Dear All,
We are excited to announce Zilliqa Testnet v2.0 – Codename: D24 to all of you. In D24 we are unveiling a number of exciting features, including a working environment for developers to begin testing our secure smart contract language - Scilla. D24 will also allow developers to begin testing smart contract applications live on a testnet.

Specific features in D24 include:

1) Documentation https://scilla.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ to begin programming applications in Scilla
2) Scilla Blockchain Integrated Development Environment (IDE), an integrated environment connected to a dedicated blockchain testnet, where users can a) write smart contracts, b) upload them to the blockchain, c) send messages to smart contracts and d) receive messages from them. The link to the wallet with smart contract functionality is available at https://wallet-scilla.zilliqa.com and the explorer for the dedicated Scilla testnet at https://explorer-scilla.zilliqa.com.
3) Scilla Interpreter Integrated Development Environment (IDE) https://ide.zilliqa.com where developers can write their Scilla programs and upload using the dedicated testnet in the Blockchain IDE above
4) An upgraded version of our existing testnet (1000 nodes) https://explorer.zilliqa.com and wallet https://wallet.zilliqa.com
5) Opening up the testnet for new nodes to join https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSesn-MxThl4ocKCrjUYSPGc463E7-1I1O1v_GGccYbqfFr7zg/viewform

Please check out our blog post for a detailed write-up. Thank you!
https://medium.com/zilliqa/zilliqa-testnet-v2-0-codename-d24-ea7ca75adc70

Dear All,
We are happy to share that EMONT Alliance, creators of popular decentralised games Etheremon https://www.etheremon.com/ and EMONT Frenzy are working with the Zilliqa team to explore Zilliqa as a scalability solution for their current games. Decentralised games require frequent transactions and both teams hope that the higher-throughput and lower gas costs on Zilliqa will bring about a better gaming experience for game players. We look forward to working closely with the EMONT Alliance team and sharing our progress in the months to come. You can read more about it here https://medium.com/etheremon/etheremon-approach-to-the-scalability-issue-and-game-ui-updates-f1fbc7afbe7b

Dear All
We are thankful for the support that the community has provided us throughout our journey. Lately we have noticed that some social media channels seem to be getting flooded with messages on Zilliqa. We would like to remind everyone to be considerate when sharing about Zilliqa on various channels. Thank you.

Dear All,
A quick update on events we will be speaking at in July in China and Korea.
1) Bluzelle Meetup 9 July 2018
Time: 6.30-9.30pm
Venue: Zhaotai International Building Block C Level 3, Chaowai West No. 3, Chaoyang, Beijing
2) Zilliqa Meetup 11 July 2018
Time: 6.00-9.30pm
Venue: Ocean Tower L29, 550 Yanan East Road, Huangpu, Shanghai
http://www.huodongxing.com/event/4446320289600?td=9342936681918&from=groupmessage
3) Zilliqa Meetup (with Kyber Network, Quantstamp and others) 19 July 2018
Time: 7.00-10.00pm
Venue: 346 Gangnam-daero, Seoul
https://onoffmix.com/event/144194

Hope to see you there!

Dear All,
Our website www.zilliqa.com has a new look! As we have progressed further in our project roadmap we have revamped our website to help drive adoption of the Zilliqa platform. Do have a look and as always, let us know your feedback.
Cheers!

Dear all,

It’s time for bi-weekly update #12. In this update, we share with you the technical work that we did to make Testnet v2.0 happen. We are really excited to release Scilla and we invite you to try it out using the Interpreter IDE (https://ide.zilliqa.com). Don’t miss the chance to become the first developers in Scilla!

In order to push the adoption of Zilliqa, as we announced earlier, we will be working closely with the Etheremon team to bring gaming dapps to Zilliqa. We will also be touring China (July 11) and Korea (July 19) in the coming days to do meetups. Do join us if you are around.

And please welcome Edison Lim and Sheng Guang who have joined the Zilliqa team as an application developer and a core developer respectively.

Do give the bi-weekly update a read and let us know your thoughts.

https://medium.com/@jiayaoqijia/zilliqa-project-update-12-driving-adoption-testnet-improvements-a9ab2446f3c8

Cheers!

Dear All,

This is a reminder that we don't do any airdrops. Any sites advertising airdrops are scams. Do stay vigilant.

Thank you.

Dear All,
Tune in to Huobi Talk tomorrow 19 July (Thu) 12pm (GMT+8) where our Head of Technology Yaoqi will be sharing on the security of blockchain assets. https://www.youtube.com/c/huobipro/live
Cheers!

Dear All,
Zilliqa is in the running for the community vote for listing on Ethfinex. Do vote here https://nectar.community/#/listings and our CEO Xinshu will also be participating in the Ethfinex AMA today at 5pm UTC+8 (9am UTC) here. You can submit questions beforehand or ask them live
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinex/comments/90zr23/ama_w_xinshu_dong_zilliqa_ceo_starts_monday_23rd/.
Cheers!

Hi All,

Zilliqa Project Update #13 is here https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-project-update-13-building-on-zilliqa-812603157713

We have launched a dedicated website for Scilla at https://scilla-lang.org/, attended and hosted events in China, Korea and Singapore.

On the tech front, we’ve successfully migrated our public testnet to Kubernetes and have constantly been making improvements to the consensus layer.

On smart contracts - we have been working hard on the interpreter and also implemented a non-fungible token standard a la ERC-721. Jacob who specializes in programming language semantics and compiler implementation has joined the team as compiler engineer.

Thank you to all those who have submitted applications to the Zilliqa Ecosystem Grant - we will be sharing the first batch of awardees with everyone soon. Anyone keen to submit an idea/application for the grant programme can connect with our dev team or find collaborators at https://gitter.im/Zilliqa/.

Cheers!

Hi All,
Recently, Amrit, Head of Research at Zilliqa sat down with CoinCrunch to discuss Scilla - the smart contract language that Zilliqa will be using and how it can help prevent bugs in smart contracts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2A8amo_pjE
Enjoy!

Dear all,

We are happy to announce that our Scilla codebase is now open source: https://github.com/Zilliqa/scilla. Scilla is a safe-by-design smart contract language being developed for Zilliqa. We take this opportunity to invite the community to contribute to the project and help us find bugs (if any).

Cheers!

Dear community members,

The Zilliqa team is committed to building a secure, scalable and decentralized blockchain platform. Amongst all existing solutions to achieve scalability such as off-chain, sidechains and others, we believe that sharding is a very promising one towards linear scalability. We are happy to have made sharding a reality by releasing the first testnet network that is sharded.

We have 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. We will soon be releasing a blog post to explain the architecture that we have started to implement.

Since the release of our technical whitepaper back in August 2017, we have come a long way and have modified part of the initial design and implemented new techniques to make the protocol more performant and more secure. For instance, we have merged the two PoWs (as outlined in the whitepaper) into a single PoW. We have also replaced raw transaction data sharing with state-change sharing. Oftentimes, such modifications to the protocol design required a complete re-design of certain parts of the system.

In the past few weeks, we have had extensive discussions to review the timeline in light of these enhancements. Unfortunately, we will need more time to ensure that the code gets properly tested by the core team, the community and last but not the least, established auditing firms. We will also be leveraging the additional time to:

- Conduct thorough security audits
- Prepare for and execute the token swap
- Integrate with wallets
- Develop toolchains
- Bring more dapps onboard

We will be updating the community about the mainnet timeline along the way. At this stage, we are targeting end of this year or January 2019. We apologize for the delay but we firmly believe that it is in the best interest of the long-term future of the project and would like to seek your support and understanding.

Sincere thoughts,
The Zilliqa Team

Dear all,

It’s time for biweekly update #14. In the past two weeks, we have made progress on both business development as well as technical sides. On 2 August, we announced a partnership with Infoteria, a leading enterprise software company in Japan. Both Infoteria and Zilliqa will promote the Zilliqa platform on ASTERIA — Infoteria’s middleware product that currently has more than 6,500 enterprise customers and 41% market share in Japan.

On the technical side, the team has been working on various features, e.g., merging of PoW1/PoW2, GPU-support for mining, stability improvement, refactoring of the current protocol to support our sharding-friendly smart-contract design, our own TestRPC aka Kaya among others. On the Scila interpreter side, we have finished implementing the typechecker and have open sourced the Scilla codebase.

We would also like to introduce you to our newest team member Ian who will take the role of a fullstack developer at Zilliqa.

Do give the blog post a read and let us know your thoughts.

https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-project-update-14-enterprise-partnerships-scilla-made-open-source-588e0be48618

Dear All
We will be hosting an AMA tomorrow 8 Aug from 3.30-4.30pm (UTC+8) on https://t.me/zilliqachat. Please join Zilliqa's CEO Xinshu and Head of Research Amrit on the session and we look forward to answering any questions you have on Zilliqa.

Dear All

We are pleased to announce that Yiling Ding will be joining as Chief Marketing Officer of Zilliqa.Yiling was formerly Head of APAC Regional Marketing for Google Pay where she defined marketing strategies and developed partnerships https://blog.zilliqa.com/welcoming-yiling-ding-to-join-zilliqa-as-cmo-2e262a0bae76

Dear All,
Recently, we announced our #BuildonZIL Ecosystem Grant Programme to encourage teams and developers to contribute to our new, scalable, secure, and truly decentralized blockchain application infrastructure. When we launch our mainnet, we intend to have an ecosystem of applications running on Zilliqa that will support enterprises as well as end consumers.

We are thankful for the support of our community throughout our journey so far and are heartened by the number and quality of applications we have received so far.

Today, we are happy to share the first batch of 12 Zilliqa Ecosystem Grant awardees that will also be working alongside us to build infrastructure and also new applications on Zilliqa. These include Web3 libraries, wallets, extensions, smart contract libraries, Scilla language server, games as well as a cross-chain protocol for Bitcoin issuance. A big thank you to all those who participated and we look forward to receiving more applications in future!
https://blog.zilliqa.com/announcing-the-first-zilliqa-ecosystem-grant-awardees-4ccb39ef83c9

Dear All
Zilliqa Project Update #15 is here. In this update, we have more details on our roadmap leading up to mainnet launch.

Q3 2018: Support for sharding-friendly smart contracts
Q4 2018: Large-scale tests and security auditing
Dec 2018/Jan 2019: Mainnet launch

We have announced the first 12 awardees of the Zilliqa Ecosystem Grant and hope more will join us on this journey.

We have 3 new joiners across Business Development and the Core Development team.

On the technology front, we have continued to make good progress. The team has been working on improving node recovery, new node joining, GPU mining, network and protocol-level support for sharding-friendly smart contracts, enhancement of the Scilla interpreter and adding to our developer tools such as JavaScript libraries, Scilla IDE and Kaya RPC server.

As usual, eager to hear your feedback and suggestions.

Cheers!
https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-project-update-15-updated-roadmap-ramping-up-marketing-zilliqa-infrastructure-335818c7060

Dear all,

We are happy to announce that we have published a new blog post that explains how to run smart contracts on a sharded architecture like Zilliqa: https://blog.zilliqa.com/provisioning-sharding-for-smart-contracts-a-design-for-zilliqa-cd8d012ee735.

Running smart contracts on a sharded architecture brings into picture some exciting research problems that the blockchain community has been looking into lately. In this blog post, we present our solution to the problem that we refer to as “Deterministic Transaction Assignment”. The post also presents the status of the implementation. Give it a read and let us know your thoughts.

Cheers!

Dear All,

We are going to be at a number of events in September. Do catch us if you are in any of these cities.

1. Cluj, Romania
Date: 4 Sep 2018 10am-6pm
Event: Scilla Full-day Workshop – Learning how to program in Scilla
https://medium.com/cryptoland-tech/workshop-2-diving-into-scilla-a-safe-by-design-smart-contract-language-5cb23f71222b

2. Berlin, Germany
Date: 6 Sep 2018
Event: Dezentral
https://www.dezentral.io/

3. Beijing, China
Date: 5 Sep 2018
Event: PublicChain Odaily Developer Conference
https://www.odaily.com/post/5133227

4. Beijing, China
Date: 7-9 Sep 2018
Event: BlockChain Cases Center Conference
http://bccc.msup.com.cn/

5. Hanoi, Vietnam
Date: 15-16 Sep 2018
Event: Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets Dialogue
https://www.vietnamcryptodialogue.com/

6. Singapore
Date: 19-20 Sep 2018
Event: Consensus: Singapore 2018
https://www.coindesk.com/events/consensus-singapore-2018/

7. Singapore
Date: 19 Sep 2018 7-9pm
Event: Zilliqa x DMM.com x LayerX: Tools, Use cases and New initiatives for blockchain adoption
https://www.meetup.com/Ethereum-Singapore/events/253942745/

Cheers!

Dear All

I have just joined the team as CMO and am excited to share Zilliqa Project Update #16 with you. We have just published details on our solution to one of the most challenging and exciting problems in blockchains today - supporting smart contracts in a sharded network. In addition, we are constantly looking to grow our ecosystem - if you are interested in building a blockchain-based game or Decentralised exchange, do reach out to us!

We will be at several events across the globe this month, from Romania to Berlin to Beijing, rounding off with Singapore.

Please also welcome Han Wen, who has joined as Developer Relations.

On the technology front, we have implemented new features – events (you can now automatically retrieve data from the blockchain), transaction generator and difficulty adjustment of PoW.

As always, eager to hear your feedback and suggestions. Let us know if there is anything you want to hear more of in our updates!

https://blog.zilliqa.com/zilliqa-project-update-16-sharding-friendly-smart-contracts-and-target-dapps-8adfbd926641