Zilliqa Lowers Funding Cap Despite Heavy Demand from Investors

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Zilliqa, an anticipated high-throughput ‘sharding’ Blockchain platform announced yesterday evening on their Slack and Telegram channels that the company would be reducing their fundraising amount from $30 million to $20 million in their upcoming token generation event, scheduled for early January.  This comes just one week after the project announced a strategic partnership with FBG Capital and made several high profile media appearances, including last week’s episode of Epicenter.

Last week, Zilliqa stated on their social media channels that they had received overwhelming interest in their ongoing pre-sale. Today, the company announced they would be lowering the hardcap of their upcoming token generation event to $20 million from $30 million and that more details would be announced shortly.

The company said in a statement:

“After taking into consideration feedback from our advisors, early adopters, and the community, we have decided to revise our planned hard cap closer to USD 20m.  With strong community support we are confident we can execute our R&D plans to ensure the rapid adoption of Zilliqa.”

The Zilliqa Blockchain platform is based off of the concept of ‘sharding’ that the a team at the National University of Singapore proposed in a paper back in 2015, but hasn’t yet been deployed as an open and permission-less Blockchain at scale until now.  The team led by Dr Xinshu Dong continued its work at Anquan, a spinoff of National University of Singapore, where Prof. Prateek Saxena is a co-founder. The idea is to automatically split up a large network of machines processing transactions into parallel sub-committees or “shards”. Each shard processes its own microblock in parallel with other shards, and resulting micro-blocks are merged into one final one.

For their smart contracts, Zilliqa proposes a new ‘scalability-driven’ smart contract language that is not Turing-complete, but rather scales much better for a multitude of applications that range from automated auctions, digital advertising to shared economy. The smart contract language in Zilliqa follows a dataflow programming style, where the program can be seen as a directed graph, and nodes in the graph represent computations, while arcs represent input/output.

Last month, the company announced that they had reached a breakthrough of 2,488 transactions per second on an internal testnet of Amazon AWS instances.  Bitcoin and Ethereum currently process less than 10 transactions per second.  For perspective, with the current scaling rate, if Zilliqa were fully functional on the same number of nodes as Ethereum (~22,000) their transaction rate would be over 15,000 TX/s, nearly double the average of VISA, the largest electronic payment network in the world.

Zilliqa has stated that they will be announcing details soon about their upcoming token generation event with KYC / AML checks beginning in early December.

Learn more at www.zilliqa.com