storing data among others. Storage becomes even more critical in the context of blockchain, where storing data on-chain is extremely costly.

Bluzelle aims to solve these issues by providing a decentralized platform to securely store data. With Bluzelle, users with unused storage can rent it out to those in need in an on-demand manner. Bluzelle and Zilliqa will work together to provide an integrated solution so that users building dApps on Zilliqa may easily use Bluzelle for decentralized data storage.

Tech Updates

We’re making progress towards the release of our public testnet, which we are planning for in the next few weeks.

On the technical side, we’ve been working on the implementation of lookup nodes and the mechanism for new nodes to join the system. For lookup nodes, they are the entry points for new nodes to fetch the information of current DS nodes, DS blocks, and a list of nodes to sync up with the latest state of the blockchain. Via them, the wallets can get to know a list of nodes in different shards and send transactions to the corresponding nodes for broadcasting/processing within the shard. In the meantime, we’ve also implemented a feedback mechanism to enhance the stability of the consensus protocol to tolerate more misbehaviors of malicious nodes. We further improve the validation of microblock and DS blocks. At last, we also have progress on the wallet side, e.g., Schnorr public/private key generation using JS libraries and implementing cache of the wallet data. We list several fixes below.

• Lookup node local script fixes.
• Consensus id fix for lookup.
• Resolving concurrency issues when a node contacts multiple lookup nodes.
• Handling missing responses to commitment in the consensus run of microblocks.
• Lookup nodes only perform PoW2 once per DS epoch instead of multiple tries.
• Serialization and deserialization of accountStore.
• Schnorr pub-private key generation and adding a JS library to handle generation of addresses on the frontend wallet. So ‘Create Wallet’ button leads to generating a valid address.
• Caching the wallet data on the front-end.
• Updated documentation (Doxygen).

Scilla

In the last update we talked about Scilla, a new proof-carrying smart contract language that has been proposed by Amrit alongside Zilliqa advisor, Aquinas Hobor from the National University of Singapore and Yale-NUS College, and Ilya Sergey from the University College London. Since then, the media has begun to interview the team and write articles about the project:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/blockchain-how-write-safe-verifiable-smart-contracts-1657976

https://themerkle.com/what-is-scilla/

We also discussed Scilla in our updated Zilliqa presentation deck — and we will look to share more information about Scilla going forward.

How Scilla, the smart contract language that Zilliqa will be using, will be able to prevent incidents like The DAO

Thank you for following Zilliqa and as always feel free to give us feedback via our social media channels on how you like the format of these updates and what you would like to see going forward.