Thread by @edison0xyz

Good question, and its a question I get often from people since Zilliqa was super hyped back before 2020s.

My perspective as a ex-Zilliqa team member from 2018-2021:

https://twitter.com/0xemon/status/1830131090444726705

From many ways, we could compare Zilliqa to Solana and see why it didn't get traction.

Why Solana and Zilliqa are good comparisons:
- Both are high-throughput L1 blockchain;
- Similar challenges on dev onboarding being non-evm compatible;
- Both raised about $20M (as of 2020)

Both executed really well on what they promised from the tech standpoint.

The main diff is on everything that is non-tech.

When I joined Zilliqa, we focused on getting mainnet out and then I was appointed to work on everything that is developer experience related.

Dev tools, experience, docs, etc.

But in the bear market of 2019, company had a change of strategy to work on enterprise projects.

Zilliqa diverted a lot of resources to work on STOs (now known as RWAs) and we had a flagship programmatic trial with PepsiCo.

I was even moved from dev experience and dev tools to work on enterprise projects (huge mistake!)

Looking back, we can all say its a huge mistake. But in those days, enterprise projects get people excited about the future prospects.

But it has been 4 years, and nothing came out of enterprises. We now know its a costly mistake to focus on that.

With permissionless stuffs, everyone can all try and use the chain. They may buy some tokens to hold since it is still valuable in the ecosystem.

But enterprise projects is really just for vanity. It makes you feel important but don't value add you in any way.

In bear market, Enterprise projects created press release that temporarily uplifted sentiments but not value for the actual Zilliqa chain.

Enterprise always want things to be "private", and you end up having to build use-case on a forked version of your public chain (lame)

Meanwhile, Solana continued improving on
- Developer experience and tools;
- Exchange integrations;
- Growing their ecosystems

We see chads like @armaniferrante working on anchor lang throughout the bear market and @aeyakovenko supporting ecosystem projects

There are probably other reasons too but IMO, the shift to focus on enterprise projects and not investing into developer experience and ecosystem projects cost Zilliqa to lose out completely on traction.