Zilliqa was first conceived by Prateek Saxena, an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore School of Computing. Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. Zilliqa is a smart contract platform featuring a sharded architecture that aims to address the scalability limitations seen in some other blockchains. Its sharded design allows concurrent chains to execute transactions in parallel, thereby increasing the overall capacity of the network. In addition to scalability, Zilliqa provides a smart contract layer to support smart contract creation by way of its native programming language, Scilla. The network reaches a consensus on transactions and contract executions through a hybrid Proof-of-Work based on pBFT mechanism. Recently it introduced a staking system to increase the distribution of node operators.