Zilliqa launched its own blockchain yesterday. But how does it work?
Zilliqa is a contract-enabled platform for payment processing and dApps focused on speed, security, and scalability. It transitioned from the Ethereum blockchain to start its own mainnet yesterday, January 31.
Development for Zilliqa began in June 2017, and by September of that year, it had a private testnet operating. Since then, it has created a public testnet, thoroughly tested sharding, developed a testnet wallet, and established a smart contract language and framework – called Scilla – for a sharded architecture. Developers have also begun creating dApps for the platform. And now, of course, there's the mainnet.
The primary way that Zilliqa scales beyond the current capacity of the Ethereum mainnet is sharding[1]. In short, sharding means breaking a blockchain network up into smaller subnetworks to process transactions and execute operations in parallel rather than requiring the whole network to process every transaction or operation simultaneously. Other blockchain projects, including Ethereum, plan to implement sharding in the future, but Zilliqa is the first big blockchain project to do so.
Zilliqa sees its main advantage over other blockchain platforms as speed. Theoretically, transaction speeds for Zilliqa will increase as the number of network nodes increases. By comparison, in a standard blockchain, transaction times don't improve. But in a sharded network, wherein each shard/group of nodes processes transactions independently of the other shards, more transactions can be processed simultaneously.
In fact, Zilliqa uses two types of sharding.
Network Sharding
Zilliqa's network sharding protocol uses proof of work (PoW) to divide up the task of validating transactions across the network. It does this by choosing and continually updating what is called a directory service committee (DS committee), a group of randomly selected nodes that assigns transactions
