Zilliqa (ZIL)
Zilliqa (ZIL) in Summary
Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain.
Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet.
The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.
Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Saxena and several students in the School of Computing published a paper in 2016 that outlined how a sharding-focused blockchain could improve network efficiency and speed.
Around the same time, Saxena co-founded Anquan Capital alongside Max Kantelia, a lifelong finance and tech 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 previously worked as research fellows at the NUS School of Computing.