Calling All Zilliqa Gurus! — Infographic Contest
Dear all community supporters, we’re seeking the most informative and creative infographics on the strengths, features, and offerings of Zilliqa as a next-generation high-throughput blockchain platform!

Criteria:
- Infographic must fit into one page
- Feel free to utilize all materials currently available on Zilliqa
- Creativity is strongly encouraged!

Suggested topics (not limited to only these):
- Comparison of Zilliqa’s technology and features (how they are desirable in supporting dApps) vs other public blockchains
- Explaining the technology of Zilliqa, such as network sharding, PBFT, or Schnorr multi-signature
- Illustrating use cases that can be enabled by Zilliqa which would otherwise be less feasible, efficient, or secure using other public blockchains
- Illustrating use cases that will be significantly benefited by the secure-by-design smart contract language Scilla

Judging criteria:
- 75% Content accuracy, clarity & creativity
- 25% Visual appeal
- Community will vote for the 8 finalists, and the Zilliqa team will decide the final ranking; additional details on the selection process will be announced later

Deadline for submissions: 25 March 2018 (12noon UTC+8)

How to submit: Tweet your submission on Twitter with hashtag #zilliqacontest and tag @zilliqa. Feel free to include additional hashtags to your submission as well, be it #sharding or #scilla, etc.

Prizes:
First prize: 1 winner
- Round trip ticket to Singapore, in-person meeting and dinner with the Zilliqa team
- 200,000 ZILs
Second prize: 2 winners
- 50,000 ZILs each
Third prize: 5 winners
- 15,000 ZILs each

Questions? Please email contests@zilliqa.com

Additional resource:
- Zilliqa logo: https://docs.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-logo.png

Disclaimers:
- We reserve the full right in deciding the selection process and final awards
- Awards of ZILs are subject to KYC and jurisdiction constraints. We reserve the right to award the winners in corresponding USD or ETH under certain circumstances.

https://blog.zilliqa.com/calling-all-zilliqa-gurus-infographic-contest-7699a1dbb076

Dear all community members, congratulations to all of us on Binance announcing to list us! This is a great testimony of achieving success together as a community. We would like to thank everyone again for your support to Zilliqa and we will do great things together going forward!

https://support.binance.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001411811-Binance-Lists-Round-6-Community-Coin-Winner-Zilliqa-ZIL-

Dear community members,

We are honoured to announce two new members of our advisory team who are both experts in smart contracts and programming languages: Ilya Sergey and Evan Cheng. Ilya (distinguished researcher in programming languages) and Evan (ACM Software System Award recipient of LLVM) will work alongside members of Zilliqa on proof-carrying and sharding-friendly smart contract design, as well as efficient and secure virtual machine design at Zilliqa.

Dr. Ilya Sergey is currently Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and is a distinguished researcher in the area of programming languages, program analysis, and formal verification. He has already worked alongside members of the Zilliqa team on numerous projects, including Scilla, a new proof-carrying smart contract language that solves many of the security issues of existing smart contract programming languages. He co-authored the Scilla whitepaper alongside Amrit and Zilliqa advisor Aquinas Hobor and has appeared in the media recently with Amrit talking about the project.

Evan Cheng is the ACM Software System Award winner for his contribution to LLVM (2012) and is currently an Engineering Director at Facebook, where he oversees development of programming languages, runtimes, and compilers. He is a veteran in the broad field of programming languages, Evan’s extensive practical experience in building the infrastructure, toolchain, and applications for different programming languages will add significant strength to the Zilliqa team.
https://blog.zilliqa.com/welcoming-ilya-sergey-and-evan-cheng-as-advisors-to-zilliqa-e205dad5db30

Dear All, we are happy to announce that ZILs are now available on KuCoin. Supported trading pairs include ZIL/BTC and ZIL/ETH.

https://news.kucoin.com/en/zilliqazil-gets-listed-on-kucoin/

Dear community members,
Our amazing team at Zilliqa continues to grow. We are very pleased to announce that En Hui Ong is joining our team as Head of Business Development.

En Hui is instantly a great fit for our team and we are very glad that she decided to leave the world of finance at JPMorgan to build the ecosystem for the blockchain of the future at Zilliqa.
https://blog.zilliqa.com/welcoming-en-hui-ong-as-head-of-business-development-7b4d2013a72

Dear community members,
1) We have an upcoming meetup at Beijing on Mar 14 (Wed). Do check this poster for more information. Please note that this meetup will be be presented in Mandarin.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/780/1*38YKKpWsR4XstF1oeI8oLw.jpeg

2) Yaoqi Jia, our Head of Technology, will be speaking at “Everyone is talking about Blockchain 2018” at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on Mar 15 (Thur).
Time: 6.30PM
Nanyang Technological University
The Hive, Tutorial Room 47, Level 2
52 Nanyang Avenue
Singapore 639816

Hello community members, we are very excited to announce our Europe tour.

1. Meetup in London 23 Mar 2018 (Friday), 6.30-9.00pm
Location: Lucas Lecture Theatre, Strand Campus, King’s College London, WC2R 2LS
Speaker: Amrit
Topic: Developer deep dive on Sharding and Scilla (the smart contract language that Zilliqa will be implementing)
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/developer-deep-dive-on-sharding-and-scilla-smart-contracts-by-zilliqa-tickets-43834052832

2. Meetup in Berlin 24 Mar 2018 (Saturday), 3.30 PM
Location: Cryptotank, Markgrafenstr. 11, Berlin
Speaker: Armit (Zilliqa) and David Li (Trinity)
Topic: Zilliqa and Trinity: How to scale a blockchain! A conversation on different approaches.
https://www.meetup.com/cryptotank/events/248741697/
https://docs.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-trinity-berlin-2018.png

3. Meetup in Amsterdam 26 Mar 2018 (Monday), 6.30-9.00pm
Location: GoDataDriven, Wibautstraat 202, Amsterdam
Speaker: Amrit
Topic: Sharding and Scilla (the smart contract language that Zilliqa will be implementing)
https://www.meetup.com/Blockchain-in-Business/events/248570492/

Dear all, we have just published project update #4 at https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-update-4-march-16-1f9c799b3af4.

We have updates on the recently concluded trip to Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei, where we did several meetups and campus outreach events. The next leg of our outreach program will be Europe, where we have upcoming events in Amsterdam, Berlin and London. Do join us if you are around.

Our team is rapidly expanding with the addition of En Hui as the Head of Business Development. Also with our new advisors Dr. Ilya Sergey and Evan Cheng, we will have an expert guidance on smart contract development and formal verification.

Last but not the least as we are closing in on the testnet release, we have updates to share on our wallet and its integration with the testnet. Do give the blog a read and let us know your thoughts.

Hi All, we are happy to share 2 articles with all of you. The first article in TechinAsia explains sharding
https://www.techinasia.com/biggest-problem-blockchain-company-solving

The second in Bitcoin Magazine by @Yaoqi Jia covers the differences between network/transaction sharding and state sharding
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-many-faces-sharding-blockchain-scalability/

On a separate note, the deadline for the Zilliqa Infographic Contest is 25 March 2018 so keep your entries coming! Submissions are accepted by tweeting #zilliqacontest on Twitter

Dear All, thank you for your amazing submissions. We have come to the deadline for entries to #zilliqacontest For all that have submitted,please check that your entry has been retweeted by @Zilliqa If not, kindly tweet to @enhuiong. We will be announcing how the community can vote for all these infographics in the coming week. Stay tuned!

Dear All,
Thank you for your infographic submissions to #zilliqacontest. We have received a grand total of 143 submissions! Due to the high standards of entries received, we are increasing the number of finalists to 15! We have also noted the community’s feedback and have decided to implement the following. The 15 finalists will be chosen in the following manner
1) 5 finalists will be chosen by the community via Retweet counts. @SaibaKataruka ‘s Twitter account has a list of all entries received. Please retweet the infographic of your choice to vote. This will be carried out over a 24h window from 27 March 2018 Singapore time (UTC+8) 17:00hours to 28 March 2018 Singapore time (UTC+8) 17:00hours
2) 10 finalists will be chosen by the Zilliqa team and experts from our partner Mindshare. This is to ensure that good infographics will not be left out in the process.
The final ranking of the 15 finalists will be done in conjunction with Mindshare. Stay tuned.

Dear community members,

We recently concluded our trip to Europe where we had some great conversations with the local community in London, Berlin and Amsterdam. We thank you for coming over to our meetups. In case you couldn’t join us or if you are still new to the project, a recording of our talk at the Amsterdam meetup is now available: https://youtu.be/TfhWF2fIUNQ

As for the infographic contest, we would like to thank the community for their participation in the community voting. This is to announce that the community voting is now closed. Five entries will be chosen through it; but there will be ten more shortlisted entries based on the merit of the work, judged by the team. Please stay tuned for the next announcement regarding the shortlisted entries.

Cheers!

Dear community members,

We are happy to share with you testnet v1.0 codenamed Red Prawn. This version of the testnet will allow users to send transactions through our web wallet to the network (https://wallet.zilliqa.com). Users can also use our block explorer (https://explorer.zilliqa.com) to check the status of their transactions and other network and protocol parameters such as previously proposed blocks, transactions accepted by the network, and the transaction throughput among others. For concrete steps to use the wallet and the explorer, please refer to the tutorial video: https://youtu.be/u_xBY7teNu0.

Please note that Red Prawn is the first version of the testnet and we will be continuously updating the testnet on a weekly basis. In our internal testing, we ran experiments on about 2,000 to 3,000 nodes achieving 2,000-3,000 transactions per second. As we have implemented several new features in the past few weeks, the stability of our testnet could be enhanced. We are first releasing our testnet with 1,000 nodes (4 shards) running on AWS. In the next few weeks, we will progressively scale up the network and facilitate select community members to start running nodes for the testnet.

We have also written a blog post to further explain the details on Red Prawn. Do give it a read: https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-testnet-v1-0-release-codename-red-prawn-27974ca46ecb

Thank you for your patience and for your continued support.

Cheers!

Dear community members,

The Zilliqa team particularly the development team has been working tirelessly and non-stop since the start of the project in mid 2017. With the release of testnet version 1.0 yesterday, we have achieved an important milestone. We deeply appreciate your messages on our channels. This would not have been possible without your continuous support.

We however realize that testnet version 1.0 is simply the beginning and we have miles to go to make it more stable and feature-rich. We believe that the development team (and the Zilliqa team in general) needs a short break so as to be in form to improve the testnet and prepare for the next milestone.

We hereby would like to inform the community that the team will take a break for a few days. The distribution of testnet tokens required to issue transactions on the testnet will be done on Monday, 9 April 2018.

Please note that during this break, there might be some delay in our reply to your questions or concerns about the testnet.

We thank you for your understanding and for your continued support.

Best of thoughts,

The Zilliqa team

Dear all, we have just published project update #5 at https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-project-update-5-april-2-27ee7429c85b.

We have reached a major milestone with the release of our testnet v1.0 (codenamed Red Prawn). The Zilliqa testnet is the first public, permissionless blockchain to implement the technology of sharding and we are happy to announce that sharding is now live for testing. You can read more about it here: https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-testnet-v1-0-release-codename-red-prawn-27974ca46ecb. We will progressively be adding more features and scaling up the testnet, so stay tuned!

We have received over 140 submissions for our infographic contest and will be selecting the 15 finalists together with our partner Mindshare. Amrit and Saiba were in Europe and held meetups in London, Berlin and Amsterdam. We are also adding to our ambassador team with Ray Chen joining as our ambassador in Taiwan. Ray and Ratul have been conducting Zilliqa workshops in Taiwan and India respectively. We are going to be in Seoul and Tokyo the first 2 weeks of April.

On the technical front, the dev team has been hard at work. We have been enhancing the core protocol and have also added tools like the web wallet and explorer — which will allow community members to get involved with the testnet. It has been a hectic two weeks since our last update and we look forward to bringing you more news about our progress!

Wish you all a good week ahead!

@everyone

Dear All, our Head of Technology @Yaoqi Jia will be speaking at the following events in Beijing this week:

1. 7 Apr 2018 1.30-5.30pm CSDN Blockchain Salon - High performance blockchains at Wangjin Soho Tower 3B 1906, Chaoyang, Beijing https://huiyi.csdn.net/activity/product/goods_list?project_id=3811&from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=0

2. 8 Apr 2018 9.00am-12.00pm at Peking University School of Mathematical Sciences Science Block 1, 1365

3. 8 Apr 2018 1.30-5.00pm InForSec Blockchain Security and Privacy at Tsinghua University FIT Second Level, Livestream available at http://www.edu.cn/live/

Do join us if you are around.

Dear All,
1) CEO of Bluzelle Pavel Bains will be live on Zilliqa's Telegram channel next Monday 16 Apr SGT 8pm (UTC +8) to discuss the Zilliqa-Bluzelle partnership. Please join us at t.me/zilliqachat. We recommend you to submit your question beforehand through the following google form: https://goo.gl/forms/c9il4zZeHnlHL5Gg2.

2) Our CEO Xinshu Dong was interviewed on Cheddar which was broadcasted live from the New York Stock Exchange: https://twitter.com/cheddar/status/983743838413053953

3) We would like to announce that a new project named Noorcoin will be building their project on Zilliqa. Noorcoin aims to provide a decentralized payment and trust solution. The throughput requirement of Noorcoin is estimated to be high for which Zilliqa is a good fit due to its underlying sharding technology and horizontal scalability.

4) Test tokens (for trying out the testnet) have been distributed. We're upgrading our testnet with several new features currently. You will be able to test transactions once this is complete. Please stay tuned.

Dear All, we are happy to share that we will be holding a meetup in Singapore. We will be sharing more on our progress, which partners are coming onboard and a preview of our new smart contract language Scilla that enables unprecedented security for smart contracts. To register for the event, please proceed to: https://www.meetup.com/Ethereum-Singapore/events/249733843/?rv=ea1&_xtd=gatlbWFpbF9jbGlja9oAJGYxNWYwMjlmLTJiN2UtNDYxYy04YWNmLWU0ODJkZDE1ZjlmMg

And do save the date and time.
*Date:* 23 May 2018 (Wed)
*Time:* 6.45pm
*Venue:* The Metro @ The Bridge 2 Science Park Drive