Zilliqa (ZIL) Were the First To Employ Sharding in a Public Blockchain

ZIL community appreciates Zilliqa, the high-performance enterprise-grade blockchain, by pointing to how it has shown that blockchain is not just about buying and selling crypto. It can also be about: Combating fraud, enhancing Transparency for social impact and predicting Risks thru crowdsourcing, and maximizing Investment ROI. Furthermore, supporting SMEs and Protecting Data.

The community claims the Zilbridge progress to give people valid reasons to build on Zilliqa.

Amrit Kumar of Zilliqa stated one of their Unique Selling points was:  “There was a point in time if you wanted to perform a transaction worth of 5 dollars, you have to pay a transaction fee of 100 dollars’ worth of fees. It was at that time that you get started looking into scalability. And the solution that we came up with was Sharding, which is something that you see that many other chains are pursuing as well, but we are the first ones to show that we actually employed Sharding in a public blockchain like Zilliqa.”

The second problem they identified was that you could have smart contracts that are so expressive that they invite many attacks.  It started from DAO when the Ethereum community got divided into Ethereum Classic. It was very clear from all these incidents that you can’t just wait and watch; you need to go ahead to build solutions that could prevent if you cannot eliminate completely at least mitigate some of those hacks that you see on an everyday basis.

To deal with this, Zilliqa collaborated with an academic from UCL in London.  The idea was to develop a language that would eliminate some of the hacks from happening in the future.  We designed a new language that we call Scilla with the idea of making the language more resistant to attacks; you could actually make it even stronger.  You could say, look, if you have a contract that holds a billion dollars, you want to make sure that no one can steal or freeze that money.  And, what you need essentially is a mathematical proof that would say here is the guarantee.  My guarantee is a guarantee it a mathematical proof. And, languages like Scilla allow you to do that more easily. Even if you tried to do that, it is much more complex.

So, the idea was to be able to design a language that is safe by design and at the same time gives you some stronger properties that is very hard to proof. And, thus focusing on scalability and smart contract safety.