Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that was launched in 2017 with the goal of providing fast throughput and the capacity to process thousands of transactions per second. It uses sharding as a second-layer scaling technique to address the issue of blockchain scalability and performance.The smart-contract technology from Zilliqa scales linearly without sacrificing the required security offered by decentralized validating nodes. The platform successfully balances the "trilemma" of security, scalability, and decentralization that plagues the blockchain industry.ZIL, Zilliqa's native utility currency, is used to process network transactions and execute smart contracts. ZIL is also given out as a block reward.