Just hours after the official launch of Zilliqa’s non-custodial staking platform on its mainnet, users flocked in to stake more than one billion ZIL tokens. Confirming the news, Zilliqa’s official Twitter handle tweeted,
The blockchain also unveiled a new fungible governance token, gZIL, as part of its launch to the network which will be earned alongside staking rewards. Additionally, it is also meant to function as an incentive for long-term token holders. gZIL token will also enable the long-term token holders to stand to become part of the Zilliqa ecosystem’s governance mechanism. It is a limited time token and will only be issued for approximately one year with its value derived from its scarcity. Besides, a market cap of 682,550 has been placed on gZIL minting and distribution.
Amrit Kumar, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Zilliqa, commented,
“After months of rigorous testing with the help of our enthusiastic community, staking is now finally live on Zilliqa, marking a major milestone for our team this year. As one of the first sharded blockchains to implement staking onto the network, we are thrilled to be joining the ranks of some of our most innovative peers, as we continue to build out future-fit DeFi offerings.”
In related news, Zilliqa had recently announced the launch of its first decentralized exchange dubbed, ZilSwap, in collaboration with another DEX platform Switcheo, adding to the trend of growing decentralized exchanges.
This DEX built by Switcheo claims to be a fully on-chain, scalable public blockchain platform aimed at pushing the ecosystem into the decentralized finance space by enabling users to trade digital assets on the Zilliqa blockchain. Zilawap is by Switcheo developers. Additionally, the platform will support Singapore-Dollar [SGD] backed stablecoin, XSGD. The first token pool during the launch will be ZIL-XSGD.
Similar to Uniswap, it leverages constant product automated market maker on top of a permissionless liquidity protocol and allows users to trade ZIL or ZRC tokens directly on the blockchain from their wallets, or add tokens they are holding to a liquidity pool to passively earn as market makers.
ZIL’s Price Response
Despite these developments, its native toke ZIL has failed to respond positively. At the time of writing, ZIL was down by 3.11% over the last 24-hours driving its price to $0.0191. Since its 2020-peak of June, when the token was priced at $0.0298, ZIL was down by over 35% as the downtrend showed no signs of stopping.