Episode 59: Zilliqa Capital (ZIL) , a conversation with the founders

MikoBits Blockchain NFT and DeFi show

Why did you start Zilliqa?

So Well, well, the main reason why we started Zilliqa was based on this idea of sharding. Because he felt that this was an idea that we started as a first academic paper. So that was the first paper that was published in the academic literature that basically showed two people that you could actually apply this idea of sharding in the public blockchain. So until then, it was not known or it was not well formally studied how to do that in practice. So one, one very key sort of idea that we started now with something that many people are following. Or you know, whether it be I won't say Ethereum ICO followed us. But definitely, we started that chain reaction where now, several teams that are actually pursuing that idea of sharding, may different forms and shapes, some are obviously trying to improve on what we have done. So that's, that's something that hopefully, obviously gives us an advantage on what we started with. The second area that we tried to focus on was around smart contract safety is something again, that many people are doing but in our approach has been outside perimeter, the first or second one, in that sense, where we felt that the language, smart contract language, the way it was designed, specially solidity was sort of designed with, you know, developer features in mind, not so much on security aspects of it. And what ended up happening was that it became so loose or became so open, for people to use that it became very difficult to make sure that any formal guarantees could be, could come off. And of course, you know, it's not impossible, but it's very, very difficult. And if you change the language, or if you restrict the language in some way, it becomes much easier. So basically, what we have learned so far is that you basically have a trade-off between how expressive a language can be and how auditable that language could be. So how easy it is to reason about the correctness and safety of that contract. And that's it for today if you look at a recent survey made by I think sorority team, one of the most hated, I mean, it's one of the most most loved aspects as well, is that 30 is most one of the most hated aspect of it is that it's very close to JavaScript. Even though, even though it definitely makes people who actually develop web applications, so they like it much easier. And that's again, because of some of the guarantees that the language doesn't provide. So he also felt that back then we were when we were building silicon, developing silica, he felt that there is an opportunity to actually build a safer language that could be easy to use, at the same time, be able to provide stronger guarantees. And you know, after that, you know, we saw Viper coming in the Ethereum ecosystem, we saw, I think, recently, a language called Fey coming. I think, after that, I think Cardano started to work on their own language called Plutus algorrand developed their own language. So in a way that created a sort of chain reaction where people felt that this, this is an area of development, that people need to focus on to make language better because, in the end, many of these contracts actually handle hundreds of million dollars worth of assets, but billions of dollars worth of assets. And you want to make sure that it's safe to hold that. So these are two sort of key areas, which we started with, again, that have created a lot of different tentacles. One, me I would claim that you know, we have changed our impact on other people we but we have seen, that other people have actually started to work on symbolizes was that I feel that there's some contribution to the blockchain ecosystem.