The First Ever Sharding-based Smart Contract Goes Live on Zilliqa

Today it was announced that their first smart contracts have been launched on the Zilliqa platform, a blockchain technology developed by the computer science division of the National University of Singapore.

Zilliqa’s President, Amrit Kumar said regarding the launch:

“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.”

Developers are now able to deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain. The contracts will all be written in Scilla, a secure-by-design and functional smart contract language native to the platform.

“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.”- said the president.

The features of Zilliqa Smart contacts

Mr. Kumar highlighted what core features can be expected from the Zilliqa smart contracts.

• Amenable to formal verification: Scilla allows developers to formally verify the contract’s behavior.
• Static analyzers suite -can verify potential bugs and problems in the contract before it goes live.
• Clean separation- different operational components are handled separately, thus eliminating any complex interleaving that might lead to incidents similar to the DAO and the Parity hacks.
• Safe standard libraries: a suite of standard libraries are incorporated in the Scilla code, thus removing the need to import algorithms from other open libraries.

Zilliqa partnerships and future developments

Zilliqa has established many prominent partnerships across a variety of fields such as:

Zilliqa smart contracts were used by Project Proton, an alliance between WPP company Mindshare, Mediamath, Rubicon, Integral Ad Science, and Underscore CLT, to run the first live campaign for PepsiCo. The campaign saw a 28% increase in cost-efficiencies for viewable impressions.

HG Exchange, the first exchange in Southeast Asia run by its members, is powered by the Ziliqa blockchain. The exchange allows investors to access startups with high potential through privately-held shares and security tokens.

The Bolt digital entertainment platform will be making use of Zilliqa’s smart contract technologies to streamline the content platform, video analytics, and payment engine.

Regarding future research and development plans, Mr. Kumar has 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.”

Featured image: Coinsutra