So today I’m going to review Ontology ONT and Ziliqa ZIL, comparing two very high potential projects that I like and are part of my own Portfolio. To avoid bias I will try and compare against each other as they are competitors in the same space.
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Let’s begin with Ontology, on coinmarketcap they are ranked 20th, is has a market cap of $967 million.
It rose from $5 all the way up to $9 to nearly double the price within the last run, which is crazy. It has come back down to $6.40 at the time of writing this, but the market is being dragged down by BTC, that is something to consider if you're wanting to get into either project.
Zilliqa are rank 26th and are not far away with a market cap of $728.98.
The alts are red across the board so the 24hr gains aside. Zilliqa has seen less of an increases from the ICO, well it actually had a drop to around 5 cents per token and it's jumped up with the rest of the market to highs of 20 cents and today is sitting around 9 cents.
The market capa are quite similar in that respect, so what are the projects? what do they actually do?
Ontology (https://ont.io/) says it is a new public multichain project and a distributed Trust collaboration platform. What that means is that they're trying to build a blockchain in which other businesses and developers who want to use blockchain technology can build on their network to create their own little chain in this multi chain platform.
Ontology also want to be a high-throughput project, that includes a series of complete distributed ledger's and smart contract systems and it is a framework for others to build blockchain systems on Ontology.
Zilliqa (https://www.zilliqa.com/) just wants to build itself as a high-throughput blockchain platform, they have a big focus on scalability. So if a particular project wants to have a highly scalable blockchain then it would use Zilliqa. That is the target markets for both projects, both are tackling scalability.
So what are the main features of them, and why are they’re so interesting?
Let’s start with Ontology, the infrastructure consists of these multi changes, so it's got ONT blockchains and these are common services for applications and other chains in the Ontology ecosystem. They are provided by one or more servers public chains. So people who want to build stuff on blockchain and want to use blockchain, they can literally use Ontology to have their own little chain for whatever use they may need.
It's high performance and flexible as we see the chain framework is modularised and customisable to support various business chains. So when businesses create their own chains what they can do is customise their consensus mechanism and do all sorts of things to make it more adept for their business. With ONT interaction protocols, means different protocol collaborations provide compatibility with different cross chain cross system and cross industry scenarios. So what this means is that there will be interaction between all of these different chains that different businesses will be using. So everything is within this Ontology infrastructure. That's how the actual framework and the infrastructure or Ontology works.
It’s got a few different features as well which I think really really interesting. One of them is ONT ID, which I think is going to be one of the biggest features for ontology. It is a complete distributed Identity framework supporting identity verification and authentication for people, assets and affairs. What this means is we can have our own personal ID on the blockchain and this can have things like your education, medical records, work experience, work history. Basically have everything that an employer or an authority would need to know, would be automatically stored on your ONT ID. Your ID will be anonymous to the rest of the public, you can give access to the relevant authorities. So this is fantastic, it provides security, it’s unchangeable except when it needs to be changed. So it's a very, very strong feature that I like a lot.
They also have ONT Data and ONT Scores. So it will essentially provide support for various businesses to develop different credit evaluation logic according to distributed data, you can get scores if you are a reliable person, all that kind of stuff for credit links back to your ID so can all be found within your ID. That's the main things that make Ontology great.
The unique things about Zilliqa and the reason why people are taking notice, is because it is the first public blockchain to implement sharding for scaling purposes.
So what is sharding?
Sharding is a concept that has existed in distributed databases for a long long time now, but it hasn't actually been able to be implemented and it's not being demonstrated open permissionless public blockchains at scale. This is exactly what we want if we are going to see adoption of this technology. The idea is the automatically split up a large network machines, so that all of the machines that would be processing and verifying transactions are split up into parallel subcommittees or ‘Shards’ as they are called.
Each different shard essentially the little bits after they have been split up, they work to processes a micro block. This means each one is processing a little micro block and then at the end of an epoch (a time period) all of these micro blocks merge into a proper block and that's then added to the blockchain. So look at sharding as just breaking up the pool of miners or machines processing the transactions, they then verify their own micro block and then they merge to create a full block which is added to the main chain. Simple right?
so that is how sharding works and Zilliqa is the first public blockchain to be implementing this for scaling purposes and the great thing about this is the more machines that enter the network, the more scalable it becomes due to sharding. So that is a big, big positive!
So both companies are looking good in there own rights so far.
Let’s take a look at their consensus mechanisms, focusing on the high throughput then consensus mechanisms are imperative to achieving high throughput.
Ontology has very recently bought out a verifiable byzantine fault tolerance mechanism ( https://medium.com/ontologynetwork/ontology-launches-vbft-a-next-generation-consensus-mechanism-becoming-one-of-the-first-vrf-based-91f782308db4 ) More details about this here. The above table right here shows you some performance compared to other existing consensus mechanisms like proof of work, proof of stake, delegated proof of stake and verifiable byzantine fault tolerance, as you can see got a very good transactions per second on the test net. They have consensus time of 5 to 10 seconds. It's got the regular byzantine tolerance tolerance bits with no more than â…“ of consensus nodes for security on the network. Has high manageability and low resource consumption. These are all good features which is good for the environment as well. This is very interesting consensus mechanism and I think it's definitely one to keep your eye on, it will probably be used in more and more projects that we see coming out.
For Zilliqa we actually see that they use the PBFT so the practical Byzantine fault tolerance and what they do is they've created a protocol which enables each little Shard to reach an agreement on the blocks to propose. It's based on the idea of Byzantine fault tolerance and I here is the link for more details about that.
Essentially they have heavily optimised it for scalability, existing BFT protocols intake a large communication bandwidth and they don't really scale for a large network that Zilliqa is aiming to have.So they have recently proposed scalable signature scheme called CoSi and that has the potential to make BFT protocols of more scalable. This is a huge innovation, so they have add extra steps and message rounds for leaders and signers to prevent malicious attacks on the protocol.
They derive a secure scheme and apply it to develop a scalable BFT protocol for consensus in Zilliqa, this the practical byzantine fault tolerance protocol significance.
Moving away from the technical side if we look at each projects tokens, they don't differ much. Ontology has a Max supply of 1 Billion ONT, that's the max the will ever be produced.
Currently we've got a circulating supply of 53.7575% of that say 537.5 million in circulation they have done and plan to do airdrops, but you gotta think about the inflation with drops.
Ontology use is a duel model token a bit like Neo and gas, so at the moment because the Ontology mainnet is not released yet, the ONT token is just an NEP5 token which means that it is based on the Neo network until it gets exchanged for the proper ONT on the Ontology Mainnet after its released. When you hold ONT on the main net you will get ONG which is the gas that power transactions on the network. So a lot like Neo and gas.
Zilliqa has only one token and that's Zil, it is currently not on its mainnet either. At this time it is actually an erc20 token, they will also migrate when the main net goes live later this year. The purpose of the token is to give platform users rights to the holders to pay for sending transactions and run it’s smart contracts. So no gas everything is transacted in ZIL, you will need to pay ZIL to run smart contracts.
There is a finite supply of ZIL which is 21 Billion, so 21 times the supply of ONT, so they can play this role of gas and being a token for the network because it's got such a higher total supply or Max supply.
Let’s have a look at the teams for both projects.
Ontology is very closely tied to Neo because Da Hongfei who is the CEO of Neo is also the CEO of OnChain, which is a company which has actually bought out Ontology.
OnChain has developed a distributed network architecture what DNA and this allows for easy implementation and development of standardized blockchains. They want every interested field to be able to easily migrate their data and assets onto a private or public blockchain. This will use Ontology and Neo all interconnected, not for only succeeding in this vision, but they're set up to thrive within regulations of the Chinese government which is imperative for the success of any project in China.
This all ties back to the ONT ID that was mentioned earlier.
See here it says future of onchain and Neo they are starting a new blockchain called ontology! Focusing specifically on identities this ONT ID. Da Hongfei would like to beable to attach data to the IDs such as universities, work experience, medical records and the alteration and authorisation of IDs would be the ability to authorise people to view your information, such as your finances when you apply for a loan, the government could if they needed to. This is all within Chinese regulations or they're working with them not against them and this bodes very well for Onchain. It ties in with there desire to be compliant, because China cannot effectively monitor these platforms they don't know who is using it. The ONT IDs are essential for these things to actually be used in real life.
All of these public and private blockchains are going to be able to connect to Neo basically interconnected all these projects. The team as such behind ontology is Onchain and that's all interconnected with Neo and other Chinese projects.
The team behind Zilliqa project is extremely accomplished! It’s not quite as broad and diverse as Ontology’s team which is Onchain. Zilliqa have an incredibly qualified team and have 9 PhD qualifications within the team and advisory board of extremely academically focused people. With the developers, marketing and research teams, they have a very solid team for the project.
This could be a sleeping giant as Zilliqa seem to be spending their effort on the technology, sort of let it speak for itself rather than pushing marketing. In this market noise is key but means that when the noise comes we could see a huge bull run from Zilliqa.
Partnerships
We've got Neo working within Chinese regulations and all of this stuff is in that ecosystem which is great and they have announced a collaboration with 4 venture capital firms and they seek to govern and secure the industry ecosystem. They are getting a lot of investment and have ties within the Chinese ecosystem, whether they can break out of that ecosystem and expand globally is yet to be seen. I think that is something that will take ontology, Neo and the other products that are connected to the next level.
Zilliqa have partnered with Genaro which is the first turing-complete public blockchain with decentralized storage. They're going to act as a storage solution for Zilliqa to store block data and store it in their decentralised storage network.
Compared to the partnerships that Ontology has, it’s just not quite to the same level. It’s good to see they are getting partnerships but it would be better to see more at this stage. This ties back in to the company building the tech first approach. It just doesn't have the grandeur and the reach that ontology does in my opinion.
Summarising - High Performance Blockchains
Got really into this one as have been researching both so let's summarize
Market cap
- Ontology $967 million (20th)
- Zilliqa $728.98 million (26th)
Both pretty close and close together on the ranking with Ontology slightly ahead.
Main Features
Ontology - Multi-chain and ONT ID
The main feature of Ontology that has these multi changes, it has infrastructure for businesses build on the blockchain with their own customisable chain that can all connect with the other chains within the ontology infrastructure. The key feature is the ONT ID! This could be rolled out across Neo to help work within the Chinese government making blockchain mainstream.Zilliqa - Sharding
Zilliqas main feature is sharding which helps to become a high-throughput, highly scalable blockchain platform. Looking to build the fasted blockchain for developers and businesses to adopt.
Consensus
Ontology Ortorand Consensus Engine with Verifiable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (VBFT)
The consensus mechanisms for both, Ontology uses this anto rand consensus engine with verifiable Byzantine fault tolerance,Zilliqa Practical Byzantine
Zilliqa uses practical Byzantine fault tolerance with SoSi, so highly optimised for high throughput transactions and it'll be interesting to see when both come out with them a net which one actually works better.
Token
- Ontology ONT - NEP-5 Moving to main net with ONG gas functions.
Ontology you use as a dual token system ONT which is the main token and then you will get ONG which is the gas which you will get paid for holding ONT in ONG. Much like the Neo Gas relationship. - Zilliqa ZIL - ERC20 Moving to mainnet
Zilliqa there's only one token, a higher supply so the price will be lower.
Team
- Ontology CEO Da Hongfei, Ranked in China as a top 50 fintech by KPMG
Onchain and a lot of powerful connections and partners - Zilliqa - Very accomplished team with over 9 PhD’s
A extremely technically accomplished team and advisors, writing one of the most technical whitepapers you will ever read.
Partnerships
- Ontology - Neo, Onchain, 4 VC firms and many partners working with the Chinese government
- Zilliqa - Genaro, Mindshare, Insurance Market
Ontology are ahead here. Although Zilliqa has a greater ecosystem, some good partnerships but nothing really that particularly stands out as a huge partnership. In terms of today I think that Ontology is the stronger project that looks like it will be adopted in China with all the work that Zeo is doing. It’s this reason that I have invested more with Ontology that Zilliqa.
But I did invest in Zilliqa as well, if this sharding can scale all it would take is for a partnership on a working mainnet to send Zilliqa to the moon. The marketing and partnerships of ontology make it the stronger project right now. The possibilities of Zilliqa if sharding works while scaling will phenomenal. Right now ONT is the winner by where we are right now.
If based on the potential in the future given the mainnets perform as expected then Zilliqa has the potential to use huge global applications with speeds we never thought possible! And they have the brains on the team to pull it off.
Not a clear winner but I’m saying ONT… Although rumours of a combined sharding project with ETH sharding focussed partnership could be a real stand out collaboration for ZIL but it is still just a rumour at the moment.
Do your own research and report back here what you find please, thanks for reading. Sorry it was a long one but as you can tell I am torn between the 2 projects. Both really good projects both are set for gains.
Let me know your thoughts, have you invested?