Zilliqa is a high-throughput public blockchain platform that expands its performance to thousands of transactions per second. It aims to solve the problem of transaction speed and scalability, and is used to solve the biggest problem of the current blockchain. While speeding up, it also takes safety into consideration, allowing the two to find a relatively optimal balance point. It transforms sharding technology from theory to practice, uses innovative cryptography and consensus protocols, provides transaction processing capabilities that increase with network capacity, and provides a running platform for high-throughput on-chain applications to meet requirements such as Necessary expansion requirements for businesses such as electronic advertising, payment, sharing economy, and property rights management.

Technical Highlights

Sharding
Sharding simply divides the mining network into smaller pieces, each capable of processing transactions in parallel. Use a smaller subset of network nodes to verify each transaction, rather than waiting for every node in the network. This saves a lot of time, and as the network grows, it doesn't require every node to validate every transaction. The Zilliqa network supports regular payment transactions and shards that require smart contract transactions. In the first test in September 2017, the development team announced that the transaction volume per second reached 2488TPS when using 3600 nodes and 6 shards. Processing smart contract transactions on a sharded architecture has its own set of challenges.

Detailed explanation: ZIL's sharding strategy is to select one DS shard + n working shards from the nodes of the entire network. Each shard has m miners. The nodes of the entire network first conduct a computing power competition (academically called workload proof PoW), and the m nodes that win first form DS shards; the remaining nodes conduct a second computing power competition, and the first n*m nodes win Assigned to n working shards. Each working shard processes part of the transactions in parallel to form a sub-block, which is sent to the Boss shard, and the Boss shard verifies and packages it to generate the final block. This way, disjoint shards of transactions can be processed in parallel, and eventually, these transactions will be merged into a new block dedicated to the blockchain.通过并行处理，达到效率的提升
 
可扩展性
Zilliqa属于链上项目，与侧链和链下项目相比，Zilliqa在安全性和疏散性能Zilliqa can also be integrated with side chains and any projects under the chain if necessary. Zilliqa has proven efficient scalability, and its throughput can increase almost linearly with the growth of nodes. In the future, it will also support cross-chain technology and develop a compiler that can help convert Ethereum smart contracts into Zilliqa smart contracts.

Consensus mechanism
In the PoW blockchain, each transaction is a part of a certain block, and the creation of each block requires a huge amount of calculation, but it also causes Huge waste of resources. Zilliqa’s alternative takes advantage of PoW along with a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (pBFT) protocol. Zilliqa will be one of the few PBFT blockchains currently on the market. The consensus mechanism of PBFT is both efficient and endows transactions with finality, so no confirmation is required. Miners use PoW to establish their identities on the Zilliqa blockchain. Once identified, miners are assigned to a consensus group where multiple rounds of PBFT consensus can run. Performing a PoW writes multiple blocks into the chain, thus providing a larger guaranteed reward. At Zilliqa, about 12 hours of PoW are executed each month, when the graphics card is running at full capacity. During the rest of the time, the graphics card will run in idle mode, consuming minimal power. Miners will consume less energy, making mining much cheaper than other PoW-based blockchains. Zilliqa brings two other benefits to miners and users. First, the total energy cost per transaction will remain constant as the network scales. Second, transaction fees on Zilliqa will be much lower than those on Bitcoin or Ethereum. While miners on the Ethereum network prioritize transactions with higher transaction fees, miners on the Zilliqa blockchain are only incentivized by the size of the transactions they can process. Therefore, the user's transaction costs are greatly reduced.

Secure Smart Contracts
The Zilliqa protocol comes with a new smart contract language called "Scilla". The language will be a non-Turing-complete language designed to eliminate many known vulnerabilities in existing smart contracts and make them easy to formally verify. It will enable developers to more easily develop secure and scalable smart contract applications. A future feature will allow anyone to port their existing Solidity applications to Scilla.

Zilliqa leverages the underlying architecture to provide a large-scale and efficient computing platform. The smart contract language in Zilliqa follows a dataflow programming style and is therefore ideal for running large-scale computations that can be easily parallelized. Examples include simple computations, such as searching, sorting, and linear algebra computations, as well as more complex computations, such as training neural networks, data mining, financial modeling, scientific computing, and generally any MapReduce task.

Dual activation of environmentally friendly mining
For ethash-based PoW blockchains such as Ethereum and Zilliqa, dual mining is feasible. This is because Zilliqa combines PoW and PBFT, where PoW is only used to prevent Sybil attacks, and PBFT is used to achieve consensus. Since the PoW cycle on Zilliqa only needs to run for 1 minute every 2-3 hours, the energy footprint of mining on Zilliqa is much smaller compared to blockchains that require the use of PoW for every block to reach consensus.
 
区块奖励的方差很小：Zilliqa 协议采用一种创新的激励机制，通过衡量矿工在共识协议中的贡献来予以奖励。 Thus, thousands (or more) of miners can be rewarded for a block, resulting in low variance.

Security Mechanisms
Like other blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the Zilliqa blockchain network is able to process transactions and maintain the global state of the distributed ledger. Unfortunately, there are some notable differences between different blockchain networks in terms of potential attackers. On one side is Bitcoin, which has grown organically with little to no valuation to begin with; on the other side is Zilliqa, which has considerable value today. This discrepancy in valuation leads to threats when the Zilliqa network is still in its infancy, whereas such threats are not necessarily a serious problem when a network like Bitcoin is just getting started.
With this in mind, the Zilliqa mainnet will launch with protection mechanisms and a conservative mode to minimize the chances of attacks on this nascent network.

Project advantages

Zilliqa is the world's first high-throughput public blockchain platform - designed to scale to thousands of transactions per second. As its network expands to increase the speed of transactions, Zilliqa brings the theory and practice of sharding with its new protocol. The performance of existing public chains such as ETH has encountered bottlenecks, making it difficult to meet the development of the industry. The project technology is advanced and has been verified by actual tests.

Project risk

The platform is designed to enable secure data-driven decentralized applications designed to meet the scaling needs of machine learning and financial algorithms. The competition for public chain projects is very fierce. The realization of projects such as EOS (which claims to reach one million/TXS) will greatly reduce the actual value of these public chains.

Related information:
Rating: Zilliqa
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