Zilliqa (ZILL) advertises themselves as being able to achieve a speed of 2828 transactions per second. This is a significant claim. However, several projects in crypto claim to have 10K transactions per second, some even 100K.

It seemed for a period; every new project was solving the massive blockchain scalability issue by claiming new enormous exorbitant transactions speeds.

For the most part, however, the vast majority of the projects either failed to live up to their initial claims or didn’t make any effort to try at all- merely stating bigger numbers to get greater funds from fooled investors.

Zilliqa, however, is a project that is very different from some of the existing scalability ‘solutions.’ How do Zilliqa aim to achieve such speeds- sharding.

Considering that the scalability issues prevalent among the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, sharding is one of the many ways that have been discussed as a way to make blockchain scale more effectively. Sharding allows for a high amount of on-chain transactions.

What Sharding does, is that it essentially splits the computational load of blockchain transactions; so nodes establish consensus in smaller groups, making transactions faster and cheaper than if they were processed by the entire network.

Zilliqa specifically will have six shards, each containing six hundred shards for very high security. If any malicious actors attempted to attack the network, they would need to control four hundred nodes on any given shards, and then they would control one-sixth of the network.

This is, however, a very unlikely attack vector because if an attacker was able to direct the attack at a single shard, Zilliqa randomizes the nodes between shards- thus making an attack near impossible due to the randomization process.

Now while this might compare unfavorably with Bitcoin, in which every node confirms every transaction, Bitcoins scalability problems are notorious. It is incredibly inefficient and results in a very low transaction per second. The same applies to Ethereum.

Zilliqa is aiming to strike that balance of different technological implementations to make it so that it’s possible to achieve faster and cheaper transactions. This is where shard groups come into play, so only one-sixth of the network, instead of the entire network need to agree on a consensus.

The Zilliqa network also has its own bug-resistant Scylla smart contracts that also use sharding. This contributes to Zilliqa being on the very few practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant Blockchains.

Essentially a PBFT style consensus mechanism while being efficient, also gives finality to transactions, so that confirmations are not required.

Despite the array of positives Zilliqa has, it does not arrive without some concerns. This includes the storage challenge. Due to high throughput (thousands of TX per second), Gigabytes of data will be needed for storage. Zilliqa does transaction sharding, not state sharding, which essentially means each node has to store all the data. This is only possible with terabytes of storage available. The question is how Zilliqa manages to do it and if they can do it in such a way that does not negatively impact the high throughput ability of their blockchain.

This is a concern, but the Zilliqa team is a very talented and engaged one. As well as having a committed community, the project has rock-solid foundations in which to try and produce a successful product.

Ethereum is famous just like Bitcoin for its scaling problems, so Zilliqa’s sharding and existing mainnet solutions could be very enticing for developers who are frustrated with Ethereum.

This could be another point of migration for projects that are built on Ethereum, but for whom Ethereum is not working.

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