Zilliqa Aims To Tackle Slow Crypto Speeds

If anything showed up the fragility of the Ethereum blockchain it was CryptoKitties. The fun, collectible game congested the blockchain so badly that transactions were taking several hours to process and costs skyrocketed for the ‘birthing fee’ of the kitties from 0.002 ETH to 0.015 ETH.

For all the promise of blockchain, one of the most crippling aspects is the speed of transactions. Currently, roughly a maximum of 10 transactions is possible every second across Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchains. When compared with corporate real-life examples of Visa, which typically handles 7,000 in the same period, it is a long way off commercial application.

There are many teams of programmers looking at this problem with Singapore-based Zilliqa an early pioneer.

Headed up by Xinshu Dong, Zilliqa is looking at sharding as a technology to improve the speeds. Dong hails from the National University of Singapore where he did his PhD in computer science, most notably looking at cyber security in complex software systems.

After university, Dong joined Anquan Capital Pte Ltd, which was co-founded by a professor of his, Prateek Saxena, in 2015, together with Max Kantelia and Juzar Motiwalla.

“We originally worked on a bond trading project where technology was antiquated and bonds very illiquid.’ says Dong. “We quickly could see the applicability of blockchain but such applicability was tempered with the slow speeds of existing blockchains.”