Whenever there's a blockchain related meetup in Amsterdam that sounds interesting to me, I try to attend and be there in real life. Yesterday there was a Zilliqa meetup, so that one I didn’t want to miss. Zilliqa is the first blockchain with sharding built into it and is able to achieve impressive throughput (on-chain). The meetup was hosted by Xebia at the Wibautstraat and they did quite a good job at organizing it.

I share with you my most interesting insights and pieces of information. The invited speaker was Amrit Kumar, head of Research at Zilliqa. Amrit is a post-doctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore. His research interests broadly span security, privacy and applied cryptography.

Introduction of Zilliqa

For you who are not familiar with the project, here is a brief introduction I copied it from the meetup invite.

Zilliqa is a next-generation high throughput blockchain that is the first to implement sharding. Scalability is arguably the most pressing problem faced by blockchains today. Popular blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum can only handle around 10 transactions/s which are a far cry from the 2,000 transactions/s which payment systems like Visa handle on average. Furthermore, decentralized applications (dApps) that run on blockchains are pushing the underlying protocols to their limit at a point where, a single popular dApp (e.g., CryptoKitties) can clog the entire network. One of the most advocated solutions to the scalability problem is the idea of sharding.

Sharding in Zilliqa follows a divide and conquer approach, where the network gets divided into smaller groups each capable of processing transactions in parallel. In the most recent trial run, Zilliqa demonstrated a capacity of 2,488 transactions per second with 3,600 nodes. Zilliqa also will have its own smart contract language Scilla, an intermediate-level language for verified smart contracts. This new approach provides a clean separation between the communication aspect of smart contracts on a blockchain, and the programming component which is amenable to formal verification. Using Scilla, it will be able to prevent issues like the DAO at the language level.

In his talk Amrit takes us through the history of Zilliqa, which started in 2015 (in permissioned setting) and quickly goes into the current scalability challenges we face in the blockchain space. While increasing the blocksize could increase the throughput of some blockchains, this isn’t really a solution. It is a temporary fix. Other solutions go into the direction of off-chain (Think Raiden for Ethereum, Lightning Network for Bitcoin or Trinity for Neo).

Technical stuff

Zilliqa focuses on on-chain scaling through a technique called sharding. Through this they currently achieve a transaction throughput of 2,488 transactions per second through 3,600 nodes.

Side note: these nodes are currently all located in Singapore so these are not cross-continent and are not personal computers but optimized servers. So this currently is a sort of optimal situation and when the nodes would be realistically spread out the throughput is likely to be a bit lower.

With sharding, Zilliqa typically focuses on high throughput applications, like digital advertising (they currently are working with MindShare), shared economy, scientific computation and payment networks. By using shards the transaction throughput increases linearly with the number of nodes in the network. So as opposed to many other networks where transaction throughput decreases with the number of nodes, within Zilliqa it actually increases.

Zilliqa makes use of two types of consensus mechanisms. Zilliqa uses Proof of Work (PoW) for the process of randomly assigning nodes to shards. Next to that Zilliqa uses Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) to process all transactions. This mining mechanism comes with low energy losts, stable rewards and lower transaction fees.

To avoid hacks like the DAO and the Parity hack, Zilliqa uses a new programming language they designed called Scilla. Causes of trouble with current smart contracts (referring mostly to Ethereum) are the complexity, expected vs. unexpected behavior and the fact that there is no formal verification. With Scilla Zilliqa tries to avoid those problems.

Roadmap

This week Zilliqa will release their testnet and everybody will be able to see and test how it works. Mainnet will be released at the end of Q3. The roadmap for 2018:

Amrit also estimated that Zilliqa should be able to reach at least 10,000 transactions per second on-chain with the current set-up and by adding a few shards. Further scaling probably needs to come from off-chain solutions, but they are not working on those yet and focus on smart contracts for now.

Of course there is more info in the whole talk a Amrit answers some interesting questions during the Q&A. You can watch the whole talk (58 min) here:

Cheers!

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Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor, trader or developer. I am just a blockchain & cryptocurrencies enthusiast. Make sure you do your own research, draw your own conclusions and do not invest any money that you cannot afford to lose.