Zilliqa’s First Progress Update Event: Partnerships, Project Grants, and the Unveiling of Scilla
Since we first officially began work on Zilliqa, our plan has been to fix actual problems with actual solutions. The team we have assembled for Zilliqa is made up of the top research minds in blockchain and security from some of the leading universities around the world. But what has truly stood out about the team we have put together is not just their ability to write academic papers, but their ability to execute.
The roots of Zilliqa lie in a scalable blockchain technology based on sharding that was conceived in a research lab at the National University of Singapore and was created to solve two of the most crucial issues plaguing blockchain technology: scalability and security. Since first proposed in an academic research paper in 2015, our team has fully developed this concept into a working technology and earlier this year released our public testnet — the first blockchain platform to implement sharding technology to enable high blockchain transaction speeds.
Since then, we have been building our community with outreach about our technology at events around the world. The project recently reached the milestone of achieving a $1 billion market capitalization, making it one of the top 25 largest blockchain projects in the world and the largest home-grown project native to Singapore.
Tonight, at the first ever progress update event for Zilliqa, we gave a glimpse of our solution for building a better, more scalable, more secure, public blockchain platform that we believe will be a better way for enterprise and developers to build blockchain applications.
We demonstrated our new smart contract programming language Scilla for the first time this evening. We demonstrated a crowdfunding contract in action. We invoked a few transitions and showed how the state changes.
We then used COQ to prove properties about the crowdfunding contract. Now, as we introduce bugs to the smart contract, the COQ proof breaks, signaling that the contract is unsafe to use.
With Scilla, developers will be able to write and test their contracts before deploying, thereby getting the assurance that their contracts are safe to use and preventing issues like the DAO hack.
Combined with our high throughput platform based on the technology of sharding, Scilla will allow for new, more powerful blockchain applications with use cases in gaming, digital advertising, e-commerce and many more. All safely built on our platform.
Tonight, we also spoke about how we will drive adoption for Zilliqa. We are going to push adoption in 3 ways:
- First, through partnerships with corporations like Mindshare. Mindshare and Zilliqa will be running an application pilot for advertising with a universal ledger, throughput verification and a native alliance token. The participants in the pilot will also include 2 publicly traded companies, listed on the NASDAQ and NYSE, respectively. More details to come. Infoteria, a technology company listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and chair of the first Japanese Blockchain Consortium bccc.global with over 200 affiliate members will be assisting Zilliqa with outreach in the Japanese market.
- Second, through nurturing the ecosystem -we are launching a USD5m grant (first-phase) for tools and dApps to be built on Zilliqa. The grant provides non-dilutive funding and the Zilliqa team will also provide technical advice and resources. The application process will be shared later.
- Third, through thought leadership and developer outreach. We are launching a thought leadership initiative and will be embarking on global hackathons with a partner to be announced in June.
Also, to demonstrate the capabilities of our testnet we showed how our platform demonstrates linear scalability and its performance under stress test conditions. Yaoqi did a demo starting with 1 shard at 481tps, doubling to 2 shards at 995tps, 4 shards at 1967tps and 6 shards at 2828 tps, observing linear scaling. He also showed how robust the platform is — when shards are attacked/taken down, transactions can still be processed.
Amazon Web Services made a special appearance at the event to hand out the top prize to the lucky winner who gave the closest answer to the question on our visits to different cities across the globe. AWS also shared how Zilliqa got onto their radar — for our high usage of their instances across Singapore and the US.
Looking ahead we will be launching Testnet 2.0 with smart contracts alpha in Q2, Mainnet with smart contracts beta in Q3, anchor dApps in Q4 and working on privacy, interoperability and storage in 2019.
We’re very excited share with you all about our progress so far. Stay tuned for more updates soon.
As always, to learn more about Zilliqa or to discuss technical aspects of the project, feel free to connect with us through any of our official channels below:
Telegram: https://t.me/zilliqachat
Slack: https://invite.zilliqa.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/zilliqa