Singapore-based blockchain startup Zilliqa[1] has announced the launch of smart contracts on its blockchain platform, enabling developers to write and deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain with its smart contract language, Scilla.
“With this launch, … we’ve come to realize our vision of a better smart contract language, one built with greater security guarantees at the language level,” Amrit Kumar, president and chief scientific officer at Zilliqa, wrote in a note sent to CoinJournal.
“We’ve made significant technological and engineering inroads, as we’ve refined our protocol infrastructure and enhanced developer tools for Scilla in order to provide our community with the necessary resources to engage with the Zilliqa ecosystem as we know it today.”
Core features of Zilliqa smart contracts include a static analyzers suite that checks for potential bugs and issues in the contract, and a suite of standard libraries. Kumar said the Scilla smart contract language is designed “to achieve both expressivity and tractability, while enabling formal reasoning about contract behavior,” and handles different operational components such as computation and communication with other contracts, in “a very clean manner, hence eliminating any complex interleaving.” This prevents incidents like the DAO and the Parity hacks, Kumar said.
Founded in 2016 by the computing faculty and research team of the National University of Singapore (NUS), Zilliqa is a high-throughput public blockchain platform designed to scale to thousands of transactions per seconds. The core feature that makes Zilliqa scalable is sharding, a database partitioning technique that divides the network into several smaller component networks capable of processing transactions in parallel.
Zilliqa aims to rival payment networks Visa and MasterCard, and claims that with a network size of 10,000 nodes, it would be enable to match the average transaction rate of Visa and MasterCard.
“Throughout the
