What is ZIL?

ZIL is the cryptocurrency of Zilliqa, a public platform founded by academics from National University of Singapore, their mainnet went live in January 2019. They have already found real world usability of their platform in finance, digital advertising, and gaming. They were the first platform to use sharding to scale its network. Sharding is the process of breaking the individual nodes on the blockchain into multiple parts. These individual shards process simultaneously before being re-merged into the node, which is then added to the blockchain. The benefit of this is each shard is able to process in a millisecond, and there are 10 shards, together they are able to process 10 shards in one millisecond within one node. This is why sharding is the key component of its scalability and how they are able to process 2,500 transactions per second (tps) compared to Bitcoin’s 7 tps. Zilliqa uses Proof-of-Work like Bitcoin does for new entrants on the blockchain, as a security measure. As this method is highly secure but less efficient, the rest of the transactions use the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (pBFT) consensus protocol. The ZIL utility token is used as gas to execute smart contracts, to reward miners, and to pay transaction fees on the blockchain.