Synthetix is based in Australia, Synthetix launched a seed funding round in September, 2017 to develop the concept of a self-contained stablecoin payment network. They then kicked off their public ICO on February 28, 2018 and by the end of the ICO on March 7, 2018, they had met their goal of $30,000,000 USD. Synthetix was rebranded from Havven on November 30, 2018. Synthetix is led by a multidisciplinary team of 13 individuals. The project was founded by Kain Warwick, who previously co-founded blueshyft, one of the largest digital payment networks in Australia. The CTO is Justin Moses, who also serves as the Director of Engineering at MongoDB. Synthetix aims to address the problem that companies running centralized payment networks such as PayPal, credit card networks, or the SWIFT banking network have “absolute control over the value within the network, so any transaction conducted within them may be blocked or reversed at any time.” According to the Synthetix white paper, “Although this is ostensibly designed to protect users, it introduces systemic risk for all participants. If the network is compromised or its owners cease to behave benevolently, no party can trust that the value in their account is secure or accessible.” This is theorized to work because anyone who holds SNX tokens in escrow will be incentivized by Synthetix rewards derived from network transaction fees that will be distributed “in proportion with how well each issuer maintains the correct Synths supply.” When a Synthetix escrow user puts their SNX in escrow, USD-stabilized Synths will be automatically put up for sale on a decentralized exchange at a price of $1 USD. To release escrowed SNX, the user must buy back the Synths issued (also at a price of $1 USD) at which point the Synths will be burned. The Synthetix system uses an algorithm to adjust network fees, and therefore dividends, to SNX holders to incentivize (or disincentivize) the holding of SNX in escrow smart contracts, and thus, the creation of Synths. The theory is that this will cause users to mint and burn Synths in the appropriate amount based solely on supply and demand.
Zilliqa (ZIL) is a token developed in the year 2017. Zilliqa is mainly based on the concept of Sharding and primarily aims at improving the scalability of the cryptocurrency networks as in case of Bitcoin or Ethereum. The white paper mentions that the transactions speed would be approximately a thousand times more than that of Ethereum network. Ziliqa is fast, secured and decentralized. Zilliqa’s high throughput means that you can focus on developing your ideas without worrying about network congestion, high transaction fees or security which are the key issues with legacy blockchain platforms. Zilliqa network uses a concept called Sharding where the transactions are grouped into smaller groups and divided among the miners for the parallel transactional verification. Developing smaller groups for transactional verification means the Consensus can be reached faster and hence a higher number of transactions can be processed in a given time frame. The capacity of the network linearly increases in other cryptocurrencies as the number of people joins the network, but in this case, the capacity is increased at a higher variable rate than the number of members joining the network. By incorporating the Sharding Technology, it can completely revolutionize the smart contract functionality too. Ziliqa has few pros as it has a great new technology. Zilliqa is the first platform to use sharding technology. This puts it ahead of the rest of the market. It’s a completely new kind of blockchain designed to solve the problem of scalability. Third-generation platforms like Zilliqa could be the big winners in the future of cryptocurrency. Ziliqa has a strong community. The platform has a lot of fans. The Zilliqa ICO only happened because there was so much demand for it. The Zilliqa ICO also shows that the crypto community is ready to see blockchain technology move to the next phase of its development.