Zilliqa zil

Zilliqa is a public blockchain project whose architecture was designed to scale throughput through sharding and parallel transaction processing. Its original stack uses a directory-service committee to assign nodes to shards, PBFT-style consensus with EC-Schnorr multisignatures, and Scilla smart contracts; ZIL is native fee/staking token. Zilliqa 2.0 adds a fast-finality architecture with native EVM while retaining Scilla. The current official site frames the broader direction as a mediation layer for institutional finance: credential/compliance checks run before settlement on any chain or rail, rather than being reconciled afterward.

Legacy design targets blockchain congestion and low throughput by avoiding every node redundantly processing all work; sharding allows independent transaction groups to process in parallel while preserving decentralization/security. Current direction targets institutional onchain settlement risk: compliance and permission checks traditionally happen after settlement, creating reconciliation/exposure; Zilliqa aims to gate state transitions before anything settles.

Nodes perform PoW to establish identities and a DS committee assigns participants to shards. Transactions are assigned by sender address, each shard creates microblocks, and DS committee aggregates them into final blocks. Consensus is PBFT-derived, with two rounds of EC-Schnorr multisignatures and signer bitmaps. Scilla provides a restrictive/dataflow smart-contract model; Zilliqa 2.0 also provides native EVM execution. The current mediation concept adds identity-bound policy and verifiable credential checks before state transition, with fees per validation request.