Zilliqa, a blockchain company founded on academic research conducted at the National University of Singapore and based on the technology of sharding to create a highly scalable and secure blockchain platform, held their first project update event in Singapore today that was attended by supporters, partners, business leaders, and members of the media.
The company announced a project roadmap with advertising giant, Mindshare, alongside a consortium of companies, a plan to help establish Zilliqa in the Japanese market, a $5 million seed grant program for apps looking to build on Zilliqa, and the unveiling of their new smart contract programming language, Scilla.
The roots of Zilliqa lie in a scalable blockchain technology based on sharding that was conceived in a research lab at the National University of Singapore and was created to solve two of the most crucial issues surrounding blockchain technology: scalability and security. Since first proposed in an academic research paper in 2015, their team, consisting of some of the world’s leading researchers and academics, has fully developed this concept into a working technology and earlier this year released their public testnet – the first blockchain platform to implement sharding technology to enable high blockchain transaction speeds.
Since then, Zilliqa has been building their community with grassroots outreach about their technology at events around the world. The project recently reached the milestone of achieving a $1 billion market capitalization, making it one of the top 25 largest blockchain projects in the world and the largest home-grown project native to Singapore.
“Just a short time ago the technology behind Zilliqa was purely academic – existing only in peer-reviewed research papers. It’s an incredible testament to the team we have built around our project for us to reach the technology milestones we have, but also the incredible support and adoption we have received from our community. It’s a great honor for us to hold an event like this and have so much interest from people around the world. We set out to create a better blockchain platform that is scalable and secure, and we are getting closer every day. The future is truly bright for Zilliqa.”
Scilla – A New ‘Bug Resistant’ and Secure Smart Contract Language
One of the main issues with the majority of the smart contract applications currently being built is their inherent lack of security. This has been exhibited repeated in some of the most dramatic events in the history of blockchain, including the DAO hack and the Parity bug – which froze hundreds of millions of US dollars of Ether. These issues were caused by bugs that were exploited or triggered in the underlying smart contract programming language. Recently, a team of academic researchers that included Zilliqa Chief Scientific Advisor Prateek Saxena conducted a research project that found over 34,000 live smart contracts that were exposed to exploits.
Scilla, the smart contract language developed by Zilliqa, is the future of dApps because it offers developers a way to prove properties about their contracts before deployment, thus preventing unexpected behavior. Scilla will be integrated into the Zilliqa protocol and will allow developers to easily and safely build smart contracts and even port over their existing projects in the future. In addition, Scilla will also be sharding friendly which means that apps built on Zilliqa will benefit from the underlying high throughput of the platform.
This evening in Singapore, Dr. Amrit Kumar, Head of Research for Zilliqa, unveiled the first working version of Scilla by demonstrating a smart contract crowdfunding application that was designed to be ‘bug resistant’ at the language level.
Zilliqa’s First Major Project update – Partnerships, Grant Program
Zilliqa also announced major new initiatives and partnerships at the event. The company announced that their partner Mindshare – one of the largest creative agencies in the world with over 7,000 employees and $31B in annual billings – will be launching a full value chain pilot project for digital advertising using Zilliqa that will include two publicly traded partners, listed on the NYSE and Nasdaq. More details to come.
In addition, the company announced that Infoteria, a listed technology company in Japan and chair of www.bccc.global, the first Japanese blockchain consortium with over 200 members, will assist Zilliqa with outreach in the Japanese market.
Zilliqa announced that version 2 of their testnet will be released this quarter, with the mainnet of their platform going live in Q3. To encourage projects to build on their platform, the company announced the creation of a $5 million first-phase grant program for projects, from wallets to stable coins, interested in building on Zilliqa’s high throughput, secure blockchain platform.