With Mainnet Launching Soon, Zilliqa Releases Tech Upgrades, Security Enhancements, and More

Zilliqa (ZIL), the high-performance blockchain platform that achieves secure scaling in an open and permission-less network through sharding has just released their final project update before their mainnet launch on January 31, 2019.

The team at Zilliqa has been extremely busy with numerous thing,s including the final testing before mainnet launch, to ensure the Zilliqa blockchain maintains high levels of security. They have also been taking a phased approach to proper scaling solutions for the network.

External Code Review

To ensure the robustness of Zilliqa’s core protocol code, the team has hired auditors for several rounds of security audits. The auditors responsible for checking Zilliqa’s cryptography and digital security include Beijing Zhenyuan Cybersecurity Co. Ltd, Cure53, Kudelski group, and NCC Group.

In addition to the third-party security audits, the Zilliqa team started a private security bug bounty program in November 2018 in an effort to crowd-source efforts in ensuring security. Come February 2019, the bug bounty program will become public on the Bugcrowd platform.

Tech Updates

While Zilliqa’s core protocol code was being audited, the team at Zilliqa has been working on a number of technical updates to provide the final touch on the codebase and finalize the parameters for mainnet.

One such completed update includes the refining of Zilliqa’s reward mechanism for nodes who successfully verify transactions and sign blocks with the coinbase/gas fees.

Based on the feedback received from miners, the team at Zilliqa changed the reward mechanism to reward miners more equally and to incentivize new nodes to join the network.

Another important upgrade was a network upgrade for both Zilliqa and Scilla so that Scilla smart contracts and states benefit from backward compatibility. More upgrades with Scilla involve small changes to the language and interpreter.

Other important updates include various security updates and improvements to remote/dual mining, whereby the Zilliqa team helped community developer Gully to develop the Zilminer.

Preparing for Zilliqa Mainnet Launch

Apart from what the team at Zilliqa has already accomplished, they have a number of key developments in progress leading up to the Zilliqa mainnet launch.

One of the key things the Zilliqa team will be working on is bootstrapping the mainnet carefully to mitigate attacks when hash power is low. This bootstrap phase will involve the rewarding of miners without any transactions being processed. This will allow time for enough hashing power and/or number of blocks to be achieved.

Furthermore, once the mainnet is successfully launched, Q1 – Q2 2019 will be the window for swapping the ERC-20 Zilliqa tokens to Zilliqa mainnet tokens. The token swap window will be open for several months to allow sufficient time for the swap.

Conclusion

All in all, the Zilliqa team has been working very hard to ensure that, at this crucial time in the network’s history, the Zilliqa mainnet is launched smoothly and securely.

Towards the end of January, we could see some volatility in Zilliqa’s price as big events such as mainnet launches, hard forks, and token swaps often result some price action due to uncertainty.