14 FEB 2018

Cryptocue Spotlight: :ZILLIQA (ZIL)

Next Generation High Throughput Blockchain Platform

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ZILLIQA is a new blockchain platform capable of processing thousands of transactions per
second with sharding built into it. With sharding, ZILLIQA has the potential to match
throughput benchmarks set by traditional payment methods (such as VISA and Master-
Card).
Even more importantly, ZILLIQA’s transaction throughput increases (roughly) linearly with
its network size — a feature missing in all popular blockchains.
In addition, The ICO took place from December 27th, 2017 to January 10th, 2018 and
Huobi.pro was the first official exchange where ZIL tokens were released on February 8th
2018.

The problem with other blockchains: Contrast.

Scalability is arguably the most pressing problem faced by blockchains today. Popular
blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum can only handle around 7 to 15 transactions per
second, which are a far cry from the 2,000 transactions per second that payment systems
like Visa handle on average.

Furthermore, decentralized applications (dApps) that run on blockchains are pushing the
underlying protocols to their limit at a point where, a single popular dApp (e.g.,
CryptoKitties) can clog the entire network. There are a few blockchain projects out there
today, that scale significantly better than Ethereum, although, while sacrificing either
security or decentralization.

In contrast, Stellar Lumens (XLM) and Ripple (XRP) are centralized to a high degree.
Transactions are going to fewer, centralized nodes to increase their speed. Subsequently,
IOTA and Raiblocks are running on a DAG-Concept.
To illustrate, A Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) of transactions is a concept where each
transaction “confirms” one or more previous transactions. The confirmation security of a
transaction is measured in accumulated amount of proof-of-work referencing the
transaction.
This approach is fairly untested and it is far from proven that this will work in a high
throughput environment.

IOTA, for example, is not a fully open source and their network was unavailable for 2 weeks
back in November 2017. This never happened to a public blockchain like Bitcoin or
Ethereum before. On the other hand, Raiblocks is facing difficulties with forking their micro
blockchains, which are created with every transaction.
Arguably, the DAG-concept approach is not the solution to scaling, and neither are
centralized blockchains with fewer nodes, as they are vulnerable to dDOS attacks.

How does ZILLIQA solves this problem?

One of the most advocated solutions to the scalability problem is the idea of sharding. In
this spotlight, we present ZILLIQA — the first permissionless blockchain with sharding built
into it.

Sharding in ZILLIQA follows a divide and conquer approach, where the network gets
divided into smaller groups each capable of processing transactions in parallel.
The process entails automatic splitting of a network of nodes into parallel chains called
shards. Each shard processes a small amount of all transactions in conjunction with other
shards, resulting in a microblock from each shard. These microblocks are then merged into
one complete block which is added to the blockchain. Truly, this makes ZILLIQA linearly
scalable.

In the most recent trial run, ZILLIQA demonstrated a capacity of 2,488 transactions per
second with 3,600 nodes. It uses the Proof of Work protocol for establishing mining
identities and the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant (pBFT) consensus protocol, which
finalizes and confirms transactions.

To sum up, ZILLIQA is an exceptional project in the crypto space. An all-star team of
computer science PhD’s, a scientifically correct whitepaper and first-mover status are all
signs of a bright future for this protocol.
Crowdsale Stats:

Crowdsale Hard Cap: $22 million

Total Supply (once main net launches in Q2 2018): 21 billion ZIL

Token Distribution: 30% to crowdsale contributors, 40% to miners, 30% to project for
research and development, bounty programs, team allocation

Price per Token: 116,060 ZIL per 1 ETH

Maximum Market Cap (at crowdsale price): US$73 million

Bonus Structure: 10-15% presale bonus for early contributors

Recent Stats:

Circulating Supply: 6,511,228,178 ZIL

Total Supply: 12,600,000,000 ZIL

Market cap as of this writing: $329,493,540 (1 ZIL = $0.05)

Most of the 6.5 billion tokens have been given to strategic partners and are mostly vested
for 3 years.
When their main net goes live in Q2 2018, their token will be mineable through PoW with
GPUs, and the total supply will increase to 21 billion ZIL which will be mined over a ten year
timeframe.

Here at Cryptocue, we believe there are good profits to be made with this token if held
over a medium term until Q2 2018. It could 17 fold to a market cap of $6-7 billion.
We will sell our positions before mining starts, as price will most likely decrease due to the
low initial mining difficulty, which will cause an initial inflationary spiral.

Note: This token was “born” in a bear market and is therefore relatively off the radar.

Website: https://www.zilliqa.com/
White Paper: https://docs.zilliqa.com/whitepaper.pdf
Position Paper: https://docs.zilliqa.com/positionpaper.pdf

Happy trading,

The CryptoCue Team