Zilliqa has become one of just 28 cryptocurrencies to boast a market capitalization over $1 billion.

According to CoinMarketCap, Zilliqa passed the $1 billion threshold late Monday and is worth nearly $1.2 billion at the time of writing, making it the world's 23rd-most valuable cryptocurrency. The rise coincided with the announcement that Zilliqa is available to trade on OKEx, the third-highest volume cryptocurrency exchange tracked by CoinMarketCap.

The coin is also available to trade on Binance, Huobi and Gate.io, among others.

The Singapore-based project presents itself as solving the scalability problems endemic to blockchain technology through sharding, an efficiency-boosting technique that predates bitcoin but has yet to prove its viability in big permissionless networks. First introduced last year, the team's white paper claims that "at ethereum's present network size of 30,000 miners, Zilliqa would expect to process about [1,000] times the transaction rates of ethereum."

The ethereum network plans to introduce sharding in the future, perhaps undercutting Zilliqa's value proposition.

Zilliqa's market cap has more than tripled in the past 30 days, from $295 million on April 9. The coin is worth just over $0.16 at the time of writing, and is up 16.9 percent over the past 24 hours.

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