Cryptopedia - Zilliqa

## What Is Zilliqa (ZIL)? Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform is home to many decentralized applications, and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming. Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet [went live](https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-testnet-v1-0-release-codename-red-prawn-27974ca46ecb) in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform [launched](https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-mainnet-the-launch-and-beyond-4cd7e113369f) its mainnet. The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.