Zilliqa recently announced that its mainnet launch will be delayed until January 2019. Having kept up to speed with their roadmap thus far, we look at what this means for the Zilliqa community.
Zilliqa To The (TSP) Rescue
Blockchain technology offers great potential for a multitude of industries, yet scaling remains one of its biggest issues, affecting everything from legacy technology Bitcoin to industry-standard Ethereum. If you’ve ever had a transaction sit in the chain for hours (sometimes days), it will come as no surprise that a new race has developed among startups: solving the TPS (transactions per second) problem.
Zilliqa, one of just 28 cryptocurrencies to surpass the US$1 billion market cap and the second blockchain from Singapore to do so, is working to alleviate this. Of course, due to the complexity of the issue, achieving this is no mean feat. CEO Xinshu Dong has said in an interview that while this is simple in theory, getting there is not nearly as easy.
Zilliqa aims to mitigate blockchain’s scaling limitations using sharding, which divides blockchain networks into shards, allowing it to process multiple transactions simultaneously, which not only enhances scalability but also reduces the massive amounts of computing power.
With Bitcoin alone using as much CO2 a year as one million transatlantic flights, such unsustainable practices cannot be ignored, especially in a time when society is becoming increasingly conscious of our energy resource mismanagement.
A Disappointing But Understandable Announcement
To that end, the Zilliqa community has awaited the Q3 2018 mainnet launch with great eagerness.
Dong has estimated:
Sharding in Zilliqa has an energy footprint that is at least an order of magnitude less than today’s Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The market has been bullish on the cryptocurrency, and ZIL saw a 68% boost after their public testnet release in April 2018, which boasted 2,488 TPS using only 3,600 nodes.
It was with great disappointment, then, that the community learned from co-founder Amrit Kumar’s recent announcement in the official Telegram group that the mainnet’s planned release in Q3 2018 will not be achieved.
The Reason Behind the Delay
Said Kumar of the postponement of mainnet launch to, at the latest, January 2019:
“In the past few weeks, we have had extensive discussions to review the timeline in light of these enhancements. Unfortunately, we will need more time to ensure that the code gets properly tested by the core team, the community and last but not the least, established auditing firms. We will also be leveraging the additional time to:
- Conduct thorough security audits
- Prepare for and execute the token swap
- Integrate with wallets
- Develop toolchains
- Bring more dapps onboard
We will be updating the community about the mainnet timeline along the way. At this stage, we are targeting end of this year or January 2019. We apologize for the delay but we firmly believe that it is in the best interest of the long-term future of the project and would like to seek your support and understanding.”
About Zilliqa
Our mission is to bring the decentralization movement to everybody.
Zilliqa was developed in the realm of academia with the publication of a paper on a secure sharding protocol for open blockchains, co-authored by founding team member and Chief Scientific Advisor Prateek Saxena and advisor Loi Luu, CEO and co-founder of KyberNetwork.
Zilliqa is also the first blockchain company to achieve a working implementation of sharding.
The company is highly tech-focused and very forthcoming in its communication and education efforts, whether on the reasoning behind Scilla, the smart contracts language it created (read the technical paper), or in providing both technical and non-technical information about the Zilliqa platform (including a community-generated FAQ document).
Seen in this light, their announcement is indicative of an organization that takes its product seriously and opts to deliver a quality mainnet instead of merely dancing to a deadline.
Visit the Zilliqa website to learn more about the company. You can also follow their Twitter and Telegram to keep up with their latest news and updates.
