Zilliqa & Quora Inner Circle AMA
On March 5th, the ‘Quora Inner Circle’ team hosted an AMA session for Zilliqa — welcoming our President and CSO Amrit Kumar to speak to their growing telegram community. It was a great 2-hour session filled with insightful questions.
On March 5th, the ‘Quora Inner Circle’ team hosted an AMA session for Zilliqa — welcoming our President and CSO Amrit Kumar to speak to their growing telegram community. It was a great 2-hour session filled with insightful questions. If you missed it, you can check out the transcript below!
#1
Q: How would you describe ZIL idea in a single sentence?
A: Zilliqa is a high throughput blockchain that implements sharding for scalability and provides a safe, smart contract programming language Scilla to make smart contracts formally verifiable.
#2
Q: How is Incognito’s privacy better than Mimblewimble, for example?
What do you think?
A: To the best of my knowledge, each project uses a different cryptographic construct to achieve privacy. One uses generic ZKSnarks while the other uses range proofs. Each underlying primitive provides a different security guarantee and comes with different trade-offs.
#3
Q: The blockchain industry is growing by the day, what makes Zilliqa stand out against other projects and companies competing in the space?
A: Good question. As you noticed, there is a lot of competition in the space. Nevertheless, there is also a lot of opportunities as space is trying to mature. We are working on many initiatives to ‘stand out,’ but our main goal is to be Enterprise Ready. In other words, we are trying to onboard small and large organizations/institutions to run on our high-performance, high-security blockchain. As you may have noticed, the biggest bottleneck right now is to allow traditional enterprises to integrate into blockchain due to security and scaling issues. We are focussing on solving this problem. Without going in too much detail, I recommend you to check our website for more details. Like our safe-by-design smart contract language Scilla and our ecosystem page with the partners we are working with to be ‘Enterprise Ready’!
#4
Q: What Zilliqa’s project are you most excited about and why?
A: One of the first dapps named Unstoppable domains have been the most popular in the community, and they also drove a large volume to the Zilliqa network. I am very impressed by their team and the community that they have been able to build. More recently, one of our partners Xfers (a licensed entity in Singapore), launched an SGD (Singapore Dollar) backed stable coin on Zilliqa. They also plan to launch an XIDR (Indonesian Rupiah) backed stable coin in the near future. I am extremely excited about this one too as stablecoins open up an entire new basket of possible DeFi dapps. Furthermore, given our strong presence in the ASEAN region, these stablecoins can create use-cases beyond just trading; for example, remittance is a huge market in this region, and I am hoping that given the regulated nature of Xfers, remittance can be a focus business market.
#5
Q: How do Zilliqa project promote cooperation & collaborative development within the community? If anyone has an idea which works well on ZIL, then how can we get support?
A: Yes, we absolutely believe in the power of our community to grow globally. Did you see the announcement made earlier this week on zillacracy.com? It’s a community-driven project through which people can work on whatever ideas they make have in exchange for rewards in $ZIL. We’ve also got a community of developers on Discord who share ideas they can work on together. Through our ZILHive projects (which have an Education, Grants, and Accelerator track), we make sure to support promising projects that want to build on ZIL via mentorship, financial assistance, grant help, and tools devs and entrepreneurs can use as they develop their visions into reality. You can find a ton of information on this on our website zilliqa.com — Check our ZILHive for sure!
#6
Q: What if a malicious node creates a smart contract to stimulate participants in the shard to check for bad blocks that would make money out of thin air?
A: I am not sure if I follow your question. In order to create money out of thin air, 2/3 of the nodes in the shard must be malicious. Deploying a smart contract does not allow you to simulate nodes as a node has to do PoW, and this prevents sybil attacks.
#7
Q: What is meant by ZILHive in Zilliqa Network? I see there are many parts in ZILHive, which are Grants, Accelerator, Education, etc. What are the benefits of these ZILHive products?
A: We have chosen to combine our Ecosystem Programme with the other on-going incubation projects across the Education (such as Blockchain A-Z) and Accelerator (such as ZILHive) fronts — consolidating it into one master project which falls now under the umbrella brand ZILHive. ZILHive’s main benefit is, therefore, to allow our ecosystem to grow faster through the initiatives mentioned above.
#8
Q: What has been Zilliqa’s biggest obstacle that you’ve successfully overcome?
A: Given that we were the first to implement sharding, we had to solve open and challenging problems on a regular basis. For example, running smart contracts on a sharded architecture has been an open research problem, and we were the first ones to implement a solution.
#9
Q: The Indian Supreme Court has lifted the Reserve Bank of India’s banking ban on cryptocurrencies. What impact does this have on the development of Zilliqa in India?
A: We’ve been reading all about this and are very excited about the opportunities this opens up for crypto and blockchain as a whole! With time, we’ll be able to zero in on different development opportunities, but the potential is limitless — given the sheer size of the market, knowledge of technology, and massive talent that lies within. Our community itself has many people from India who are passionate about this space and advocate for its growth and adoption into the mainstream. Eager to see how this unfolds, how many new start-ups pop up in the industry in the coming weeks and months, and explore how we could work with small and large institutions there to drive adoption!
#10
Q: How does your sharded architecture work? Is it secure enough?
A: The sharded architecture works in the following way: In order to join a shard, each miner has to do a PoW. Based on the results of the PoW, the miner is assigned to a shard. Since PoW has randomness, this ensures that a shard does not get dominated by malicious nodes. In fact, if the size of the shard is > 600, then the probability that any given shard has more than 1/3 malicious nodes is very low.
#11
Q: As I see, Zilliqa Blockchain has its own Programming language, which is Scilla for creating DApps.Can you tell us what’s the main reason behind creating own Coding language rather than using current existing languages like Javascript, Rust, Solidity, etc?
A: So, as you may have noticed in the last years, there were many Smart Contract (SC) issues (e.g. the DAO hack) allowing users to lose their funds and/or companies being more skeptical about the security of SC languages. Instead of using the languages that are available, the team has done extensive research and developed a new programming language called ‘Scilla’ (short for Smart Contract Intermediate-Level Language).
Scilla imposes a structure on smart contracts that will make applications running on Zilliqa less vulnerable to attacks by eliminating certain known vulnerabilities directly at the language-level. Furthermore, the principled structure of Scilla will make applications inherently more secure. If you want to try it out and code on Scilla, check out: http://www.learnscilla.com/ (http://www.learnscilla.com/). More information about Scilla can also be found on our website!
Also, we have written a dedicated blog post on this topic: https://blog.zilliqa.com/scilla-design-story-piece-by-piece-part-1-why-do-we-need-a-new-language-27d5f14ae661
#12
Q: How much percentage of progress ZIL achieved so far? And what’re your future plans to increase this value up to 100%?
A: Zilliqa has delivered on every single promise (in fact, more) that we had described in the whitepaper. So, I would say that we have finished Zilliqa 1.0, and now we are slowly moving towards Zilliqa 2.0 with a focus on improved usability, toolkits, and protocol optimisations and enhancements.
#13
Q: How does Zilliqa rate the importance of the user community? What was Zilliqa’s plan to build the user community?
A: We are, in essence, a community-driven project and have been from the very start of our journey! Our community has put tremendous faith in us, and we don’t ever forget that. Couldn’t even really “rate” it, but it’s at our core. Our plan is to channel the community’s passion for making us even more : “decentralized” in every way. We have just launched an initiative run by the community and for the community called Zillacracy, which is a rewards-based system of engagement. This is just one of many ways we’re building our very global community- which includes people from all walks of life and various areas of expertise. We always need their feedback to keep us abreast of things and help us stay competitive in this ever-so rapidly evolving space.
#14
Q: In terms of Xfer and their new Zilliqa powered stablecoin XSGD, why do you believe this is better than any other stablecoin coins in existence and what can it do to improve global commerce in southeast Asia and particularly Singapore where we’ve seen huge investment in FinTech recently?
A: You have to look at the stablecoin being developed on Zilliqa, XSGD, from a slightly different angle. To a very large extent, it seems that much of the use of USD backed stablecoins right now is in trading. Additionally, many of them seem also to have some issues with regulations, including Tether, which does not serve US customers (if I am not wrong). We believe that unregulated stablecoins will face issues being adopted beyond trading usage as regulators would like to know when a token is redeemed for fiat.
Since Xfers, our partner that helped launch this stablecoin initiative, are licensed to operate as a Widely Accepted Stored Value Facility, this solves the problem. It also opens up other use cases, particularly in the region beyond trading — for example, remittance. XIDR (when it gets launched) can help create that bridge between Singapore and Indonesia.
Moreover, remittance is a huge market even if you only consider the ASEAN region (which we are focussing on heavily). The region is still over 60% underbanked and unbanked. If the right tools are provided to the people in this region, you should be able to make XSGD more useful in day to day economy than USD-backed stablecoins. The regionalness of XSGD will be a factor at play here.
#15
Q: How many people/partners approximately at this time are working together for Zilliqa’s and from how many different countries across the world?
A: Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa’s ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, and more.
#16
Q: Even if you are very good in terms of technology, you can not attract investors if the price increase does not happen. How will you solve this issue? Zilliqa’s price is near to ICO price after 3 years.
A: Yes, we have set a HIGH benchmark of technological excellence, no doubts about that! I hear that you are frustrated about the price movements in this volatile market — and acknowledge that it can be so very stressful. On our end — we’re focusing on all aspects of the business and platform that we do have control over — from ramping up marketing through various channels, hiring the best talent, pushing hard on the enterprise adoption front across ASEAN and elsewhere, and fortifying our platform, dev tools to help builders, and implement reward-based mechanisms to grow our larger community. We’re seeing positive change across all fronts!
#17
Q: What are your plans for Zilliqa’s growth and adoption? How do you help people to understand that sharding is a great solution for blockchains?
A: We are working on different fronts to grow the ecosystem and bring valuable use-cases that can drive the real-world economy. The centre to this is the ZILHive programme that provides blockchain-related education to university students as well as enthusiasts. We also have an incubation program backed by a 5 million dollar fund to encourage developers to build on top of Zilliqa. We have over 60 projects from over 20 countries that have received grants from us. Several of them were later successful in getting funding from established VCs. Unstoppable Domains (a domain registry dapp), Transak, and Xanpool (fiat on-ramp solutions) are some great examples. We are now focusing a lot in the ASEAN region, given our base there. To this end, we have started to work with Xfers (a regulated fintech provider) in Singapore to develop stablecoins that can open up several OpenFi/DeFi applications.
#18
Q: Sharding is one of the buzz words of crypto Verse. Zilliqa has sharding in practical, up & running on mainnet for last 1 year, but still people are not aware of Zilliqa; many don’t even know that sharding has been implemented by Zilliqa, for example, a recent tweet by Weiss crypto rating. So my question is, how do you plan to increase general awareness & mass adoption of Zilliqa.
A: Zilliqa is still the only project that is regularly mentioned in Ethereum’s tech community and resources. In order to boost exposure to the non-technical crowd, we are doing regular AMAs in different channels such as this one and attending conferences and events, and organise meetups.
#19
Q: There are many great Blockchains for creating DApps So, why should any Developer choose Zilliqa Blockchain for their DApp? Which additional benefits are provided by Zilliqa Blockchain to developers for creating DApps?
A: Yes, there are many other blockchains, as you noticed. However, we are not just building ‘any’ blockchain. We are focussing on building a sustainable blockchain that fits the needs of billions of people and can also integrate with traditional enterprises and institutions. Right now, we are at a stage where things are somewhat ‘experimental.’ There are many big partnerships. However, many are still stuck at a ‘Proof of Concept’ phase. Our aim is to go beyond that. We are, therefore working on many initiatives to onboard more developers and companies to our ecosystem and be compliant with regulations. We recently also launched www.zillacracy.com (http://www.zillacracy.com/), allowing for community members all over the world to contribute to the Zilliqa ecosystem and earn $ZIL rewards.
We offer an array of resources and toolkits to support developers to write contracts and check them out — in addition to guidance and numerous benefits of developing on ZIL. Not to mention- devs can even apply to our incubator and accelerator programmes if their idea takes off and they need additional mentorship and financing for progressive rounds of development. Workshops are always a huge help to the dev community so we can teach them to work on our proprietary language Scilla. In fact, we’re hosting a bootcamp in Singapore now in collaboration with the Open Nodes academy — and we’re seeing some great talent and receiving positive feedback on various people’s experience working on — and with Zilliqa. The technology is definitely up there, but so are our experts!
#20
Q: Southeast Asia is a very vibrant market, and most exchanges are competing campaigns here to entice users and grow, with #zil you see how Southeast Asia is and do you plan to develop & to expand here?
A: We see tremendous potential in this region. Many of the markets are able to leapfrog to technologies like blockchain and are not so bogged down by legacy infrastructures or regulatory roadblocks that some other more cautious or skeptical countries see. With over 60 percent of people in the region falling into the underbanked and unbanked category — blockchain could really be a missing ingredient here! Once weaved into the traditional financial ecosystems, there is a potential to reach these people and empower them to take control of their payments in a secure, cost-efficient way. We’re dedicated to enabling a more financially inclusive world and our home region — SEA — will certainly be a focus for us.
#21
Q: Ethereum has a good scaling solution with the same processing speed as Zilliqa. What are the 3 main differences between Zilliqa and current competitors and how will you attract developers to build on your platform?
Are there other competitors besides Ethereum?
A: I disagree. Ethereum does not have a good scaling solution. It may have a solution on paper, but there is still a long way for it to be live on the mainnet. Having said that, I love what Ethereum is doing.
#22
Q: Can you share some Recent Big Achievements done by Zilliqa Blockchain Project in the past? Also, what are the main Adoption Plans of Zilliqa Project of 2020 Year? Which Latest announcements we can expect from Zilliqa project?
A: Hello, please take a look at this page. https://www.zilliqa.com/faq
We answer exactly those questions in the FAQ section! We also share a roadmap on our website outlining some of our key plans and make frequent announcements on our Telegram, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, Medium Blog, and Blockfolio channels. We’ll also be sharing one of the monthly newsletters tomorrow.
#23
Q: How do you see yourself in your project? What are some of the best and worst experiences you have encountered upon taking this project and make this as your step to become successful? Are you guys willing to do anything for your project?
A: I joined Zilliqa about six months ago, and I can say that it is probably one of the most interesting companies to work for in the world. Our team is very diverse, and it’s fascinating to be part of such a big project. Many of us inside the company firmly believe that we are building truly disruptive technology that can transform the lives of millions (if not billions) of people. Our company culture is also great. We are always brainstorming about new ideas, solutions and everybody is very passionate about the project. As you can imagine, it can also be very intense, but that’s part of the deal:)
We actually have some jobs open. So please do check out our careers page if you (or others) feel like joining: https://www.zilliqa.com/careers
#24
Q: What can we expect from Zilliqa in terms of the release of Staking very soon? Is there anything you can tell us in terms of minimum stake amount or annual ROI percentage, for example.
A: We are planning to release a Zilliqa Improvement Proposal (aka ZIP) very soon that has more information on ZIL staking. I cannot release all the info yet, but you can expect the ROI to be over 10%. We’re excited about the opportunities this will open up to decentralise the platform further — we anticipate this to be around a 3-month rollout at the very least. Considering testnet to partner onboarding to ‘soft’ or beta launch. We’ve made a solid start though.
#25
Q: What is Zilliqa doing to attract developers?
A: As mentioned above, we have ZILHive, Zillacracy, and working and many initiatives to attract more developers. We soon will have a developer series launched with a person many of you know to encourage more #buidling on Zilliqa. Check out:
#26
Q: What is meant by Eco-Friendly Dual Mining of Zilliqa Blockchain? Which Consensus Algorithms are used by Zilliqa Project in Its Blockchain?
A: Zilliqa uses PoW but not in the same way as in Bitcoin or Ethereum. Miners do PoW roughly every two hours, and after that, they run a PBFT consensus protocol that does not require GPUs. This allows a Zilliqa miner to use their GPUs to mine both Ethereum and Zilliqa.
#27
Q: What are the benefits and adoption that ZIL really brings to the community? What is the motivation for the project development?
A: Well, I encourage you to join our community on Telegram (https://t.me/zilliqachat). Almost daily, our team is in contact with the community and encourage community members to participate. Our community members, together with us, have also launched www.zillacracy.com two weeks ago to motivate them to be part of projects. Over 30 proposals have been submitted, and many of them will start soon:)
#28
Q: What are the benefits of using your net for the projects — comparing with other popular chains like Ethereum and others? Ease of use, reliability, safety?
A: Scalability, i.e., high throughput and safe smart contracts that come with strong safety guarantees.
#29
Q: What are the benefits of becoming a ZIL Stakeholder in 2020?
A: Zilliqa does not implement staking as in PoS, but it implements staking for a slightly different purpose. A token holder will be able to stake or contribute to the stake and earn rewards in return.
#30
Q: As, I’m currently creating dApps on Ethereum blockchain. So, Can I create dApps easily on Zilliqa Blockchain too or is there any special languages or knowledge required? What is the difference between creating smart contracts or dApps on Ethereum Blockchain & Zilliqa blockchain? What’re the benefits of creating dapp on Zilliqa rather than other Blockchain?
A: It’s very easy. You should be able to learn our own smart contract Scilla pretty quickly. Check out www.learnscilla.com. There are also projects on www.zillacracy.com you can get started with. If you need more info, please DM me, always happy to help:)
#31
Q: What do you think is the biggest problem ZIL can solve that its competitors are not solving now?
A: We are currently researching a way to run smart contracts on a sharded architecture that makes the most of the sharded architecture. Several other projects are attempting to solve the same problem; however, their focus is at the network and consensus layer. We are trying to see if we can leverage smart contract language design to solve this problem.
#32
Q: Validators, as I understood, are defined according to the stake of tokens which validator keeps, am I right? Don’t you think that randomness-based sharding will decrease the throughput in comparison to location-based sharding?
A: No, Zilliqa does not use staking. But, uses PoW. Randomness based sharding is very important for security reasons. If you have all the nodes in a city or a country to gather together in a shard, then it is much easier to compromise such a shard.
#33
Q: I know many people are getting interested in blockchain in India nowadays, but when do you think our traditional education system will be able to adapt to such technological change?
A: Traditional education has its own place, but with the future of work rapidly changing — we’re taking blockchain education into our own hands, given that it can have such high barriers to entry. Too much jargon and not enough clarity for the majority of people out there! Via our initiative ZILHive education, and by collaborating with so many other brilliant people out there evangelising blockchain and with a knack for bringing in awareness in creative ways- we are pushing the ecosystem forward. Lately, we teamed up with KCL and Oxford University to host workshops for their students, outlining the essentials of blockchain and teaching them some basics to code on our smart contracts platform with Scilla. We are working with videographers, animators, writers, and many more experts to share what we’re about and what blockchain is about. It’ll take time, but the industry is still in its nascency — and we’re on the right track!
#34
Q: Besides scalability, the gas fee is another issue for blockchain. Does Zilliqa provide a solution for gas?
A: Gas fees are generally high because the network does not scale. If a network can only process 5 transactions per second, then users have to compete to get in that 5 transactions; this competition leads to an increase in gas fees. With a scalable blockchain like Zilliqa, the gas fee can be much lower. For example, Zilliqa’s gas fees are roughly 1/100 of what you see on Ethereum.
#35
Q: What were the major requirements needed for mining?
A: Check out these links:
https://github.com/Zilliqa/Zilliqa/wiki/Mining
https://github.com/DurianStallSingapore/Zilliqa-Mining-Proxy
https://forum.zilliqa.com/c/Mining
We also have a Telegram for miners where other community members can help you to set it up: https://t.me/zilliqaminer
#36
Q: As far as I understand the approach to this technology, Sharding is an individual solution in each of its design execution. Development of a network of shards of the whole project needs a solid ecosystem, you have a view on this?
A: An ecosystem is a mix of miners, dapp developers, core contributors, and end-users. We are one of the very few chains that have a large number of active miners. As far as dapps is concerned, I was quite surprised when I did some analysis on the mainnet transaction data and noticed that there are over 40k contracts (obviously including duplicates) deployed on the mainnet.
As for end-users, one of our first dapps Unstoppable domains drove around 200k transactions to the network and has a registered domain names for over 80k users.
#37
Q: How did the concept of ZIL originate, and what is possible with the ZIL blockchain?
A: The company (and platform) has its roots in academic research. The co-founders had identified scalability as one of the key issues that would potentially hinder the widespread adoption of the technology. As such, our team realised that blockchain scalability was a problem that needed to be addressed today rather than tomorrow.
Zilliqa is pronounced [‘zilikā’], where ‘Zi’ is pronounced as in ‘Zi[nc]’ and ‘ca’ is pronounced as in ‘[sili]ca’. The project’s name is a play on “silica,” which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
As mentioned above, Zilliqa aims to drive the blockchain industry forward by developing the highest quality technology infrastructure, which can create measurable and real-world impact. To that end, we have sought to establish partnerships across industry verticals that have emerged as clear beneficiaries to innovative, decentralised technologies, with participation across digital advertising, financial services, payments, gaming, as well as digital entertainment. With our platform, we hope users and businesses can leverage the full potential of decentralised technology.
#38
Q: Which countries is Zilliqa focusing on for growth? Are the present markets with huge data sources like India and China your target markets?
A: ASEAN is one of the main regions we are focussing on, but we are also focussing on other regions such as China, Europe etc.
#39
Q: How is sharding of Zilliqa better than contemporary projects like Elrond, Harmony, and what exactly the role of Distributed Random Generation serves in the overall integrity of Zilliqa protocol and decentralisation?
A: Zilliqa’s approach to sharding is much simpler and time tested compared to other projects exploring sharding. And simplicity has a beauty to it. We may not Bitcoin’s slowness, but there is a beauty to Nakamoto consensus, and that comes from simplicity. A simple protocol is easier to implement and easier to debug and has fewer vulnerabilities and bugs.
#40
Q: DeFi is one of the hottest topics in the blockchain space right now. Can you share your opinions on DeFi with us? Do you think that DeFi will disrupt the existing financial system? What is Zilliqa approach towards the DeFi sector?
A: Zilliqa is looking to focus heavily on the areas of open finance (OpFi) and decentralised finance (DeFi). DeFi will bring about a wave of change in the areas of cross-border payments and remittance, and tokenization of assets to unlock greater liquidity. DeFi brings new possibilities to the table — empowering a huge amount of banked and underbanked in an ecosystem of transparency, openness, and financial inclusivity. Of course, there is a lot of work to be done in this space, and we’re still very early in this game. As it continues to evolve, the idea is that anyone with a mobile device and an internet connection can have access to the wider thread of financial progress, and be part of it! In fact, just today — co-founder Max Kantelia spoke about all this in a panel just today at the London Blockchain Summit — if possible, we will try and source this and post it on our twitter soon.
In 2020, we’re committed to building an open, interoperable blockchain which can really drive open finance across the world — especially in emerging markets where user demand is growing.
#41
Q: Why PoW?
A: Because PoW is time tested, unlike PoS/dPos. We are only now starting to understand the issues with PoS and their variants. Steemit’s case is a good example. Also, DeFi may also have conflicts with PoS systems. Check out this if you want to read more about it: https://haseebq.com/how-defi-cannibalizes-pos-security/
#42
Q: How many transactions for Zilliqa at this time?
A: As mentioned above, we implement (network) sharding, which allows Zilliqa to divide the network into multiple groups. Each group is able to process transactions in parallel. The sharded network architecture also allows the throughput of the platform to increase almost linearly as the network expands. Through this approach, we have achieved approximately 2800 transactions per second in the testnet.
#43
Q: Where does Zilliqa’s core profit come from?
A: We are looking at ways in which Zilliqa could monetize; this includes developing blockchain-backed products.
#44
Q: What is meant by ZILHive in Zilliqa Network? I see there are many parts in ZILHive, which are Grants, Accelerator, Education, etc. What are the benefits of these ZILHive products?
A: ZILHive is our initiative to grow the ZILLIQA ecosystem in a way that aligns with our larger goals, and simultaneously help drive the overall industry growth as well. Innovation is a huge part of this. We reward and support big ideas but also make way for new people to understand the basics. Do take a look at this blog to better understand the different tracks: https://blog.zilliqa.com/introducing-our-newly-restructured-zilhive-programme-822563acabde
#45
Q: It is a race for the adoption of any specific development which can put us in Top 5?
A: Beyond “hype,” we need to find an application that serves this new crypto consumer base. The more users we can bring, the more chances of success a chain will have. We also need to start thinking like a business and go beyond protocols and projects.
#46
Q: Who is your direct competitor?
A: Any competition always drives the industry to be better, stronger, and more innovative. In an open-source framework like blockchains, where people can easily apply ideas into their own projects, competition takes on a different form. Attempting to compete with any blockchain whatsoever will take the project nowhere. This will prevent us from adopting smart ideas out there in our so-called competitors. Our philosophy is that one needs to identify the strength of one’s idea, follow it, and be open to learning from other projects:)
#47
Q: What are the plans to expand in different regions? Will you outsource the team/skills or keep it centralised?
A: We have an office in Singapore, and an office in London and our team is spread around the world (I myself work from The Netherlands). So we are definitely not centralised (even from a company perspective)
#48
Q: What are the marketing strategies of your project? What will you do so that your project will be visible in the crypto field and people come to explore your project?
A: Talking to you is part of our marketing strategy. To create more awareness for Zilliqa.
Apart from that, we are working on many different things to create more awareness, which you will see soon. Recently we also launched www.zillacracy.com, where everyone can take part in the marketing and development of Zilliqa and accelerate our growth even more. Check it out and apply for some projects and get rewarded in $ZIL
#49
Q: Is there something you could share about the progress of a lending/borrowing protocol on Zilliqa (for DeFi purposes)?
A: Lending-borrowing protocols often require a stablecoin as a base component. Now that we have Xfers’ XSGD, we are starting to talk to players in the ASEAN region to build a solution that will be either undercollateralized or collateralized by real-world assets. Since this may touch regulations, we have to find the right parties to work with.
#50
Q: With the assumption Zilliqa still being around for a decade, how do you plan to apply post-quantum secure encryption algorithms? (Moving from EC-Schnorr and increased signature sizes)
A: I am sincerely hoping that Quantum-safe primitives will have lower overheads in the future. But, one simple way to adopt quantum-safe primitives will be to abstract the signature verification. So, basically, a user may provide a signature generated from a scheme of his choice, and the network would run the right verification algorithm. I am not sure, though, if there are quantum-safe primitives that support multisignatures. That’d be cool.
#51
Q: What is your take on how the future will look like in ten years with technologies such as public/private smart contract platforms, artificial intelligence, and (distributed) machine learning?
A: Given the speed at which space is moving and experimenting, it is very hard to predict the future, but space definitely needs a little bit of grounding. I would say that distributed machine learning is already picking up. Google is planning to roll out Federated learning.
#52
Q: If all of a sudden, all Singaporean dishes would be erased from the collective memory, and you could save one? Which one would you choose?
A: Chicken rice.
#53
Q: Safety and security are always the most important things. So what is the security mechanism of Zilliqa to ensure user assets do not become the target of hackers?
A: Security’s of the utmost importance to us. This is why we chose to develop our own smart contracts language called Scilla, which is secure by its very design. It eliminates several know vulnerabilities, and in addition to that, it is formal verification friendly. I.e., it allows dapp developers to provide mathematical proofs that a contract will not misbehave or leak funds to attackers. You can check our learnscilla.com to get more information on this. We’ve also teaming up with compliance and risk management expert Elliptic to ensure that all transactions on the Zilliqa blockchain have an added layer of security to them, and users can rest assured that their funds are safe. Check this out: https://www.coindesk.com/elliptic-brings-aml-compliance-to-the-zilliqa-blockchain
#54
Q: Due to the scaling ability, is the GAS fee reduced?
A: Our gas fees are extremely low. Check it out for yourself.
#55
Q: Zilliqa solves the prevailing issue of scalability using its own unique sharding technique. Since you were the first, did you inspired some existing tools(ElastiSearch, for example) or infrastructure to design your sharding solution, and which has been the biggest problem you had to shard the blockchain?
A: It has been designed as a principled language with smart contract safety in mind. Our inspiration was some of the academic papers that explored sharding in an academic context. Examples includes Elastico, ByzCoin, and OmniLedger.
#56
Q: Why Scilla is best of other languages like solidity? Does it achieve goals that are not possible with other languages? Which are those exclusive features?
A: 1) Rooted in science
Scilla is a peer-reviewed smart contract language created by academics from the ground up. It has been designed as a principled language with smart contract safety in mind.
2) Identifies security risks
An extensible static analysis framework and an automated scanner is provided to help developers identify generic security vulnerabilities directly at the language level.
3) Easier to write safe contracts
Scilla provides developers with more sanity-checkers in addition to static type-checkers. This makes comprehensive testing much easier.
4) Mathematical proof of safety
Scilla is amenable to formal verification, meaning you can write mathematical proofs to prove that a given contract satisfies certain safety properties.
We have dedicated slides for this.
#57
Q: You organized a lot of AMA and received lots of questions about the technology and benefits that Zilliqa brings. So now I want to ask what you want to receive from the community? What will Zilliqa do to build a thriving community that truly cares and supports the project for the long term, not just for a temporary profit?
A: We really do care about our community. If you join our Telegram channel, you can see we are talking to our community members almost daily since we enjoy it and understand how important the community is. This is why we also started www.zillacracy.com. It is a community-led initiative, governed by a community council, to help the Zilliqa ecosystem grow and reward community members with $ZIL. Over 30 proposals have been submitted in the last 2 weeks.
You can check the projects out here and also pitch your own project: https://zillacracy.com/community-projects/
#58
Q: What will be in 2025?
A: Hopefully, we will be everywhere.Our technology might be used by you without you even noticing it.
#59
Q: Theoretically, when Zilliqa scales to hundreds of shards, TPS will be multiplied as well, producing incredible throughput. How do you solve synchronization and communication among nodes within a shard and among shards efficiently?
A: Hight TPS should not create problems of synchronization within a shard as once a transaction is committed, all the nodes in the shard must have already seen the transaction. As far as cross-shard communication is concerned, we have to make sure that the network has enough time to synchronize.
#60
Q: What’s your outlook on the future of cryptocurrencies? What can we do to keep increasing adoption?
A: Build use cases that this new blockchain consumer-based needs.
I’d like to thank Amrit Kumar and Zilliqa team, once again for contributing your time to answer all of our community questions.
Also many thanks to both Quora Inner Circle and Zilliqa communities for participating and asking interesting questions.
If you still have questions left, do not hesitate to ask directly at Zilliqa telegram group!