It seems like just about every day a new trend pops up in the world of cryptocurrencies. One would think that one of these days investors will get tired of them. But, it looks like we might not be there yet as Zilliqa is starting to gain momentum.
Zilliqa is touted as “The Next-Generation High Throughput Blockchain Platform” and has been picking up steam the past few weeks with an increase to a $2 billion market cap over four weeks time. The emergence of this new blockchain platform apparently began with its release at EDCON, part of the European Ethereum Development Conference in Paris last month.
The release was also covered in various high profile articles from Forbes and Bloomberg. This new blockchain platform is being developed as a sharding solution that could bring the coveted transaction speeds to Ethereum’s network, which it desperately needs if it wants to be viewed as a viable alternative for running decentralized applications.
What is Zilliqa?
Zilliqa is the brainchild of Leemon Baird, a developer well known for her work on the Ethereum project. Baird is an early member of the Ethereum development team that created it in 2014 as well as our former community manager, Joseph Liss. She has also been an active advisor to several other blockchain projects in recent years including Kaleido and IOTA.
After the sale of MakerDAO, which was recently liquidated due to a DAO hack, Zilliqa founders felt that their expertise was needed to tackle the scalability issues plaguing cryptocurrency networks.
Why is ZIL rising?
While the markets have been volatile, ZIL has been rising. A possible reason for this could be the interest in the Zilliqa ICO. ZIL tokens are taking a big hit in the cryptosphere as we speak, but there are still some exchanges that support the trading of this cryptocurrency.
As far as wallet support goes, it is too early to tell if any will be added yet for this new cryptocurrency. However, it looks like a few projects are working on solutions for their tokens.
According to their website, ZIL is a smart contract platform that can process 25,000 transactions per second. For comparison, Ethereum can only handle 15 transactions per second. And even Bitcoin is split between the scaling debate and the recent hard fork into Bitcoin Cash which is trying to usurp the title of most popular cryptocurrency by scaling solutions. On top of that, Bitcoin has a backlog of around 3,000 pending transactions right now on its network due to a backlog of unfilled transactions.
What is Zilliqa’s long-term plan?
The long-term vision of Zilliqa is to allow users to create, run and scale their own private and extremely secure smart contracts. This would increase the speed of transactions from 25 tps to thousands or millions of transactions per second. You can read more about this in their whitepaper here.
This new architecture also promises to overcome the scalability limitations that have plagued Ethereum since its inception. At a high level, the sharding technology makes use of a sophisticated algorithm that ensures that every single transaction runs on its own “shard” and none of them are compromised in any way.
Zilliqa price prediction
In the cryptocurrency market, there have been few major movements this past week and ZIL is no exception. After a price boom in the middle of June, the value of ZIL took a big hit and saw a drop to around $0.35 as of this writing. It has risen since I first wrote about it for you guys and will do so until we get more news on the upcoming ICO release date.
