A look at Zilliqa co-founder’s ambitious blockchain project, AltLayer

Jia Yaoqi, co-founder and former CTO of Zilliqa, does not want to talk about the management shakeout at the public blockchain network earlier this year.

Yaoqi left the firm exactly three years ago after it struggled to differentiate itself as an altcoin platform amid heated competition.

As a tech enthusiast, for the past two years, I’ve spent all my time and efforts in designing and building Zilliqa. Now with a strong tech team to support the mainnet and some other reasons, it’s a good time for me to step down as CTO, to move forward and seek new challenges

— YQ (@jiayaoqi) September 16, 2019

He wants to turn attention to his newest venture – AltLayer, a solution that enables blockchain applications to obtain extra processing capacity during periods of high traffic. It’s like a Web3 equivalent to how AWS lets websites quickly scale up resources to tackle sudden “bursts” in web activity.

AltLayer raised US$7.2 million in July from investors including Polychain Capital, Breyer Capital, and Jump Crypto. The round also saw participation from Balaji Srinivasan, who previously worked as CTO of Coinbase and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Parity Technologies, a firm founded by former Ethereum CTO Gavin Wood.

Zilliqa’s management shakeout

Armed with a freshly minted doctorate in computer science, Jia co-founded Zilliqa in 2017 with a group of researchers from the National University of Singapore. He would serve as the blockchain firm’s CTO for two years before departing in September 2019.

Zilliqa co-founder Amrit Kumar (seated) with members of the team / Photo credit: Zilliqa

Those were still early days as far as blockchain is concerned. Soon after launch, Zilliqa received accolades from the crypto community for its use of “sharding,” which allows the blockchain to maintain high throughput and speed even as the number of applications and users “scale” upward.

Zilliqa hit US$1 billion in market cap within a year of its launch after the team said that it could handle over 2,000 transactions per second during internal stress tests.

The good times did not last. Zilliqa’s native utility token, ZIL, was hit hard by the initial coin offering crash of 2018, which saw ZIL’s price plummet from a high of US$0.20 in May 2018 to approximately US$0.02 a year later. Many blockchains offering higher throughput than Bitcoin and Ethereum came onto the market, chipping away at Zilliqa’s competitive advantage.

This year, the blockchain firm experienced a management shakeout that saw co-founders Tan Jun Hao and Amrit Kumar depart the company.

Optimism around AltLayer

Rolling out AltLayer’s plans