New Updates in Zilliqa!
Zilliqa had some major upgrades last month. With the release of v8.0.0, there had been situations of the network being down and some problems in staking contract but that is all worth with what Zilliqa’s new upgrade has to offer to the Zil community. Some of the major upgrades in the new version were:
- Reduced block time and revised pBFT consensus: The block time in Zilliqa has been reduced to about ~29 seconds from ~40 seconds. This will lower the waiting time for transactions to be mined and facilitate dApps with a better user experience as well. pBFT consensus flow has been revised as well which can be seen in the diagram below.
2. Polynetwork support: We have been waiting for Poly-network integration in Zilliqa for a long. The new version of Scilla supports cross-chain transactions through Polynetwork. This will be a major feature for enabling other chains to leverage Zilliqa and vice-versa. The smart contract for cross-chain transactions can be found here.
3. Remote state reads: With the new feature of remote state read, now the contracts can read the state of another contract without sending any transaction. The gas cost for remote reads is identical to that of local reads because it’s implemented using the same mechanism. Jacob from Scilla team mentioned — “We thought about doubling the gas cost for remote reads because of the risk of DOS attacks (if a contract has a huge map that it only accesses one key/value pair at a time, then some other contract could now remote fetch the entire map, causing the system to crash), but first of all the damage would be very small (the transaction would fail, but everything else would work), secondly the gas cost would be prohibitive, and thirdly we managed to do a state migration of an absolutely huge map in one of the mainnet contracts, and we were able to fetch and store that map in its entirely, so it would be very difficult to cause a crash. In fact, the map was so big that when we tried to pretty-print it the OCaml to_string function crashed. But the state fetch didn’t.” The sample contract for remote state can be read here.
There are more upgrades in the Zilliqa network but I am mentioning the important ones here. I am quite excited about how the applications and community will utilize these upgrades in their system. What are your thoughts on this? Please mention in the comment section.
