Aspiring Ethereum replacement Zilliqa has launched smart contract functionality on its blockchain platform.
Zilliqa is one of a handful of blockchain platforms seeking to address shortcomings in the sector. Zilliqa using sharding to speed up its transactional rate – a priority for many potential blockchain users. Zilliqa has created its own language – Scilla – for developers to leverage the blockchain platform. A Scilla specific gateway for developers is available here.
The smart contract announcement is “yet another milestone” for the Singapore based firm. Zilliqa recently opened up an office in London to help boost awareness and utilization.
In an email, Zilliqa said smart contracts “signifies a pivotal step forward in realizing innovations on existing blockchain infrastructures in the industry today.”
“With this launch, developers will now be able to write and deploy smart contracts on the Zilliqa blockchain with our secure-by-design, functional smart contract language, Scilla. With this, we’ve come to realize our vision of a better smart contract language, one built with greater security guarantees at the language level.”
The Zilliqa mainnet was released on January 31, 2019.
Core features of Zilliqa smart contracts are as follows:
- Amenable to formal verification: Scilla is designed to achieve both expressivity and tractability at the same time, while enabling formal reasoning about contract behavior.
- Static analyzers suite: The language comes with a suite of static analyzers that check for potential bugs and issues in the contract. These are very helpful in detecting bugs in contracts before they go live.
- Clean separation: The language is designed in a way that different operational components such as computation and communication (with other contracts) are handled in a very clean manner hence eliminating any complex interleaving. This can prevent incidents like the DAO and the Parity hacks.
- Safe standard libraries: Scilla comes equipped with a suite of standard libraries such as a library that performs arithmetic operations in a safe manner and hence eliminating the need to rely on external libraries such as OpenZeppelin.
Zilliqa stated that 2019 will be the “year of realization.”
“… we’ve shown that there is more to the industry than a “blockchain for the sake of blockchain” approach to implementation. We’re proud to reflect on our progress to date and are excited for the many other developments to come,” said the company.
Zilliqa reported that there is an “exciting new partnership in the pipeline,” as the company will soon be entering the payments sector.
