Zilliqa co-founder on smart contracts, gaming, and Pepsi Cola

While in Malta for the recent AI & Blockchain Summit, Coin Rivet had the pleasure of interviewing Zilliqa co-founder Max Kantelia to discuss the company’s partnership with MindShare and how Zilliqa is one of only a handful of projects to have completed its technical roadmap, following the launch of smart contracts on the platform.

Zilliqa is a public and high-throughput blockchain that makes ample use of a technique called ‘Sharding‘, though Zilliqa also extends into the world of blockchain gaming by offering far cheaper gas fees for gamers.

Sharding is a technique that separates a single blockchain into multiple smaller blockchains (or shards), making them more efficient and much quicker to process. Each shard runs independently and processes its own transactions.

Cool, calm, and collected, it was a genuine pleasure to speak with Max.

MindShare and Pepsi Cola 

Since Max’s last interview with Coin Rivet, he revealed that Zilliqa had been busy with a lot of positive new developments. Arguably the biggest piece of news came from the project’s partnership with MindShare, which is one of the world’s largest digital ad agencies.

“We revealed firstly that the customer we are working with is Pepsi Cola,” Max said.

“We did an end-to-end reconciliation for the programmatic advertising supply chain in which we showed Pepsi Cola had a 30% cost-efficiency return from this project.”

Clearly overjoyed at the news – and rightly so – Max continued: “We think that the project itself both with Pepsi Cola and even other large Fortune 500 companies is going to take us into a different league.”

A project such as Zilliqa working in tandem with MindShare and Pepsi Cola is pretty huge news for the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, as it means mainstream behemoths such as Pepsi Cola are starting to understand how blockchain technology could impact their supply chains – as evidenced by Zilliqa’s successful trial project – which should help push for mass adoption.

Cheaper gas fees

Zilliqa is quickly cementing itself as a key player in the blockchain gaming market for one critical reason: cheaper gas fees.

Blockchain gaming had a rather remarkable rise to popularity with the emergence of CryptoKitties, though one issue that has since arisen is the increasing cost of fees (referred to as gas) on various networks. Zilliqa aims to remedy this, as Max says:

“A lot of games that have been based on Ethereum, for example, certainly last year, saw a spike in the gas fee, which meant that for the end consumer, it was becoming uneconomical to pay-to-play, and so we had keen interest from some very big games that were on top of Ethereum that wanted to come onto Zilliqa, and we’ve demonstrated to them that our gas fees are extraordinarily low in comparison.

“So we see this as being a huge advantage point for us, because ultimately if blockchain is going to get to the consumer, then we’ve got to offer much, much better prices.”

When quizzed on whether Zilliqa is contemplating developing any games of its own, Max stated that the company is choosing to work with game studios as opposed to building its own games.

“That’s the strategy for the moment,” continues Max. “But blockchain gaming is one of our stated vertical markets because we see beyond the price deficiency – we also see huge advantages of using the blockchain, for example to remove the fraud that takes place within the secondary market for accessories.”

While the co-founder was unable to disclose the names of the studios during the interview, he did say to keep an eye out for news and announcements.

Completed technical roadmap

Yesterday, on June 10, Zilliqa announced the launch of its smart contract functionality – which was an incredibly important date for the project as it marked the completion of the company’s technical roadmap and means Zilliqa is now “fully open for business”.

Zilliqa now becomes one of only a minute group of projects that has successfully completed every objective outlined in its roadmap – and it has done so in just two years.

“I think that makes us one of a tiny, tiny group of projects that have actually delivered everything that they said they would on a white paper,” Max said.

“When we launched Zilliqa two years ago, everything that we spoke about on our technical roadmap, we’ve actually achieved! The final piece is the smart contract functionality.”

Now that Zilliqa has reached this milestone, it has its sights firmly set on mass adoption. The co-founder continued:

“I think that as we now go into a different phase of growth for Zilliqa, it’s no longer just about the tech for us, it’s about adoption. It’s about internationalising our brand.”