Zilliqa had a live presentation today on YouTube which went over various developments going on at Zilliqa relating to Defi, Play to Earn, and its Metapolis offering that will be coming to fruition shortly and are part of Zilliqa’s vision for its future in 2022 and after.
Review on 2021 Growth
Zilliqa’s CEO, Dr. Ben Livshits began the first main part of the presentation reviewing the growth in various aspects of Zilliqa’s ecosystem, between usage, DeFi, Access, Community, and Interoperability:
- The volume of ZIL addresses growing 180% from 2020 into 2021
- $350 million USD-worth was locked into DeFi apps on the blockchain
- Over $60 million USD worth of ETH assets have been bridged to Zilliqa thus far
Dr. Ben called out the fact that Zilliqa has a focus on expanding various avenues of growth, with a signature focus on bridging Zilliqa to other blockchains to enable an opening-up to other DeFi assets and NFTs – the amount of ETH assets bridged to Zilliqa speaks to this direction. He also mentioned a renewed focus on community which led to a growing number of interactions between Zilliqa and those outside its immediateits community, seen in the growth of the Zilliqa Twitter channel and Discord channel.
2022 Possibilities and Roadmap
Dr. Ben called out the possibilities of the blockchain in 2022 and after with a slide showing the opportunities in the global gaming market, DeFi, and the Metaverse that Zilliqa plans on focusing on with their technology.
A slide titled “What’s Ahead” listed “Enabling Web3, DeFining the Future”, “Fueling the Creator Economy”, “Building Great Technology”, and “Fostering an energy-efficient ecosystem” as other goals of its involvement in furthering the future of the blockchain.
New Hires
We were then introduced to some of the new hires that Zilliqa recently added to their team –
Technical Roadmap
Dr. Ben then introduced brief overviews of different elements of the overall Roadmap, first being the Technical Roadmap with upcoming EVM support, LLVM support for Scilla, and growing the capabilities of ZilBridge –
DeFi Roadmap
Dr. Ben then talked about what we could expect from Zilliqa with regard to DeFi developments, from liquid staking implementation, adding power to cross-chain swap solutions which will lead to increased DEX competitiveness.
Blockchain Gaming
Gaming was mentioned numerous times over the presentation, and this underscores its importance in the overall scheme of Zilliqa’s Roadmap –
Dr. Ben ended with talking about Zilliqa having a “global growth mindset” with its expansions into European, Asian, and US markets more thoroughly.
Roadmap Details
After Dr. Ben finished with his portion of the presentation, we heard from the new hires in more depth. In this session, Zilliqa revealed its new head of marketing Art Malkov who spoke at length about how he intends to grow the visibility of the Zilliqa ecosystem over the next ten years.
Gaming and Gamification
Then, the new members of the team in turn detailed different elements of the overall Roadmap relevant to their functions. Tom, Head of BD Sports and Gaming said the Zilliqa “tech stack is well suited to the demands of gaming” when detailing the strength of Zilliqa’s blockchain capabilities.
Tom talked about his vision for increasing the number and flow of games on Zilliqa. He elaborated further on a focus towards ensuring that the user experience is gamified, and that users are incentivized in various ways that lead to deeper engagement in Metapolis and ZIL city.
Interoperability and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) Support
Valeriy, Zilliqa’s Head of Distributed Systems, talked at length about how critical it is, in his view, that Zilliqa becomes increasingly interoperable with other blockchains. EVM, to this end, is important for DeFi, institutional investors, and others across the space. Because of this importance and its compatibility with Ethereum, Valeriy said Zilliqa’s support for EVM will “open the floodgates” by increasing interoperability between larger numbers of wallets and custody providers.
When asked about a timeline for the rollout of such support, Valeriy responded that support for EVM is “definitely going to be this year (2022)”.
The participants all seemed to share a very optimistic and focused vision for Zilliqa in 2022, and that Zilliqa has potential to participate in an ever-growing share of blockchain’s future whether through strengthening the power and security of defi applications, enabling the creation of “culturally significant blockchain games that onboard many crypto non-natives”, or one of many other possibilities.
Watch the whole presentation here on the Zilliqa YouTube channel.
All images in this article are from Zilliqa’s Youtube presentation linked just above, and are owned by Zilliqa.
