Hello friends! I have prepared for you a short recap from the past AMA between Icodrops and Kira Network. Let's go!
Oleg(ICODrops): Despite the fact that the community chats are quite young, we first learned about Kira in 2019. Solid age for the current market. https://medium.com/kira-core/introducing-kira-the-future-of-interchain-exchange-c5d8f4223607
It is silly, of course, that in the current market we are surprised by everything that was created before August 2020. But this is the market now. Look at the project's twitter, the guys have been puzzling DeFi for a long time.
Let's move on to the questions?
Q1. Hey Kira Network team! Can you introduce yourself and explain what are Kira Network, Kira Protocol, Kira Core?
Kira Network Team:
Hi everyone, my name is Mateusz, the CTO at Kira Core. I am an electronics engineer, joined the crypto world in 2011 or more precisely GPU mining movement and for the past 3 years I was heavily involved in the Cosmos, Polkadot community and staking services space. Before starting Kira project with @miLanavaLmont I worked for Barclays Bank as R&D developer, as lead infra engineer for US based Settle Finance and as product manager in cryptocurrency exchange in Switzerland called Bity.
Hi everyone again, my name is Milana Valmont. I was born in Moscow but grew up in LA. I have a corporate finance background from NYC. I joined the crypto ecosystem first as an investor and in early 2017 I joined BINANCE exchange as a community volunteer. Later on I’ve worked as a project manager for Adcoin protocol and Sentinel protocol. In 2018 I went to Tel Aviv and joined Knoks platform as head of strategy, and by mid 2019 I dedicated my full attention to Kira as CEO. You can find my linkedin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milanavalmont/
Kira Core is the corporate company building up Kira Network just like Tendermint is building Cosmos or Parity - Polkadot. Kira Network is a blockchain where Kira Protocol (our DeFi application) will be deployed
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q2. I think that your project’s offer (liquid staking assets + trading) is a great idea of expanding Defi functionality. I think that now we can see similar ideas in current projects using different L0: Rampdefi (Ethereum), Stafi (Polkadot). One of the differences is that Kira Network is based on Cosmos SDK. Please tell us more about your differences and your pros.
Kira Network Team:
Kira does not stake your coins for you and does not charge you commission for that. With Kira tokens are staked directly on Kira and there is no limitation regarding the type of the token that can be staked, which is opposite to Stafi. Its good that you’ve mentioned Stafi, we actually made a comparison between Kira and Stafi if you guys care to take a look
https://github.com/KiraCore/docs/blob/master/vs/stafi-protocol.md
So we chose Cosmos over Ethereum because scalability is very important to us when dealing with financial applications, and Ethereum is very limited when it comes to that. We choose Cosmos over Polkadot because its cross chain protocol for trustless asset transfer is way more mature but we are still going to integrate with polkadot XCMP as well. We are not cosmos exclusive but we cannot wait for polkadot to deliver their cross chain protocol in order for us to build Kira. With Kira we use a costume consensus, so we heavily modified Cosmos SDK, with Substrate/Polkadot it would be way more difficult and we don’t want to get locked into a single ecosystem, because we are not exclusive.
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q3. Your MBPoS consensus mechanism which you mention in your docs sounds very interesting. But it also supports fiat currencies. Why do you choose this mechanism and how safe is it to use such assets in crypto protocols?
Kira Network Team:
Kira supports any digital asset, you can stake crypto, digital fiat, stablecoins and even NFTs, we chose this mechanism because it does not limit value that can be staked compared to other PoS chains which have only one asset on their network. Also thanks to MBPoS you can use Kira and other DeFi's at the same time because this consensus supports staking derivatives.
And this consensus is great because its secured by multiple assets and it works in a way that the more assets are deposited and at stake the more secure our network becomes which is the totally opposite of other proof of stake chains :) You can learn more about MBPoS from our WP and introduction on medium: https://medium.com/kira-core/introduction-to-the-multi-bonded-proof-of-stake-60d95905c32b
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q4. Currently the most popular design for liquidity protocols is AMM. What model have you chosen for your exchange? I think the whole DeFi hype wasn't possible with these AMA format structures: Uniswap, Balancer, Curve. Right now we're seeing more attempts to update this model or get rid of it because of different cons for LPs.
Kira Network Team:
We actually don't use any automatic mechanisms or AMMs. Kira has a liquidity pool embedded into its protocol. It works super simple - Where people stake their coins on Kira, then the network increases its security -> our DeFi platform increases its liquidity therefore the revenue from the network fees increases as well and this creates incentives for users to stake even more, and the cycle repeats itself over over.
So this mechanism allows us to create the self enforcing positive feedback loop with basic economic forces and therefore induce liquidity without using any AMMs. You guys can check out this positive feedback loop on the iconographic we've created a while back
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q5. As I know the key issue for staking derivatives is to get liquidity for them. So how are you going to solve it? Maybe you consider an opportunity to bootstrap it with community activity?
Kira Network Team:
Our Interchain Exchange Protocol (IXP) - a module that is the main part of the Kira Network is designed to provide market access and liquidity to all digital asset types including staking derivatives. Kira network shares block and fee rewards with people that stake their tokens (staking derivatives can also be staked).
This not only allows you to stake on multiple chains at the same time and claim rewards on all but also increases security and liquidity of our protocol, which in turn increases network activity and rewards,this means that there are more incentives for people to stake even more which further attracts the user base - just like on the positive feedback loop chart above.
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q6. You know that most of the participants in the ICODrops community are active investors in cryptoassets. Can you tell us more about your tokenomics?
Kira Network Team:
The main building block of the Kira economy is KEX, Top kex ?? which is a native staking asset of the Kira Network. Basically staking KEX is the most efficient way of claiming revenues from the protocol operations, such as block and fee rewards. KEX holders have the ability to become part of the governance and the validator set of the Kira Network. Kira’s governance has then the ability to define interest rates for staking foreign tokens which in turn increases security and liquidity of our exchange protocol. And KEX acts as a reserve currency in terms of which staking all other assets is valued.
So it’s a governance that ensures that staking KEX is not only the most profitable in comparison to other tokens but also attracts other token holders and increases network activity. Of course you are free to stake any asset like btc, eth, atoms and so on and earn revenue on that but staking KEX will give you more rewards ;)
Oleg(ICODrops):
Milan, could you share some insights about your upcoming launch? As far as I understand, it will happen in the near future. On which blockchain are you going to issue your token in the beginning?
Kira Network Team:
Ok so all though we will have our native token, we decided to do the erc-20 public round within 4 weeks or so. We are still trying to figure out the logistics but what I can say now is that the round will be pretty small. We should make a full announcement regarding all public round details within a week or so.
So please stay tuned :)
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q7. Aligned incentives in the protocol and good tokenomics are the key to the success of each project. Tell us what are your nearest milestones? Maybe our users can get familiar with your product in the near future.
Kira Network Team:
We are focusing on the public testnet release which we anticipate to come within 2-3 months. We are targeting the end of Q4 for the mainnet as @miLanavaLmont just mentioned and will be launching in a similar fashion to polkadot: PoA with sudo -> Governance -> MBPoS -> removing sudo -> IXP -> sharding -> on-chain contracting. We are also working on the tool that will enable community to easily launch validator nodes with no tech knowledge required.
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q8. All experiments that are carried out in our cryptoassets sandbox suddenly could be stopped by regulators. It’s potentially one of the biggest issues for the crypto. Is Kira Network at great risk due to using fiat currencies? Why do you think your protocol will continue to function as intended?
Kira Network Team:
So you can stake any “digital” asset with Kira. And Kira will be more legally compliant than your typical PoS chains because we use a hub spoke architecture, similar to Cosmos Network. What that means is- we will have a Hub where all assets are going to be deposited or staked, and trading will happen on the Zones. Kira validators will have an option to choose whether or not they want to be Zone validators and take part in order matching on that particular trading zone.
Regarding the digital fiat specifically, we will partner with e-money.com and similar projects who have appropriate licenses and who will be governing those zones where digital fiat will be issued
Thanks to this mechanism all our network operators can remain legal compliant within their jurisdiction :)
Oleg(ICODrops):
Q9. To wrap up, what is your view on the future of cryptoassets? How will it evolve? Will DeFi be the key use case for crypto? Maybe you could tell us which industries is interesting for your personal investment portfolio.
Kira Network Team:
I think that some of the projects will die out because they are redundant and easily replicable without need to charge users extra for the service - just to have a token. In my opinion the future of crypto assets lies within the Interchain and Web3 ecosystem, the power of independent, specialized blockchain applications to freely communicate between each other without any scaling limitations. DeFi in combination with interchain is very likely going to become the first ever sustainable paradigm that the cryptocurrency ecosystem has seen.
My personal portfolio is tightly focused on interchain projects, protocols and networks utilizing webassembly. CosmWasm in case of Cosmos, Polkadot wasm, Dfinity wasm, Ethereum ewasm is what will help this ecosystem attract developers and grow beyond what we have ever seen before. We are making sure that Kira also belongs to this group of ecosystem projects that incentivises and easily attracts developers as well as secure the entire ecosystem because it’s extremely important when you are dealing with financial applications :)
Oleg(ICODrops):
Ahhh, every farmer would be happy with such perspective
Thank you very much for your answers guys! I hope we have a good discussion here
