Zilliqa, a blockchain platform for hosting decentralized applications, has announced that it is postponing its MainNet launch until January 2019.
What is MainNet? When new cryptocurrencies are introduced, they take some time to become fully functional projects. The interim period between the introduction to a proper launch is known as a ‘TestNet’. Once the TestNet period ends, the MainNet period begins - this is where the currency and the platform start delivering upon the promises that they have made.
Amrit Kumar, Head of Research, Zilliqa said the company will need more time to ensure that the code gets properly tested by the core team, the community, and auditing firms. They will also be leveraging the additional time to: Conduct thorough security audits, Prepare for and execute the token swap, Integrate with wallets, Develop toolchains, and Bring more DApps (Decentralized Applications) onboard.
Kumar added that the team is committed to building a secure, scalable and decentralized blockchain platform. Amongst all existing solutions to achieve scalabilities such as off-chain, sidechains, and others, the company believes that sharding is a very promising one towards linear scalability and they have made sharding a reality by releasing the first TestNet network that is sharded.
The company said it has also finalized the design to run smart contracts on a sharded architecture which will be incorporated in the first production release of Zilliqa. This design ensures that transactions involving smart contracts can be processed in parallel across shards and the directory service committee. The entailed protocol will have no restrictions on the type of Scilla smart contracts that can be run.
Earlier this year, in the months of May and June, there were 6 MainNet launches - EOS, Ontology, Oyster Pearls, VeChain Thor, Tron, and NULS.