Zilliqa is a high-throughput public blockchain platform, which extends the performance to thousands of transactions per second. It aims to solve the problem of transaction speed and scalability, and is used to solve the first problem of the current blockchain. While speeding up, it also takes into account the safety, so that the two can find a relatively optimal balance. It changes the slicing technology from theory to practice, uses innovative cryptographic technology and consensus protocol, provides transaction processing capacity that continues to improve with the increase of network capacity, and provides an operation platform for high-throughput on-line applications to meet the necessary capacity expansion needs of businesses such as electronic advertising, payment, sharing economy and property right management.

Technical highlights

Slice

Sharding simply divides the mining network into smaller pieces, each of which can process transactions in parallel. Use a smaller subset of network nodes to validate each transaction instead of waiting for each node in the network. This saves a lot of time, and as the network grows, it does not require every node to verify every transaction. Zilliqa network supports regular payment transactions and segments that need to call smart contract transactions. In the first test in September 2017, the development team announced that the transaction volume processed per second reached 2488tps with 3600 nodes and 6 slices. Dealing with smart contract transactions on a piecemeal architecture has its own series of challenges.

Detailed explanation: ZIL’s partition strategy is to select one DS partition + N working partitions from the nodes of the whole network. There are m miners in each segment. The nodes of the whole network first conduct a computing power competition (academically known as workload proof POW), and the first m nodes form DS slices; The remaining nodes will compete for computing power for the second time, and the first n * m nodes will be allocated to n work segments. Each working fragment processes some transactions in parallel to form sub blocks, which are sent to the boss fragment. The boss fragment verifies and packs to generate the final block. In this way, disjoint transaction fragments can be processed in parallel. Finally, these transactions will be merged into a new block dedicated to blockchain. Through parallel processing, the efficiency is improved

Scalability

Zilliqa is an on chain project. Compared with side chain and off chain projects, zilliqa has more advantages in safety and evacuation performance. If necessary, zilliqa can also be integrated with any project in side chain and off chain. Zilliqa has proved efficient scalability. Its throughput can almost increase with the linear growth of nodes. In the future, it will support cross chain technology and develop a compiler that can help convert Ethereum smart contract into zilliqa smart contract.

Consensus mechanism

In the pow blockchain, each transaction is a part of a block. The creation of each block requires a huge amount of computation, but it also causes a huge waste of resources. Zilliqa’s alternative method makes use of the advantages of POW and the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (pbft) protocol. Zilliqa will be one of the few pbft blockchains on the market. The consensus mechanism of pbft is efficient and can give the transaction finality, so it does not need to be confirmed. Miners use POW to establish their identity on zilliqa blockchain. Once identified, the miners are assigned to a consensus group where multiple rounds of pbft consensus can be run. Execute a POW to write multiple blocks into the chain, providing greater assurance rewards. In zilliqa, it takes about 12 hours of pow every month, when the graphics card is running at full load. During the rest of the time, the graphics card will run in idle mode and consume the least power. Miners will consume less energy, making mining costs much lower than other POW based blockchains. Zilliqa brings two other benefits to miners and users. First, with the expansion of the network, the total energy cost of each transaction will remain unchanged. Secondly, the transaction cost of zilliqa will be much lower than that of bitcoin or Ethereum. On the Ethereum network, miners will give priority to transactions with higher transaction costs, while miners on the zilliqa blockchain will only be motivated by the size of the transaction. Therefore, the transaction cost of users is greatly reduced.

Secure smart contract

Zilliqa protocol comes with a new smart contract language called “Scilla”. The language will be a non Turing complete language, which aims to eliminate many known vulnerabilities in the existing smart contract and make it easy for formal verification. It will make it easier for developers to develop secure and scalable smart contract applications. Future functionality will allow anyone to migrate their existing solid applications to Scilla.

Zilliqa utilizes the underlying architecture to provide a large-scale and efficient computing platform. The smart contract language in zilliqa follows the data flow programming style, so it is very suitable for running large-scale computing that can be easily parallelized. Examples include simple calculations such as search, sorting and linear algebra calculations, as well as more complex calculations such as training neural networks, data mining, financial modeling, scientific computing and any MapReduce task in general.

Double start environmental protection mining

For ethash based pow blockchains such as Ethereum and zilliqa, double digging is feasible. This is because zilliqa combines POW and pbft. POW is only used to prevent Sybil attacks, while pbft is used to reach consensus. As 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 than that of the blockchain that needs to use POW to reach a consensus on each block.

The variance of block reward is small: zilliqa agreement adopts an innovative incentive mechanism to reward miners by measuring their contribution to the consensus agreement. Therefore, thousands (or more) of miners can be rewarded for a block, so that the variance is very low.

Security mechanism

Like other blockchains such as bitcoin and Ethereum, zilliqa blockchain network can process transactions and maintain the global state of distributed ledger. Unfortunately, however, there are some significant differences between different blockchain networks in terms of potential attackers. On one side is bitcoin, which has grown organically at the beginning with little valuation; On the other side is zilliqa, which has considerable value today. This difference in valuation leads to threats when zilliqa network is still in its infancy, which are not necessarily serious problems when networks such as bitcoin are just starting.

With this in mind, zilliqa main network will be released with protection mechanism and conservative mode, so as to minimize the opportunity to launch attacks on this new network.

Project advantages

Zilliqa is the world’s first high-throughput public blockchain platform – designed to scale to thousands of transactions per second. With the expansion of its network and the improvement of transaction speed, zilliqa has brought the theory and practice of fragmentation and its new protocol. The performance of the existing public chain, such as eth, has encountered a bottleneck, which is difficult to meet the development of the industry. The project technology is advanced and has been verified by actual test.