Zilliqa the next blockchain technology ?

What is Zilliqa ?

Zilliqa is a new blockchain platform that is designed to scale in an open, permission-less distributed network securely. The core feature that makes Zilliqa scalable is sharding — dividing the network into several smaller component networks (called shards) capable of processing transactions in parallel.

What is Sharding Technology ?

A database shard is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Each individual partition is referred to as a shard or database shard. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load.

Some data within a database remains present in all shards, but some appears only in a single shard. Each shard (or server) acts as the single source for this subset of data.

How this can help blockchain ? 

Sharding is a concept that’s widely used in databases, to make them more efficient. A shard is a horizontal portion of a database, with each shard stored in a separate server instance. This spreads the load and makes the database more efficient.

In case of the blockchain, each node will have only a part of the data on the blockchain, and not the entire information, when sharding is implemented. Nodes that maintain a shard maintain information only on that shard in a shared manner, so within a shard, the decentralization is still maintained. However, each node doesn’t load the information on the entire blockchain, thus helping in scalability.

As you can see by now, POW consensus algorithm can’t be used in conjunction with sharding, for, after all, how can all the participating nodes be involved in transaction validation where the nodes have information for only one shard, i.e. the one it belongs to? Blockchains that implement sharding use proof of stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.

PoS algorithm has specific, designated nodes that take transaction validation responsibility. These nodes are called ‘stakers’, for, they stake some of their crypto tokens for transaction validation. Upon successfully validating a transaction, the staker may earn part or whole of the transaction fees. The more crypto token a staker stakes for transaction validation purpose, and the longer the duration of the stake, the higher is the number of transactions the node gets to validate. PoS algorithm has some advantages over POW, and these are:

• Only designated nodes validate the transaction, and not the entire network;
• Since there’s no mining, expensive special-purpose hardware isn’t needed, besides the energy requirements are lower;
• It’s easy to identify validators with high loyalty, simply pick the ones who have staked a higher number of crypto tokens and a longer duration.
  A blockchain that implements sharding identifies stakers in each shard, who take the transaction validation responsibility. Since transaction validation is being done by loyal stakers, security of the blockchain is still very high.