The Innovative Consensus Mechanisms of Ontology and Zilliqa

Ontology and Zilliqa are projects which are both relatively new to the cryptocurrency space. Although the bear market has hurt many, Ontology and Zilliqa have out-performed most in the industry.

Zilliqa is a performance blockchain which is meant to scale for high transaction rates. Currently, Zilliqa has a working test net available for the public, along with a test net wallet. The main net was expected to launch in late September 2018 but now may be delayed until December 2018. The market has a tendency to hype up the emergence of main net launches such as the launch of EOS’s main net earlier in June. This led the price to increase and the same may be true of other high performance blockchains. Zilliqa focuses on the scaling capabilities of smart contracts, dapps, digital advertising, and machine learning applications. New forms of sharding are also implemented within the blockchain. Zilliqa is the first blockchain to implement three different methods of sharding. There are three ways Zilliqa can achieve linear scaling: network sharding, atomic transaction sharding, and computational sharding.

Zilliqa will become similar to NEO with a modified consensus mechanism. Zilliqa uses Proof of Work to establish mining identities as well as a practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism. Within this consensus mechanism, Proof of Work is only used to verify miner identities, not as a consensus mechanism. This significantly reduces energy consumption. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) is designed to scale. Unlike Proof of Work where multiple confirmations are required, pBFT does not allow temporary forks, once the block gets committed to the blockchain no other block can issue the same parent of the committed block. Therefore, no confirmations are required. Because of pBFT and its finality, the entire transaction history does not have to be stored on the blockchain, only the latest activity. Zilliqa is looking to do business with distributed cloud service networks such as Genaro Network and Bluzelle in order to store their blocks. Because pBFT does not have to store the entire transaction history on their blockchain, they were able to reach 2,000 transactions per second.

Ontology was launched in 2017 by the Chinese tech company Onchain. Onchain has been building blockchains and distributed networks for businesses since 2014. They also created the cryptocurrency NEO. Ontology was built on NEO’s platform as a NEP-5 token, similar to Ethereum’s ERC20 tokens. Ontology is designed to be a high performance blockchain which runs decentralized applications and executes large scale smart contracts. Ontology finally launched their main net on June 30th. Unlike most high performance blockchains, Ontology has a complex and unique consensus mechanism. Ontology reaches consensus with the combination of 3 protocols: VBFT, = POS + VRF + BFT (Proof of Stake, Verifiable Random Function, Byzantine Fault Tolerance,) VBFT can process 5,000 TPS without parallel processing or sharding.

Overall, both of these high performance blockchains have done well in the bear market. From March to June, Ontology increased 4x, while Zilliqa increased 2x. Currently, as bitcoin dominance grows and the bear market continues, the price of both Ontology and Zilliqa has decreased. Nevertheless, investors who entered either of these cryptocurrencies in March would still remain profitable despite investor pessimism.