Zilliqa's ZIL token jumped 33% following the release of the public testnet for the Zilliqa blockchain. The token moved to 0.06 USD per coin with a market cap of 439 million dollars, making it the 41st
Zilliqa's ZIL token jumped 33% following the release of the public testnet for the Zilliqa blockchain. The token moved to 0.06 USD per coin with a market cap of 439 million dollars, making it the 41st largest cryptocurrency on Coinmarketcap.
Currently ZIL functions as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum's network. The project plans to launch its mainnet in late September, when users will exchange these placeholder tokens for native Zilliqa coins. ZIL holders gain the ability to pay transaction fees and deploy smart contracts on the platform. Zilliqa established a fixed supply of 21 billion tokens.
The Zilliqa platform addresses a core problem in blockchain design: transaction capacity. The project employs a technology called sharding. Sharding divides the mining network into smaller sub-networks, known as shards, that process transactions in parallel. Each shard processes its own batch of transactions while all other shards do likewise, adding to the network's total capacity. As more miners join the system, additional shards can form. With a number of computers participating on the network similar to Ethereum's, Zilliqa's team projects the chain could execute 1,000 times more transactions per second.
"This is a tremendous milestone for Zilliqa but also for blockchain technology as a whole," said Xinshu Dong, the company's CEO. "It is incredibly challenging to create a high transaction rate blockchain while maintaining the security and decentralization of the system, but we feel we have made a breakthrough with what we have achieved."
Zilliqa announced the testnet release earlier this month as the first public, permission-free blockchain to implement sharding at scale. The company built the platform to rival traditional payment processors like VISA in terms of transaction throughput.
Bitcoin and Ethereum each process about 20 transactions per second maximum, a limit that creates network bottlenecks when application usage spikes. The Ethereum game CryptoKitties generated sufficient traffic to block new token offerings from launching on the network. VISA handles roughly 8,000 transactions per second globally.
For now, the testnet operates on fewer than 1,000 nodes, each running as an Amazon AWS virtual instance. In stress testing, this configuration achieved 2,000 transactions per second. Users can interact with the testnet through a fully functional block explorer and use a wallet application to generate and test transactions on the network.
