Zilliqa, also known as ZIL, is the native token of a smart contract blockchain by the same name. One of its key features is an innovation called "sharding," which lets multiple nodes validate transactions at the same time.

Zilliqa launched in 2018 to a strong start, hitting highs of $0.2 in May of that year after launching at a price of $0.12. However, then the token sank to around $0.005 by the middle of 2019, and pretty much stayed there until the crypto boom of 2021. Zilliqa hit its all-time high in May of that year, when it traded as much as $0.2563 per ZIL.

As its good fortune faded away, so did ZIL’s price, which fell to $0.04 early the next year. Only a brief spurt to $0.18 in March 2022 provided an exit for long-time investors. Zilliqa trades on leading cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Huobi and Bithumb.

To raise money to build Zilliqa, the developers held a token sale in December 2017, just as bitcoin’s price reached near $20,000. At the time of launch, ZIL traded as an ERC-20 token, but was converted to native ZIL coins after the network launched in June 2019.

The token sales accounted for 30% of the supply. Venture capital firm Anquan Capital (created by Zilliqa’s co-founders) received another 10%, the team was allocated 5%, 12% went to research and 3% was given to supporting agencies. Many of these tokens are subject to vesting periods.

The remaining 40% was held for mining rewards. Zilliqa expects that all tokens will be mined within 10 years. Zilliqa has a maximum supply of 21 billion, a thousand times greater than Bitcoin’s 21 million. Zilliqa's blockchain increases the total supply by about 2% a year.

Zilliqa relies on sharding to hit high speeds and offer cheap transactions. Each shard is like its own mini-blockchain, processing transactions individually. When the network grows, the number of shards increases, speeding up the blockchain.

While Zilliqa is a proof-of-work coin – it combines proof-of-work with a consensus mechanism called practical byzantine fault tolerance – traders can also stake it to earn rewards. Transaction fees cost a fraction of a cent and are stored for future mining rewards.

The number of transactions has steadily risen over time, from about 500,000 in February 2020 to about 1.5 million by April 2022. Almost all of the nodes that verify these transactions are located in the United States.

Zilliqa’s own smart contract language, Scilla, allows for the creation of decentralized applications, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized domain names. It should be noted that Zilliqa is small, and its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem pales in comparison to those of rival blockchains, such as Solana, Avalanche and Ethereum.

Zilliqa was created by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor in computer science at the National University of Singapore. Its CEO is Ben Livshits, and its chief scientific officer is Amrit Kumar.

A governance token called gZIL functions as the network’s governance token.

In June 2019, Zilliqa launched smart contracts on the platform. In January 2020, Zilliqa and Binance partnered with IncognitoChain to provide anonymous ZIL transactions. The transactions take place on a sidechain. In 2022, Zilliqa published standards for ZRC-7, an NFT token for metaverse content creators.