Zilliqa (ZIL) is an independent Layer-1 blockchain that uses network sharding to process transactions in parallel. ZIL is the network's native coin, used for gas fees, staking, and historically mining rewards.
The mainnet gained EVM compatibility on April 25, 2023 (v9.0.0), allowing Solidity smart contracts to deploy alongside the network's native Scilla contracts. ZIL originally launched in 2017-2018 as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum before holders swapped it 1:1 into native coins when the Zilliqa mainnet launched.
Zilliqa's differentiation lies in its sharding architecture, which splits network processing across parallel shards to scale transaction throughput, combined with support for two smart-contract environments.
Native Scilla contracts, designed for formal verification and security, run alongside standard Solidity contracts enabled by the April 2023 EVM upgrade. This dual-language approach lets developers choose between Scilla's safety-oriented design and the broader Ethereum tooling ecosystem when building on the network.
ZIL is primarily a utility coin rather than a governance token. Holders use it to pay gas fees for both Scilla and Solidity smart-contract transactions on the network.
Under Zilliqa's Proof-of-Stake model, validators stake ZIL to secure the network, while a permissionless delegated-staking mechanism lets other holders delegate ZIL to validators and earn a proportional share of staking rewards. ZIL was also historically used as a mining reward under the network's earlier hybrid consensus model.
Max supply is capped at 21,000,000,000 ZIL; circulating supply is approximately 20.12 billion ZIL (about 96% of the cap) as of 2026-09-03.
New ZIL is issued as Proof-of-Stake staking rewards, with reward rates adjustable through governance; emission narrows as circulating supply nears the fixed 21 billion cap.
Zilliqa's ZIL token launched through a public token sale in 2017 that concluded around January 4, 2018, raising approximately $20 million at an ICO price of roughly $0.006 per ZIL.
ZIL was initially issued as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum; holders later swapped it 1:1 for native coins once the Zilliqa mainnet launched. Before the public sale, the team had generated 60% of total supply internally, split among Anquan Capital, Zilliqa Research, and team allocations.
Zilliqa runs its own independent Layer-1 blockchain rather than being deployed as a token on another chain. Under the Zilliqa 2.0 upgrade, consensus moved from a hybrid Proof-of-Work/practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) sharding model to a Proof-of-Stake model using a Pipelined Fast-HotStuff consensus algorithm.
Validators must stake a minimum of 10 million ZIL to participate, and a permissionless delegated-Proof-of-Stake mechanism lets other ZIL holders delegate stake to validators and share in rewards. The network also supports EVM-compatible Solidity contracts alongside native Scilla contracts.
Zilliqa was conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore, based on his academic research into blockchain sharding. He co-founded Anquan Capital alongside Max Kantelia and Juzar Motiwalla, former president of the Singapore Computer Society.
Xinshu Dong served as CEO of Zilliqa Research, Yaoqi Jia as CTO, and Amrit Kumar as Chief Scientific Officer.
Zilliqa is maintained and developed by Zilliqa Research Pte. Ltd., a company incorporated in Singapore.
Zilliqa Research grew out of Anquan Capital, a Singapore-headquartered blockchain and software investment and R&D firm launched in 2015 by the same founding group, with a stated mission of building hard-tech companies from academic research in blockchain scalability and trusted computing. Zilliqa is headquartered in Singapore.
Zilliqa describes adjustments to network parameters, particularly staking-reward rates that balance validator incentives against long-term supply growth, as subject to decentralized governance and community voting.
Validators and delegators participate in securing the network through staking rather than through a separately defined governance token.
Zilliqa's roadmap centers on completing the Zilliqa 2.0 upgrade, which moves the network from hybrid Proof-of-Work/pBFT sharding to a Proof-of-Stake model using Pipelined Fast-HotStuff consensus.
The upgrade was tested through testnet phases code-named Aventurine, with a full mainnet release code-named Agate targeted for Q1 2025 according to the project's own roadmap communications.
Hacken has conducted at least one security audit of Zilliqa, which reportedly identified 13 findings; no CertiK audit of Zilliqa has been confirmed.
In November 2025, Zilliqa disclosed a cold-wallet security breach at an exchange partner that triggered a network-wide ZIL deposit and withdrawal freeze, with several exchanges adding ZIL to risk-warning lists. Separately, researchers disclosed a 7-year-old Ledger hardware-wallet bug affecting Zilliqa's native Schnorr-signature transactions, where roughly five signatures from one private key could allow key reconstruction; Zilliqa suspended native (non-EVM) transactions as a precaution.