Zilliqa, the blockchain based on research from a team of computer scientists at the National University of Singapore, today announced the launch of smart contracts on the Zilliqa platform.
Amrit Kumar, Zilliqa President said, “Long awaited by many members of our community, today signifies a pivotal step forward in realizing innovations on existing blockchain infrastructures in the industry today.”
With this launch, developers will now be able to write and deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain with the platform’s secure-by-design, functional smart contract language, Scilla.
“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. Marked only by progress, 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.”
Mr. Kumar outlined some key points below on what developers can expect from today’s launch along with updates on partnerships and developments on the horizon.
Core features of Zilliqa smart contracts:
- Amenable to formal verification: Scilla is designed to achieve both expressivity and tractability at the same time, while enabling formal reasoning about contract behavior.
- Static analyzers suite: The language comes with a suite of static analyzers that check for potential bugs and issues in the contract. These are very helpful in detecting bugs in contracts before they go live.
- Clean separation: The language is designed in a way that different operational components such as computation and communication (with other contracts) are handled in a very clean manner hence eliminating any complex interleaving. This can prevent incidents like the DAO and the Parity hacks.
- Safe standard libraries: Scilla comes equipped with a suite of standard libraries such as a library that performs arithmetic operations in a safe manner and hence eliminating the need to rely on external libraries such as OpenZeppelin.
Zilliqa has made notable advances across a number of sectors, including:
- Project Proton, an alliance comprised of WPP company Mindshare, Mediamath, Rubicon, Integral Ad Science, and Underscore CLT, successfully ran its first live campaign enabled by Zilliqa smart contracts for PepsiCo, delivering up to 28% increase in cost-efficiencies for viewable impressions.
- Powered by Zilliqa, HG Exchange, the first member-driven exchange in Southeast Asia, provides access to high-growth startups and decacorns such as Uber, Grab, and SpaceX through privately-held shares and security tokens.
- Bolt, the 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.
On Future Research and Development Plans, Mr. Kumar stated:
“With an exciting new partnership in the pipeline, Zilliqa will soon be entering the payments landscape to drive efficiencies in cost, transparency, and security for both clients and end users. While there has been a growing recognition of the technology in its pragmatism, the path of maturation will be mapped by progress across practical, day to day business use cases, and Zilliqa will continue on its mandate as blockchain delivers on its initial promises of disruption, evolution, and advancement. ”
“For years, 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 a critical step forward on our journey. While we will continue to enhance our platform, some areas that we will continue to explore include more efficient smart contract sharding, formal verification, zk-SNARKs, among others. As we approach Zilliqa’s second birthday, we hope that you will join us in celebrating our many achievements over the past two years. With all of the industry-wide developments, regulatory progress, and exciting new enterprise partnerships taking place, we look forward to being part of a future where blockchain will be an essential aspect of our everyday lives.”
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