What is Zilliqa?
Zilliqa is a blockchain platform built around the concepts of sharding. Ziqlliqa is aiming to be the world's first high-throughput public blockchain platform, engineered to scale up to thousands of transactions per second. The meaning behind sharding, is the idea of dividing the network into several smaller component networks that are able to process transactions in parallel. Zilliqa has been under research and development for just two years, but it puts the theoretical ideas of sharding, into reality with its novel protocol that increases transaction rates as its network expands.
Zilliqa is also able to processes more transactions per second as additional mining nodes join the network. This might seem like the natural thing initially, but in reality it's technically harder to achieve, and hasn't been possible for previous blockchain protocols. Getting consensus in a more substantial crowd is technically harder.
Zilliqa's novel consensus protocol solves this problem. Zilliqa's scalability, could support dApps that demand transaction rates beyond today's blockchains. Zilliqa only leverages PoW to determine mining identities. This method defends against sybil attacks and can be used to execute the network sharding. Unlike other blockchains though, Zilliqa doesn't use PoW for consensus. PoW is completed only at larger intervals, not by every miner on every block. Thus, it features a much smaller energy footprint. Zilliqa has stayed with PoW since it's been well studied in the literature and field-tested, while its emerging alternatives such as Proof-of-Stake continue to be under active research.
