Happy New Year and Happy New Decade dear Kyberians!

Wow, what a great year it’s been, and what a great year is coming up! In 2019 we grew, and grew, and grew. We increased our volumes, vastly expanded our ecosystem, and pumped liquidity far and wide across the Ethereum landscape. In 2020 we’re aiming even higher with the introduction of Katalyst, our major protocol upgrade that includes an exciting new DAO governance mechanism running on a completely new token model. We’ve never been more excited to tackle a new year and take Kyber to the next level!

Katalyst

So what is Katalyst? In a nutshell, you can think of Katalyst as the addition of new core pieces to Kyber to increase liquidity, increase stakeholder participation, and grow our liquidity protocol even further.

The first key addition is the ability to distribute protocol fees across multiple stakeholders. While until now, fees collected were either burnt or partially distributed to dapp integrations, the new model allows fees to be distributed as rebates to market makers, rewarded to KNC stakers for voting on protocol parameters, and burnt. Additionally, dapp integrations now have the freedom to set custom spreads based on their own individual business cases.

The second new piece is the release of KyberDAO. Managed by a wide range of KNC stakers including the wider community, dapps, wallets, and VCs, this DAO will be voting on how the protocol fees should be distributed amongst rebates, rewards, and burning, as well as deciding on various network updates. This gives stakeholders a direct say in the setup of Kyber Network’s incentive structure and we believe, will collectively lead to the best outcome for long term growth of the network.

Here’s an infographic with some more details and we highly recommend checking out our full blog post on Katalyst here.

Kyber Network Stats

Although December is usually a time of decreased trading activity due to Christmas and holiday festivities, for Kyber, it was a month of new all time highs across various metrics.

We saw our highest monthly trade numbers since mainnet launch with 55,867 total trades in December, highest unique number of addresses trading through Kyber at 6,897 addresses, and second highest first time addresses at 3,424 addresses.

Although ETH and USD volumes were down after November’s trading frenzy, December was still the 4th best performing month this year as measured by volume: