Singapore-based blockchain startup Zilliqa has announced the
launch of smart contracts on its blockchain platform, enabling developers to
write and deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain with its smart
contract language, Scilla.
“With this launch, … we’ve come to realize our vision of a better smart contract language, one built with greater security guarantees at the language level,” Amrit Kumar, president and chief scientific officer at Zilliqa, wrote in a note sent to CoinJournal.
“We’ve made significant technological and engineering inroads, as we’ve refined our protocol infrastructure and enhanced developer tools for Scilla in order to provide our community with the necessary resources to engage with the Zilliqa ecosystem as we know it today.”
Core features of Zilliqa smart contracts include a static
analyzers suite that checks for potential bugs and issues in the contract, and
a suite of standard libraries. Kumar said the Scilla smart contract language is
designed “to achieve both expressivity and tractability, while enabling formal
reasoning about contract behavior,” and handles different operational
components such as computation and communication with other contracts, in “a
very clean manner, hence eliminating any complex interleaving.” This prevents
incidents like the DAO and the Parity hacks, Kumar said.
Founded in 2016 by the computing faculty and research team
of the National University of Singapore (NUS), Zilliqa is a high-throughput public
blockchain platform designed to scale to thousands of transactions per seconds.
The core feature that makes Zilliqa scalable is sharding, a database
partitioning technique that divides the network into several smaller component
networks capable of processing transactions in parallel.
Zilliqa aims to rival payment networks Visa and MasterCard,
and claims that with a network size of 10,000 nodes, it would be enable to
match the average transaction rate of Visa and MasterCard.
“Throughout the past six months, we’ve achieved critical
milestones by way of the launch of our mainnet on January 31st, to the
culmination of our bootstrap phase and the enabling of transactions, and the
many partnerships and initiatives that we’ve spearheaded along the way,” Kumar
said.
“2019 was always going to be the year of realization for Zilliqa – the year that we’d be seeing so much of our hard work come into fruition … and the year that we would be bringing more meaningful blockchain-enabled applications into the world. … We’ve long aspired to become the building block of future enterprises and applications – the enabling of the smart contract functionalities on our blockchain is critical step forward on our journey.”
Moving forward, Kumar said the startup will continue to
enhance its platform and will explore areas including more efficient smart
contract sharding, formal verification, and zk-SNARKs, among others.
Zilliqa will also be entering the payments landscape through
a new collaboration, he added.
Recent partnerships and initiatives include Project
Proton, an alliance and pilot project with advertising agency Mindshare,
which successfully ran its first live campaign enabled by Zilliqa smart
contracts for PepsiCo.
HG Exchange, a member-driven exchange in Southeast Asia that
supports the issuance and trading of private company shares, including security
tokens, is using Zilliqa and MaiCoin to allow companies to raise funds and
present accredited investors with access to investment in high-growth companies
such as Uber, Grab, SpaceX and Go-Jek.
Bolt, a digital entertainment platform with more than three
million users globally, will be leveraging Zilliqa’s smart contract
capabilities to streamline the content platform, video analytics, and payment
engine.