Zilliqa blockchain platform launches smart contracts

Blockchain platform Zilliqa has announced the launch of smart contracts on its platform, President and chief scientific officer Amrit Kumar told TokenPost in an email.

The launch will enable developers to write and deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain with its functional smart contract language, Scilla.

“I am excited to announce the launch of smart contracts on the Zilliqa platform. Long awaited by many members of our community, today signifies a pivotal step forward in realising innovations on existing blockchain infrastructures in the industry today,” Kumar said.

“With this, we’ve come to realise our vision of a better smart contract language, one built with greater security guarantees at the language level.”

He further listed the core features of Zilliqa smart contracts. This includes amenability to formal verification. Kumar explained that Scilla has been designed to achieve both expressivity and tractability simultaneously while enabling formal reasoning about contract behavior.

Secondly, the language comes with a suite of static analyzers which checks for potential bugs and issues in the contract.

Thirdly, Scilla, by design, handles different operational components such as computation and communication (with other contracts) in a clean manner, eliminating complex interleaving. This feature can help prevent incidents like the DAO and the Parity hacks, Kumar said.

Lastly, the language comes equipped with a suite of standard libraries. For instance, it has a library that performs arithmetic operations in a safe manner and hence eliminates the need to rely on external libraries such as OpenZeppelin.

Zilliqa was recently in news for Project Proton, an alliance of WPP company Mindshare, Mediamath, Rubicon, Integral Ad Science, and Underscore CLT, which successfully ran its first live campaign enabled by Zilliqa smart contracts for PepsiCo. The trial delivered “up to 28% increased efficiency in terms of costs for viewable impressions, in running the campaign through smart contracts, versus one without.”

Organizations across sectors are increasingly tapping Zilliqa’s platform. This includes HG Exchange, a member-driven exchange in Southeast Asia, which provides access to high-growth startups and decacorns such as Uber, Grab, and SpaceX through privately-held shares and security tokens. Digital entertainment platform Bolt will be leveraging Zilliqa’s smart contract capabilities to streamline the content platform, video analytics, and payment engine, Kumar said.

“With an exciting new partnership in the pipeline, Zilliqa will soon be entering the payments landscape to drive efficiencies in cost, transparency, and security for both clients and end users,” he added.

Kumar said that Zilliqa will continue to explore areas such as more efficient smart contract sharding, formal verification, and zk-SNARKs, going forward.

“As we approach Zilliqa’s second birthday, we hope that you will join us in celebrating our many achievements over the past two years. With all of the industry-wide developments, regulatory progress, and exciting new enterprise partnerships taking place, we look forward to being part of a future where blockchain will be an essential aspect of our everyday lives,” he concluded.