Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analyzed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk-reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralized and scalable in my opinion.
Below I post my analysis of why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise, just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
Technology and some more:
Introduction
The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
Mainnet is live since the end of January 2019 with daily transaction rates growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralized and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. The maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
Zilliqa realized early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralized, secure, and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in the amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralization. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
Before we continue dissecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
Down the rabbit hole
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour, no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here. Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts, etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as: “A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronize cryptographically-secure data”.
Next, he states that: "blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”. For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber, and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
With public blockchains like Zilliqa, this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network, etc.
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever-changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralized and scalable being low.
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimization on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and the University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017. Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (66%) double-spend attacks become possible.
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT, etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralization.
Decentralisation
Currently, there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so-called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralized nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics, you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching its transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand. Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end-users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public. They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public-facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers. The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translate to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non-custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
With a high amount of DS; shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralized too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralized in my opinion.
Smart contracts
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. The faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal. If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time-stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
Generalized: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object-oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: * “all programs have two basic components, data – what the program knows – and behavior – what the program can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviors in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behavior are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.” *
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: OCaml is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognized by academics and won a so-called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise, it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts, it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa or Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”.Scilla design story part 1
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue: In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
Business & Partnerships
It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organizations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggests that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
Zilliqa seems to already take advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, Airbnb, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are built on top of these blocks.
So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human-readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They don't just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
Marketing & Community
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data, it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities also seem to be growing.
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community-run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non-custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiative (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggests in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real-time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding of what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures, Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!
Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analysed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralised and scalable in my opinion.
Below I post my analysis why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
Technology and some more:
Introduction The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
Mainnet is live since end of January 2019 with daily transaction rate growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralised and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. Maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
Zilliqa realised early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralised, secure and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralisation. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
Before we continue disecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
Down the rabbit hole
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here. Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as:
“A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronise cryptographically-secure data”.
Next he states that: >“blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”.* For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
With public blockchains like Zilliqa this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network etc.
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralised and scalable being low.
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimisation on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017. Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (>66%) double spend attacks become possible.
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralisation.
Decentralisation
Currently there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralised nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching their transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand. Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public.They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers.The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translates to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
With a high amount of DS & shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralised too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralised in my opinion.
Smart contracts
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. Faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal. If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, R&D roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
Generalised: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: > “all programmes have two basic components, data – what the programme knows – and behaviour – what the programme can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviours in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behaviour are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.”
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: > OCaml is a general purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognised by academics and won a so called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities safety is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa for Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”.Scilla design story part 1
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue:
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
Business & Partnerships It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organisations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggest that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
Zilliqa seems to already taking advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, AirBnB, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are build on top of these blocks.
So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”*
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They dont just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
Marketing & Community
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities) also seem to be growing.
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiatives (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggest in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures & Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!
Nano has 0 transaction fees, which could make it more vulnerable to spam.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) can be precomputed, which could allow bad actors to dump millions of blocks (transactions) on the network at once.
ASICs could be created to make precomputing PoW trivial for spam attacks.
Current node software and hardware cannot handle thousands of TPS (low-end nodes fall behind at even 50 TPS).
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Proof-of-Work is required for all transactions, which acts as a fee (costs electricity and time).
PoW takes a non-trivial amount of time, so precomputing PoW takes hours or days to generate enough traffic to actually affect the network (>150 TPS) for even a short period of time.
Dynamic Proof-of-Work allows legitimate users to have their transactions prioritized over spam by automatically increasing their PoW slightly if the network is congested.
As network scalability improves, more and more pre-computed PoW must be done to actually impact the network.
There is no single-blockchain that all transactions must be added to. Transactions are processed asynchronously, meaning that real user transactions can be processed separately from spam.
Creating an ASIC (none currently exist for Nano) costs millions of dollars, and is typically created to increase mining rewards (which Nano doesn't have). Why would someone make an ASIC just to attack Nano? Nano could also change the PoW algorithm to make ASICs useless. Memory-hard PoW is already being evaluated.
Second layer solutions like mixers can help, but some argue that isn't enough privacy.
The current protocol design + the computational overhead of privacy does not allow Nano to implement first layer privacy without compromising it's other features (fast, feeless, and scalable transactions).
02:56 Decentralization Issues
Nano is currently not as decentralized as it could be. ~25% of the voting weight is held by Binance.
Users must choose representatives, and users don't always choose the best ones (or never choose).
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Currently 4 unrelated parties (who all have a verifiable interest in keeping the network running) would have to work together to attack the network
Unlike Bitcoin, there is no mining or fees in Nano. This means that there is not a strong incentive for emergent centralization from profit maximization and economies of scale. We've seen this firsthand, as Nano's decentralization has increased over time.
In Nano, voting weight can be remotely re-delegated to anyone at any time. This differs from Bitcoin, where consensus is controlled by miners and requires significant hardware investment.
The cost of a 51% attack scales with the market cap of Nano.
06:49 Marketing & adoption Issues
The best technology doesn't always win. If no one knows about or uses Nano, it will die.
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
I would argue that the best technology typically does win, but it needs to be best in every way (price, speed, accessbility, etc). Nano is currently in a good place if you agree with that argument.
Bitcoin started small, and didn't spend money on marketing. It takes time to build a community.
The developers have said they will market more once the protocol is where they want it to be (v20 or v21?).
Community marketing initiatives have started to form organically (e.g. Twitter campaigns, YouTube ads, etc).
Marketing and adoption is a very difficult problem to solve, especially when you don't have first mover advantage or consistent cashflow.
08:07 Small developer fund Issues
The developer fund only has 3 million NANO left (~$4MM), what happens after that?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
The goal for Nano is to be an Internet RFC like TCP/IP or SMTP - development naturally slows down when the protocol is in a good place.
Nano development is completely open source, so anyone can participate. Multiple developers are now familiar with the Nano protocol.
Businesses and whales that benefit from Nano (exchanges, remittances, merchant services, etc) are incentivized to keep the protocol developed and running.
The developer fund was only ~5% of the supply - compare that to some of the other major cryptocurrencies.
10:08 Node incentives Issues
There are no transaction fees, why would people run nodes to keep the network running?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
The cost of consensus is so low in Nano that the benefits of the network itself are the incentive: decentralized money with 0 transaction fees that can be sent anywhere in the world nearly instantly. Similar to TCP/IP, email servers, and http servers. Just like Bitcoin full nodes.
Paying $50-$100 a month for a high-end node is a lot cheaper for merchants than paying 1-3% in total sales.
Businesses and whales that benefit from Nano (exchanges, remittances, merchant services, etc) are incentivized to keep the protocol developed and running.
11:58 No smart contracts Issues
Nano doesn't support smart contracts.
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Nano's sole goal is to be the most efficient peer-to-peer value transfer protocol possible. Adding smart contracts makes keeping Nano feeless, fast, and decentralized much more difficult.
Other solutions (e.g. Ethereum) exist for creating and enforcing smart contracts.
Code can still interact with Nano, but not on the first layer in a decentralized matter.
Real world smart contract adoption and usage is pretty limited at the moment, but that might not always be the case.
13:20 Price stability Issues
Why would anyone accept or spend Nano if the price fluctuates so much?
Why wouldn't people just use a stablecoin version of Nano for sending and receiving money?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
With good fiat gateways (stable, low fees, etc), you can always buy back the fiat equivalent of what you've spent.
The hope is that with enough adoption, people and businesses will eventually skip the fiat conversion and use Nano directly.
Because Nano is so fast, volatility is less of an issue. Transactions are confirmed in <10 seconds, and prices change less in that timeframe (vs 10 minutes to hours for Bitcoin).
Stablecoins reintroduce trust. Stable against what? Who controls the supply, and how do you get people to adopt them? What happens if the assets they're stable against fail? Nano is pure supply and demand.
With worldwide adoption, the market capitalization of Nano would be in the trillions. If that happens, even millions of dollars won't move the price significantly.
15:06 Deflation Issues
Nano's current supply == max supply. Why would people spend Nano today if it could be worth more tomorrow?
What happens to principal representatives and voting weight as private keys are lost? How do you know keys are lost?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Nano is extremely divisible. 1 NANO is 1030 raw. Since there are no transaction fees, smaller and smaller amounts of Nano could be used to transact, even if the market cap reaches trillions.
People will always buy things they need (food, housing, etc).
I'm not sure what the plan is to adjust for lost keys. Probably requires more discussion.
Long-term Scalability Issue
Current node software and hardware cannot handle thousands of TPS (low-end nodes fall behind at even 50 TPS).
The more representatives that exist, the more vote traffic is required (network bandwidth).
Low-end nodes currently slow down the network significantly. Principal representatives waste their resources constantly bootstrapping these weak nodes during network saturation.
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Even as is, Nano can comfortably handle 50 TPS average - which is roughly the amount of transactions per day PayPal was doing in 2011 with nearly 100 million users.
There are some discussions of prioritizing bootstrapping by vote weight to limit the impact of weak nodes.
Since Nano uses an account balance system, pruning could drastically reduce storage requirements. You only need current state to keep the network running, not the full transaction history.
In the future, vote stapling could drastically reduce bandwidth usage by collecting all representative signatures up front and then only sharing that single aggregate signature.
Nano has no artificial protocol-based limits (e.g. block sizes or block times). It scales with hardware.
Obviously there is still a lot of work to be done in some areas, but overall I think Nano is a good place. For people that aren't Nano fans, what are your biggest concerns?
Google Enters The Blockchain Sector Through A Partnership
The Search Engine Giant Had Switched Stances, As Prior Entering Into A Partnership Google Distanced Themselves From The Blockchain Sector One of the biggest tech companies to date, Google, struck the crypto community by announcing a partnership between its Cloud subsidiary and the blockchain video streaming company Theta Labs. Apart from enabling its users to create nodes on Theta’s network, Google Cloud would also act as a note, which would validate data transactions for whole Europe. However, this is the first step for the search engine giant, as Google remained somewhat negative about the trends and advancements in the crypto sector. “The partnership is just a baby step towards entering the blockchain space, as we currently operate with many crypto customers,” Allen Day, one of Google’s Developer Advocates stated. “Furthermore, we already made public data from Blockchain, Ethereum, as well as six other crypto project via out dataset program. The partnership with Theta is a natural consequence.” Day added. For Google, becoming a transaction validator is not such a great achievement, but Theta’s game might receive a massive boost. Theta Labs aims at lightening the load on the centralized data centers like those of Netflix and YouTube facilitate to keep their services up and running. For every video request, centralized data centers execute a series of commands, often followed by a vast download of information. Theta’s network is decentralized, meaning data packages would be evenly distributed across the entire network and only small bits of information would travel through it. Essentially, Theta’s TV app enables common Android-based TV’s to act as server nodes, distributing content to other network participants, without the need of hundreds of downloads from the main server. However, Theta’s innovation consists of enabling customers to receive bonuses, when not using their Internet bandwidth for video content streaming. According to Sandvine, over 15% of the global Internet traffic amid the COVID-19 lockdown went directly to Google’s YouTube, followed closely by Netflix, which recorded little over 10%. Facebook and Instagram combined mark less than 10% internet traffic from February 1 to April 19, 2020. https://preview.redd.it/7uw91nqmeh151.png?width=960&format=png&auto=webp&s=4eb91fe12348658bf165bea973d64c17f38e60ce Theta’s biggest achievement would be the possible YouTube integration. With costs for deploying and managing enormous centralized content delivery networks (CDNs) like those of Netflix, for example, Theta seems as a viable option for content management services providers to streamline their efficiency. “Most of the modern data centers are designed around ensuring peak performance, which occurs no more than 1% of the operational time. Building such infrastructure is costly, and you can rarely plan for a peak, ” Theta’s CEO and co-founder Mitch Liu stated. Google’s partnership with Theta turns the search engine giant into the fifth external validator for Theta’s service. Other validators include Binance, Samsung, Gumi Cryptos, as well as Blockchain Ventures. Meanwhile, Theta also launched a 2.0 version of their mainnet, improving scalability and security. Also, Theta’s incorporating a multi-byzantine fault-tolerant (Multi-BFT) consensus algorithm, which enables guardian nodes to help validators in block verification.
https://preview.redd.it/6w93e0afttx41.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=c00989612ec2d52eb522405e6b6a98bf875e08bb Version 1.3.0 is a powerful update to TkeySpace that our team has been carefully preparing. since version 1.2.0, we have been laying the foundation for implementing new features that are already available in the current version. Who cares about the security and privacy of their assets is an update for you. TkeySpace — was designed to give You full control over your digital assets while maintaining an exceptional level of security, which is why there is no personal data in the wallet: phone number, the email address that could be compromised by hackers — no identity checks and other hassles, just securely save the backup phrase consisting of 12 words.
Briefly about the TkeySpace 1.3.0 update :
Code optimization and switching to AndroidX;
New section-Privacy;
Built-in TOR;
Selecting the privacy mode;
Selecting the recovery method for each currency;
Choosing the address format for Litecoin;
Enhanced validation of transactions and blocks in the network;
Starting with the current update, the TkeySpace wallet can communicate via the TOR network, includes new privacy algorithms, and supports 59 different currencies. https://i.redd.it/kn5waeskttx41.gif Tor is a powerful privacy feature for those who own large assets or live in places where the Internet is heavily censored.
Tor technology provides protection against traffic analysis mechanisms that compromise not only Internet privacy, but also the confidentiality of trade secrets, business contacts, and communications in General.
When you enable TOR settings, all outgoing traffic from the wallet will be encrypted and routed through an anonymous network of servers, periodically forming a chain through the Tor network, which uses multi-level encryption, effectively hiding any information about the sender: location, IP address, and other data. This means that if your provider blocks the connection, you can rest easy — after all, by running this function, you will get an encrypted connection to the network without restrictions. https://preview.redd.it/w9y3ax4mttx41.png?width=960&format=png&auto=webp&s=972e375fc26d479e8b8d2999f7659ec332e2af55 In TOR mode, the wallet may work noticeably slower and in some cases, there may be problems with the network, due to encryption, some blockchain browsers may temporarily not work. However, TOR encryption is very important when Internet providers completely block traffic and switching to this mode, you get complete freedom and no blocks for transactions.
Confidentiality of transactions (the Blockchain transaction)
The wallet can change the model of a standard transaction, mixing inputs and outputs, making it difficult to identify certain cryptocurrencies. In the current update, you can select one of several modes for the transaction privacy level: deterministic lexicographic sorting or shuffle mode.
Mode: Lexicographic indexing
Implemented deterministic lexicographic sorting using hashes of previous transactions and output indexes for sorting transaction input data, as well as values and scriptPubKeys for sorting transaction output data; We understand that information must remain confidential not only in the interests of consumers but also in higher orders, financial systems must be kept secret to prevent fraud. One way to address these privacy shortcomings is to randomize the order of inputs and outputs.
Lexicographic orderingis a comparison algorithm used to sort two sets based on their Cartesian order within their common superset. Lexicographic order is also often referred to as alphabetical order or dictionary order. The hashes of previous transactions (in reverse byte order) are sorted in ascending order, lexicographically.
In the case of two matching transaction hashes, the corresponding previous output indexes will be compared by their integer value in ascending order. If the previous output indexes match, the input data is considered equal.
Shuffle Mode: mixing (random indexing)
To learn more about how “shuffle mode” works, we will first analyze the mechanisms using the example of a classic transaction. Current balance Of your wallet: 100 TKEY, coins are stored at different addresses: x1. Address-contains 10 TKEY. x2. Address-contains 20 TKEY. x3. Address-contains 30 TKEY. x4. Address-contains 15 TKEY. x5. Address-contains 25 TKEY.
Addresses in the blockchain are identifiers that you use to send cryptocurrency to another person or to receive digital currency.
In a classic transaction, if you need to send, for example, 19 TKEY — 100 TKEY will be sent to the network for “melting” coins, 19 TKEY will be sent to the Recipient, and ~80.9 TKEY will return to the newly generated address for “change” in your wallet. https://preview.redd.it/x595qwdottx41.png?width=806&format=png&auto=webp&s=d9c2ae5620a3410ed83f7e16c018165c8ab35844 In the blockchain explorer, you will see the transaction amount in the amount of 100 TKEY, where 80.99999679 TKEY is your change, 19 TKEY is the amount you sent and 0.00000321 is the transaction fee. Thus, in the blockchain search engine, most of your balance is shown in the transaction.
How does the shuffle mode work?
Let’s look at a similar example: you have 100 TKEY on your balance, and you need to send 19 TKEY. x1. Address-contains 10 TKEY. x2. Address-contains 20 TKEY. x3. Address-contains 30 TKEY. x4. Address-contains 15 TKEY. x5. Address-contains 25 TKEY. You send 19 TKEY, the system analyzes all your addresses and balances on them and selects the most suitable ones for the transaction. To send 19 TKEY, the miners will be given coins with x2. Addresses, for a total of 20 TKEY. Of these, 19 TKEY will be sent to the recipient, and 0.99999679 TKEY will be returned to Your new address as change minus the transaction fee. https://preview.redd.it/doxmqffqttx41.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=5c99ec41363fe50cd651dc0acab05e175416006a In the blockchain explorer, you will see the transaction amount in the amount of 20 TKEY, where 0.99999679 TKEY is Your change, 19 TKEY is the amount you sent and 0.00000321 is the transaction fee. The shuffle mode has a cumulative effect. with each new transaction, delivery Addresses will be created and the selection of debit addresses/s that are most suitable for the transaction will change. Thus, if you store 1,000,000 TKEY in your wallet and want to send 1 TKEY to the recipient, the transaction amount will not display most of your balance but will select 1 or more addresses for the transaction.
Selecting the recovery method for each digital currency (Blockchain restore)
Now you can choose the recovery method for each currency: API + Blockchain or blockchain.
Note: This is not a syncing process, but rather the choice of a recovery method for your wallet. Syncing takes place with the blockchain — regardless of the method you choose.
What are the differences between recovery methods?
API + Blockchain
In order not to load the entire history of the blockchain, i.e. block and transaction headers, the API helps you quickly get point information about previous transactions. For example, If your transactions are located in block 67325 and block 71775, the API will indicate to the node the necessary points for restoring Your balance, which will speed up the “recovery” process. As soon as the information is received, communication with the peers takes place and synchronization begins from the control point, then from this moment, all subsequent block loading is carried out through the blockchain. This method allows you to quickly restore Your existing wallet. ‘’+’’ Speed. ‘’-’’ The API server may fail.
Blockchain
This method loads all block headers (block headers + Merkle) starting from the BIP44 checkpoint and manually validates transactions. ‘’+’’ It always works and is decentralized. ‘’-’’ Loading the entire blockchain may take a long time.
Why do I need to switch the recovery method?
If when creating a wallet or restoring it, a notification (!) lights up in red near the selected cryptocurrency, then most likely the API has failed, so go to Settings — Security Center — Privacy — Blockchain Restore — switch to Blockchain. Syncing will be successful.
Enhanced validation of transactions and blocks in the network
Due to the increased complexity in the Tkeycoin network, we have implemented enhanced validation of the tkeycoin consensus algorithm, and this algorithm is also available for other cryptocurrencies.
What is the advantage of the enhanced validation algorithm for the user
First, the name itself speaks for itself — it increases the security of the network, and second, by implementing the function — we have accelerated the work of the TkeySpace blockchain node, the application consumes even fewer resources than before.
High complexity is converted to 3 bytes, which ensures fast code processing and the least resource consumption on your device.
Synchronization
The synchronization process has been upgraded. Node addresses are added to the local storage, and instant synchronization with nodes occurs when you log in again.
Checking for double-spending
TkeySpace eliminates “double-spending” in blockchains, which is very valuable in the Bitcoin and Litecoin networks.
For example, using another application, you may be sent a fake transaction, and the funds will eventually disappear from the network and your wallet because this feature is almost absent in most applications.
Using TkeySpace — you are 100% sure that your funds are safe and protected from fraudulent transactions in the form of “fake” transactions.
The bloom filter to check for nodes
All nodes are checked through the bloom filter. This allows you to exclude fraudulent nodes that try to connect to the network as real nodes of a particular blockchain. In practice, this verification is not available in applications, Tkeycoin — decided to follow a new trend and change the stereotypes, so new features such as node verification using the bloom filter and double-spending verification are a kind of innovation in applications that work with cryptocurrencies.
Updating the Binance and Ethereum libraries
Updated Binance and Ethereum libraries for interaction with the TOR network.
Interface
Function — to hide the balance
This function allows you to hide the entire balance from the main screen.
Advanced currency charts and charts without authentication
Detailed market statistics are available, including volumes, both for 1 day and several years. Select the period of interest: 1 day, 7 days, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years.
In version 1.3.0, you can access charts without authentication. You can monitor the cryptocurrency exchange rate without even logging in to the app. If you have a pin code for logging in, when you open the app, swipe to the left and you will see a list of currencies.
Transaction verification for Tkeycoin is now available directly in the app.
Independent Commission entry for Bitcoin
Taking into account the large volume of the Bitcoin network, we have implemented independent Commission entry — you can specify any Commission amount. For other currencies, smart Commission calculation is enabled based on data from the network. The network independently regulates the most profitable Commission for the sender.
New digital currencies
The TkeySpace wallet supports +59 cryptocurrencies and tokens.
Nano has 0 transaction fees, which could make it more vulnerable to spam.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) can be precomputed, which could allow bad actors to dump millions of blocks (transactions) on the network at once.
ASICs could be created to make precomputing PoW trivial for spam attacks.
Current node software and hardware cannot handle thousands of TPS (low-end nodes fall behind at even 50 TPS).
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Proof-of-Work is required for all transactions, which acts as a fee (costs electricity and time).
PoW takes a non-trivial amount of time, so precomputing PoW takes hours or days to generate enough traffic to actually affect the network (>50 TPS?) for a period of time.
Dynamic Proof-of-Work allows legitimate users to have their transactions prioritized by automatically increasing their PoW slightly over spam.
As network scalability improves, more and more pre-computed PoW must be done to actually impact the network.
There is no single-blockchain that all transactions must be added to. Transactions are processed asynchronously, meaning that real user transactions can be processed separately from spam.
Creating an ASIC (none currently exist for Nano) costs millions of dollars, and is typically created to increase mining rewards (which Nano doesn't have). Why would someone make an ASIC just to attack Nano? Nano could also change the PoW algorithm to make ASICs useless. Memory-hard PoW is already being evaluated.
01:58 Privacy Issues
Nano has no privacy. It is pseudonymous (like Bitcoin), not anonymous.
Second layer solutions like mixers can help, but some argue that isn't enough privacy.
The current protocol design + the computational overhead of privacy does not allow Nano to implement first layer privacy without compromising it's other features (fast, feeless, and scalable transactions).
02:56 Decentralization Issues
Nano is currently not as decentralized as it could be. ~25% of the voting weight is held by Binance.
Users must choose representatives, and users don't always choose the best ones (or never choose).
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Currently 4 unrelated parties (who all have a verifiable interest in keeping the network running) would have to work together to attack the network
Unlike Bitcoin, there is no mining or fees in Nano. This means that there is not a strong incentive for emergent centralization from profit maximization and economies of scale. We've seen this firsthand, as Nano's decentralization has increased over time.
In Nano, voting weight can be remotely re-delegated to anyone at any time. This differs from Bitcoin, where consensus is controlled by miners and requires significant hardware investment.
The cost of a 51% attack scales with the market cap of Nano.
06:49 Marketing & adoption Issues
The best technology doesn't always win. If no one knows about or uses Nano, it will die.
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
I would argue that the best technology typically does win, but it needs to be best in every way (price, speed, accessbility, etc). Nano is currently in a good place if you agree with that argument.
Bitcoin started small, and didn't spend money on marketing. It takes time to build a community.
The developers have said they will market more once the protocol is where they want it to be (v20 or v21?).
Community marketing initiatives have started to form organically (e.g. Twitter campaigns, YouTube ads, etc).
Marketing and adoption is a very difficult problem to solve, especially when you don't have first mover advantage or consistent cashflow.
08:07 Small developer fund Issues
The developer fund only has 3 million NANO left (~$4MM), what happens after that?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
The goal for Nano is to be an Internet RFC like TCP/IP or SMTP - development naturally slows down when the protocol is in a good place.
Nano development is completely open source, so anyone can participate. Multiple developers are now familiar with the Nano protocol.
Businesses and whales that benefit from Nano (exchanges, remittances, merchant services, etc) are incentivized to keep the protocol developed and running.
The developer fund was only ~5% of the supply - compare that to some of the other major cryptocurrencies.
10:08 Node incentives Issues
There are no transaction fees, why would people run nodes to keep the network running?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
The cost of consensus is so low in Nano that the benefits of the network itself are the incentive: decentralized money with 0 transaction fees that can be sent anywhere in the world nearly instantly.
Paying $50-$100 a month for a high-end node is a lot cheaper for merchants than paying 1-3% in total sales.
Businesses and whales that benefit from Nano (exchanges, remittances, merchant services, etc) are incentivized to keep the protocol developed and running.
11:58 No smart contracts Issues
Nano doesn't support smart contracts.
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Nano's sole goal is to be the most efficient peer-to-peer value transfer protocol possible. Adding smart contracts makes keeping Nano feeless, fast, and decentralized much more difficult.
Other solutions (e.g. Ethereum) exist for creating and enforcing smart contracts.
Code can still interact with Nano, but not on the first layer in a decentralized matter.
Real world smart contract adoption and usage is pretty limited at the moment, but that might not always be the case.
13:20 Price stability Issues
Why would anyone accept or spend Nano if the price fluctuates so much?
Why wouldn't people just use a stablecoin version of Nano for sending and receiving money?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
With good fiat gateways (stable, low fees, etc), you can always buy back the fiat equivalent of what you've spent.
The hope is that with enough adoption, people and businesses will eventually skip the fiat conversion and use Nano directly.
Because Nano is so fast, volatility is less of an issue. Transactions are confirmed in <10 seconds, and prices change less in that timeframe (vs 10 minutes to hours for Bitcoin).
Stablecoins reintroduce trust. Stable against what? Who controls the supply, and how do you get people to adopt them? What happens if the assets they're stable against fail? Nano is pure supply and demand.
With worldwide adoption, the market capitalization of Nano would be in the trillions. If that happens, even millions of dollars won't move the price significantly.
15:06 Deflation Issues
Nano's current supply == max supply. Why would people spend Nano today if it could be worth more tomorrow?
What happens to principal representatives and voting weight as private keys are lost? How do you know keys are lost?
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Nano is extremely divisible. 1 NANO is 1030 raw. Since there are no transaction fees, smaller and smaller amounts of Nano could be used to transact, even if the market cap reaches trillions.
People will always buy things they need (food, housing, etc).
I'm not sure what the plan is to adjust for lost keys. Probably requires more discussion.
Long-term Scalability Issue
Current node software and hardware cannot handle thousands of TPS (low-end nodes fall behind at even 50 TPS).
The more representatives that exist, the more vote traffic is required (network bandwidth).
Low-end nodes currently slow down the network significantly. Principal representatives waste their resources constantly bootstrapping these weak nodes during network saturation.
Potential Mitigations & Outstanding Issues
Even as is, Nano can comfortably handle 50 TPS average - which is roughly the amount of transactions per day PayPal was doing in 2011 with nearly 100 million users.
There are some discussions of prioritizing bootstrapping by vote weight to limit the impact of weak nodes.
Since Nano uses an account balance system, pruning could drastically reduce storage requirements. You only need current state to keep the network running, not the full transaction history.
In the future, vote stapling could drastically reduce bandwidth usage by collecting all representative signatures up front and then only sharing that single aggregate signature.
Nano has no artificial protocol-based limits (e.g. block sizes or block times). It scales with hardware.
Hi Bitcoiners! I’m back with the 30th monthly Bitcoin news recap. For those unfamiliar, each day I pick out the most popularelevant/interesting stories in Bitcoin and save them. At the end of the month I release them in one batch, to give you a quick (but not necessarily the best) overview of what happened in bitcoin over the past month. You can see recaps of the previous months on Bitcoinsnippets.com A recap of Bitcoin in May 2019 Adoption
Anonymity & Cryptocurrency: A Few Tips On How To Keep Your Privacy
Unfortunately, anonymity isn’t something that you think about as being valuable. But as Edward Snowden points out in one of his interviews, “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” https://preview.redd.it/a2t5wii1wnj41.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=df6889e510a2a0b231614636d0b6c1ac7be7e2c4 Many people are going up against online anonymity, mainly because it has the potential to enable and encourage undesirable behavior or illegal activity. State institutions and corporations are trying to limit the ability to use networks without authorization, allegedly in an attempt to increase security. Meanwhile, there is no doubt that private information that falls into the wrong hands can be used for mean purposes in many ways. Dozens of examples truly highlight the need for online anonymity today. Without it, people’s lives can easily be ruined forever. Financial and personal freedom are the main reasons why people started using cryptocurrencies. But using Bitcoin itself can not guaranty anonymity. They are not linked to a person or identity, so the name, e-mail or physical address can’t be found in the transaction. But public addresses we use publically recorded on the blockchain, so a person can be tracked down using this information and ID. Here are some methods to keep your identity safe. Use logless VPN Virtual Private Network encrypts all of your Internet traffic and routes it through multiple servers at different locations before arriving at the final location. Using a VPN is one of the simplest ways to cover your digital tracks. Logless VPN services don’t store the history of your activities, some of them provide one IP address for several users, making it difficult to isolate one person among them. It is highly recommended to avoid US/UK-based VPN services due to strict surveillance regimes in these countries. Also, you should keep in mind that some exchangers’ security systems treating logging into an account with numerous different country IPs as suspicious which can lead to blocking your account. Register a separate email Never use personal or working email for the needs of the crypto. If hackers gain access to it that can ruin your life in many aspects at once. A significant advantage will be the use of burner emails such as Guerrilla Mail and Temp Mail, or highly protected services like ProtonMail or Tutanota. Don’t forget about common security rules such as using a strong password that contains different case letters, numbers and symbols. Keeping passwords and keys on your devices is definitely not safe, better write it down in an old-fashioned pen-paper way. Create new blockchain address Make new addresses for every single transaction you make. More than half of all transactions in the BTC network go through wallets that have been in use at least once. Over time this practice will build up a list of transactions associated with one wallet. Using some manipulations those transactions could be easily associated with a real-world identity as well as your wallet could be simply hacked and robbed. Avoid KYC and AML using services Know Your Client is a policy used by many companies in which each client is required to provide credentials such as ID documents to use a company’s service. Anti-Money Laundry consists of KYC procedures and ongoing risk assessment and monitoring of transactions. Such actions are implemented in the best interest of protecting users of cryptocurrency platforms but left no chance to stay anonymous. Nowadays most of the crypto markets and exchanges require passing identity verification due to the growing control from the state institutions. However, there are some that allow you to remain anonymous unless you are withdrawing a large amount (Binance, Bitfinex, KuCoin, etc.). In such circumstances, decentralized exchanges seem like a good option. Use Anonymity-Centric Cryptocurrencies As mentioned earlier, blockchain analysis based on knowledge of the amount and time of the sent transaction allows hackers to attack user’s wallets and gain access to their data. As a reaction to this was developing coins with anonymity as the main priority. At the moment, Monero is the most popular of the anonymity-centric cryptocurrencies. It has a complex of cryptographical tools for obfuscating traces of the original transaction. Its RingCT Protocol hides the sender, recipient and transfers amounts. After the transaction is completed, it is signed and receives a time-stamp using a ring signature, where collected group’s public keys, but the private key of the specific sender is not displayed. Another private currency’s Dash work is based on the CoinJoin technology. The idea of the process is very simple: several transactions are mixed into one, so it is impossible to determine what amounts were transferred and by whom. Zcash currency uses the Zero-Knowledge Proof commitment scheme to validate transactions without revealing information about them. Protocol, called Zk-SNARKs, comprises three algorithms that generate proof and verification keys, calculate the proof and verify the authenticity of the secret information. The obvious drawback of this mechanism is extremely massive complex calculations that require enormous capacity. Even if complete anonymity seems not possible, following the above rules will help you avoid a lot of trouble. You should be extra meticulous in the process of choosing currency and an exchanger, keeping in mind where and what personal information you provide. If you need to exchange your coins private and without registration – StealthEX is here for you. Just go to http://stealthex.io and choose the pair and the amount for your exchange. Then follow these easy steps: ✔ Choose the pair and the amount for your exchange. For example ETH to BTC. ✔ Press the “Start exchange” button. ✔ Provide the recipient address to which the coins will be transferred. ✔ Move your cryptocurrency for the exchange. ✔ Receive your coins. Follow us onMedium,Twitter,Facebook, andRedditto getStealthEX.ioupdates and the latest news about the crypto world. For all requests message us via [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
Playing with fire with FinCen and SEC, Binance may face a hefty penalty again after already losing 50 percent of its trading business
On 14 June, Binance announced that it “constantly reviews user accounts to improve (their) platform security and to comply with global compliance requirements”, mentioning that “Binance is unable to provide services to any U.S. person” in the latest “Binance Terms of Use” attached within the announcement. According to the data from a third-party traffic statistics website, Alexa, users in the U.S. form the biggest user group of Binance, accounting for about 25% of the total visitor traffic. In the forecast of Binance’s user scale compiled by The Block, the largest traffic is dominated by users in the U.S., surpassing the total of the ones from the second place to the fifth place. Also, considering that the scale of digital asset trading for the users in the U.S. far exceeds that of the users of many other countries, it could mean that Binance may have already lost 50 % of the business income by losing users in the U.S. Apparently, such an announcement by Binance to stop providing services to users in the U.S. means Binance has no other alternative but “seek to live on.” So, what are the specific requirements of the U.S. for digital asset exchanges and which of the regulatory red lines of the U.S. did Binance cross? Compliance issues relating to operation permission of digital asset exchanges In the U.S., the entry barrier for obtaining a business license to operate a digital asset exchange is not high. Apart from the special licencing requirements of individual states such as New York, most of the states generally grant licences to digital asset exchanges through the issuance of a “Money Transmitter License” (MTL). Each state has different requirements for MTL applications. Some of the main common requirements are: Filling out the application form, including business address, tax identification number, social security number and statement of net assets of the owneproprietor Paying the relevant fees for the licence application Meeting the minimum net assets requirements stipulated by the state Completing a background check Providing a form of guarantee, such as security bonds It is worth noting that not all states are explicitly using MTL to handle the issues around operation permission of digital asset exchanges. For instance, New Hampshire passed a new law on 12 March 2017, announcing that trading parties of digital assets in that state would not be bound by MTL. Also, Montana has not yet set up MTL, keeping an open attitude towards the currency trading business. On top of obtaining the MTL in each state, enterprises are also required to complete the registration of “Money Services Business” (MSB) on the federal level FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the U.S. Treasury Department) issued the “Application of FinCEN’s Regulations to Persons Administering, Exchanging, or Using Virtual Currencies” on 18 March 2013. On the federal level, the guideline requires any enterprise involved in virtual currency services to complete the MSB registration and perform the corresponding compliance responsibilities. The main responsibility of a registered enterprise is to establish anti-money laundering procedures and reporting systems. However, California is an exception. Enterprises in California would only need to complete the MSB registration on the federal level and they do not need to apply for the MTL in California. Any enterprise operating in New York must obtain a virtual currency business license, Bitlicense, issued in New York Early in July 2014, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) has specially designed and launched the BitLicense, stipulating that any institutions participating in a business relevant to virtual currency (virtual currency transfer, virtual currency trust, provision of virtual currency trading services, issuance or management of virtual currencies) must obtain a BitLicense. To date, the NYSDFS has issued 19 Bitlicenses. Among them includes exchanges such as Coinbase (January 2017), BitFlyer (July 2017), Genesis Global Trading (May 2018) and Bitstamp (April 2019). Solely from the perspective of operation permission, Binance has yet to complete the MSB registration of FinCEN (its partner, BAM Trading, has completed the MSB registration). This means that Binance is not eligible to operate a digital asset exchange in the U.S. FinCEN has the rights to prosecute Binance based on its failure to fulfil the relevant ‘anti-money laundering’ regulatory requirements. Compliance issues relating to online assets With the further development of the digital asset market, ICO has released loads of “digital assets” that have characteristics of a “security” into the trading markets. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed more comprehensive compliance requirements for digital asset exchanges. The core of the requirements is reflected in the restrictions of offering digital assets trading service. In the last two years, the SEC has reiterated on many occasions that digital assets that have characteristics of a security should not be traded on a digital asset exchange In August 2017, when the development of ICO was at its peak, the SEC issued an investor bulletin “Investor Bulletin: Initial Coin Offerings” on its website and published an investigation report of the DAO. It determined that the DAO tokens were considered ‘marketable securities’, stressing that all digital assets considered ‘marketable securities’ would be incorporated into the SEC regulatory system, bound by the U.S. federal securities law. Soon after, the SEC also declared and stressed that “(if) a platform offers trading of digital assets that are securities and operates as an “exchange,” as defined by the federal securities laws, then the platform must register with the SEC as a national securities exchange or be exempt from registration.” On 16 November 2018, the SEC issued a “Statement on Digital Asset Securities Issuance and Trading,” in which the SEC used five real case studies to conduct exemplary penalty rulings on the initial offers and sales of digital asset securities, including those issued in ICOs, relevant cryptocurrency exchanges, investment management tools, ICO platforms and so on. The statement further reiterates that exchanges cannot provide trading services for digital assets that have characteristics of a security. On 3 April 2019, the SEC issued the “Framework for ‘Investment Contract’ Analysis of Digital Assets” to further elucidate the evaluation criteria for determining whether a digital asset is a security and providing guiding opinions on the compliance of the issuance, sales, holding procedures of digital assets. As of now, only a small number of digital assets, such as BTC, ETH, etc. meet the SEC’s requirement of “non-securities assets.” The potentially “compliant” digital assets are less than 20. Early in March 2014, the Inland Revenue Service (IRS) has stated that Bitcoin will be treated as a legal property and will be subject to taxes. In September 2015, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) stated that Bitcoin is a commodity and will be treated as a “property” by the IRS for tax purposes. On 15 June 2018, William Hinman, Director of the Corporate Finance Division of the SEC, said at the Cryptocurrency Summit held in San Francisco that BTC and ETH are not securities. Nevertheless, many ICO tokens fall under the securities category. So far, only BTC and ETH have received approval and recognition of the U.S. regulatory authority as a “non-securities asset.” Since July 2018, the SEC has investigated more than ten types of digital assets, one after another, and ruled that they were securities and had to be incorporated into the SEC regulatory system. It prosecuted and punished those who had contravened the issuance and trading requirements of the securities laws. Although there are still many digital assets that have yet to be characterised as “securities”, it is extremely difficult to be characterised as a “non-securities asset” based on the evaluation criteria announced by the SEC. As the SEC’s spokesperson has reiterated many times, they believe the majority of ICO tokens are securities. Under the stipulated requirements of the SEC, Coinbase, a leading U.S. exchange, has withdrawn a batch of digital assets. The assets withdrawn included digital assets that had been characterised as “securities” as well as those that have high risks of being characterised as “securities.” However, it is worth noting that although the risk to be characterised as “securities” for more than ten types of digital assets, which have not been explicitly required by SEC to be withdrawn, is relatively small, they are not entirely safe. With the further escalation of the SEC’s investigations, they could still be characterised as securities and be held accountable for violating their responsibilities. However, this requires further guidance from the SEC. *Coinbase’s 14 types of digital assets that have yet to be requested for withdrawal Poloniex announced on 16 May that it would stop providing services for nine digital assets, including Ardor (ARDR), Bytecoin (BCN), etc. under the compliance guidelines of the SEC. On 7 June, Bittrex also announced that it would stop providing trading services to U.S. users for 32 digital assets. The action of the SEC on its regulatory guidance was further reinforced apparently. In fact, it is not the first time that these two exchanges have withdrawn digital assets under regulatory requirements. Since the rapid development of digital assets driven by ICO in 2017, Poloniex and Bittrex were once leading exchanges for ICO tokens, providing comprehensive trading services for digital assets. However, after the SEC reiterated its compliance requirements, Poloniex and Bittrex have withdrawn a considerable amount of assets in the past year to meet the compliance requirements. In conclusion, the takeaways that we have got are as follows: Under the existing U.S. regulatory requirements of digital assets, after obtaining the basic entry licences (MSB, MTL), exchanges could either choose the “compliant asset” solution of Coinbase and only list a small number of digital assets that do not have apparent characteristics of a security, and at all times prepare to withdraw any asset later characterised as “securities” by the SECs; or choose to be like OKEx and Huobi and make it clear they would “not provide services to any U.S. users” at the start. Binance has been providing a large number of digital assets that have characteristics of a security to U.S users without a U.S. securities exchange licence, so it has already contravened the SEC regulatory requirements. On top of that, it is also worth noting that the rapid development of Binance has been achieved precisely through the behaviours of “contrary to regulations” and “committing crimes.” Amid the blocking of several pioneering exchanges, such as OKCoin, Huobi, etc. providing services to Chinese users in the Chinese market under new laws from the regulatory authorities, Binance leapfrogged the competition and began to dominate the Chinese market. Similarly, Binance’s rapid growth in the U.S. market is mainly due to its domination of the traffic of digital assets withdrawn by Poloniex and Bittrex. One can say that Binance not only has weak awareness of compliance issues, but it is also indeed “playing with fire” with the U.S. regulators. In April 2018, the New York State Office of Attorney General (OAG) requested 13 digital asset exchanges, including Binance, to prepare for investigations, indicating it would initiate an investigation in relations to company ownership, leadership, operating conditions, service terms, trading volume, relationships with financial institutions, etc. Many exchanges, including Gemini, Bittrex, Poloniex, BitFlyer, Bitfinex, and so on, proactively acknowledged and replied in the first instance upon receipt of the investigation notice. However, Binance had hardly any action. Binance has been illegally operating in the U.S. for almost two years. It has not yet fulfilled the FinCEN and MSB registration requirements. Moreover, it has also neglected the SEC announcements and OAG investigation summons on several occasions. The ultimate announcement of exiting the U.S. market may be due to the tremendous pressure imposed by the U.S. regulators. In fact, the SEC executives have recently stressed that “exchanges of IEO in the U.S. market are facing legal risks and the SEC would soon crack down on these illegal activities” on numerous occasions. These were clear indications of imposing pressure on Binance. Regarding the SEC’s rulings on illegal digital asset exchanges, EtherDelta and investment management platform, Crypto Asset Management, it may not be easy for Binance to “fully exit” from the U.S. market. It may be faced with a hefty penalty. Once there are any compensation claims by the U.S. users for losses incurred in the trading of assets at Binance, it would be dragged into a difficult compensation dilemma. It would undoubtedly be a double blow for Binance that has just been held accountable for the losses incurred in a theft of 7,000 BTC. Coincidentally, Binance was tossed out of Japan because of compliance issues. In March 2018, the Financial Services Agency of Japan officially issued a stern warning to Binance, which was boldly providing services to Japanese users without registering for a digital asset exchange licence in Japan. Binance was forced to relocate to Malta instead. Binance may have to bear hefty penalties arising from challenging the compliance requirements after it had lost important markets due to consecutive compliance issues. The rise of Binance was attributed to its bold and valiant style, grasping the opportunity created in the vacuum period of government regulation, breaking compliance requirements and rapidly dominating the market to obtain user traffic. For a while, it gained considerable advantages in the early, barbaric growth stage of the industry. Nonetheless, under the increasingly comprehensive regulatory compliance system for global digital asset markets, Binance, which has constantly been “evading regulation” and “resisting supervision” would undoubtedly face enormous survival challenges, notwithstanding that it would lose far more than 50 per cent of the market share. https://www.asiacryptotoday.com/playing-with-fire-with-fincen-and-sec-binance-may-face-a-hefty-penalty-again-after-already-losing-50-percent-of-its-trading-business/
Binance Bitcoin Exchange: Bitcoin price fell below the price $10,000 mark as on September 11 as five-figure support for the largest Cryptocurrency finally crumbled. Coin Desk 360 data showed a price drop of Bitcoin against the dollar falls from $10,200 late on Tuesday to $9,900 dollar. During press time the $10,000 dollar mark was acting as a guide rail. By analyzing web traffic of 48 frequently used cryptocurrency exchanges over a six-month period, a crypto researcher has found that leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance, based in Malta, eclipsed Coinbase, based in San Francisco, with the largest number of estimated visitors, and that traffic to the two leading exchanges far outpaced all other exchanges. Mobile app usage was greatest on Korea-based exchanges, where it could be up to three times their web traffic. In less mobile-obsessed nations, the figure could come as low as 50% of the web traffic. API trading accounted for between 20-35% of volume across the majority of exchanges, rising sharply for those operating a transaction mining ... Binance, the world's biggest bitcoin ... Block reports the massive deal is expected to be announced later this week and that CoinMarketCap's ability to drive "a significant amount" of web traffic ... The Block suggests that interest in CoinMarketCap is largely due to the platform’s huge web traffic, sources privy to the alleged deal told the publication. Binance reportedly attracted 113 million visitors over the last 6 months. CoinMarketCap, on the other hand, attracted 207.2 million. That is nearly 80% more traffic than the crypto exchange. Also, the traffic they pull is far larger than all the other crypto exchanges which Larry picked for the analysis. Larry Cermack works as a researcher for the Block, and he published the results ... BitMEX, Kraken, Binance, Bitcoin.com, Blockstream, ... This speaks to the kinds of crime cartels highlighted above, who often use the legitimate traffic on their exchanges or networks as a way of washing their hands of the criminality also taking place. But it also speaks to the digital asset operators who brag about their ‘anonymous’, anti-government protocols and yet will take no ... As a result of this block, the platform could lose one of its biggest markets and even the top trading volume market in April and May 2020. Despite being one of the most popular trading platforms for Russian crypto enthusiasts, LocalBitcoins has also been accused of receiving more than 99% of all criminal funds that have passed through Finnish exchanges. Major Crackdown on Crypto. Meanwhile ...
Cryptocurrency Exchange Binance to Block US Custmomers Bittrex to Follow Crypto News 2019
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