Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second.
It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution.
Development work began in June 2017 and the mainnet was officially launched in June 2019. Ziliqa has come a long way from an average of 900 blocks produced in a day in 2019 to more than 2,500 blocks a day currently.
Zilliqa has 192 projects in its ecosystem, with over 60,500 active users and ~5,500,000 addresses.
The Zilliqa team
Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Saxena and a few students in the School of Computing published a paper in 2016 that outlined how a sharding-focused blockchain can improve network efficiency and speed.
At the same time, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital together with Max Kantelia, a fintech entrepreneur, and Juzar Motiwalla, former president of the Singapore Computer Society.
The company incorporated Zilliqa Research in June 2017 to develop the Zilliqa network, bringing on Dong Xinshu as its CEO, Yaoqi Jia as its Chief Technology Officer and Amrit Kumar as its Chief Scientific Officer. All three have previously worked as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.
What is ZIL?
ZIL is the native token for the Zilliqa blockchain built to enable and scale decentralised apps, from financial services to NFT marketplaces.
With ZIL, you can engage with every dApp and platform service built on the Zilliqa blockchain.
ZIL can also be used to pay for products and services, buy and sell NFTs, and more.
Price of ZIL
In the past 7 days, ZIL has shot up 131% as a result of the most recent announcement. On 26 March itself, ZIL doubled in price closing at US$0.096.
Why did ZIL pump
On 23 March, Ziliqa announced that Metapolis is set to launch publicly with a physical event on 2 April in Miami.
This is unlike any previous metaverse announcement.
Zilliqa has chosen to partner with Agora, a global talent awards app. Through this partnership, creators will be able to upload content to the Agora app and have their work added to the Metapolis metaverse through community voting.
What is Metapolis
Metapolis is the first metaverse-as-a-service (MaaS) platform built on unreal engine, unity and Nvidia Omniverse.
It is highly scalable and affordable as it uses less energy as compared to other blockchains making it more environmentally friendly.
Through Metapolis, brands and clients are able to create digital locations that suit their needs.
Metapolis has already built multiple cities for clients, including luxury brands and top esports organisations. Users have the ability to move to and from cities within Metapolis in an interoperable metaverse.
Highlights of Metapolis
- Built for interoperability: teleportation between Metapolis cities ensures a well connected metaverse with no digital boundaries.
- Advanced gaming engines: ensures that every location is visually engaging and fully operational.
- Prioritization of user safety: Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and policies establishing tight security.
Closing thoughts
Metapolis is no doubt bullish news for Ziliqa given that it is the first MaaS platform. This is evident as the price of ZIL has skyrocketed a whopping 163% in just 36 hours.
However, could this just be a ‘buy the rumour, sell the news’ event? Do you think we will see a big dump in ZIL’s price after the 2nd of April when the event goes live?
Personally, I believe that the price of ZIL will be affected by how Metapolis can compete with the likes of The Sandbox or Decentraland in the long run.
[Editor’s Note: This article does not represent financial advice. Please do your own research before investing.]
Featured Image Credit: Ziliqa
Also Read: The Metaverse: What Exactly Is It, And Are Metaverse Tokens A Good Buy For 2022?
