End User Token Swaps: Improving the ability to exchange tokens seamlessly will encourage usage. Kyber will keep pushing for adoption of this use case in popular wallets, third party websites, and mobile apps. There will be joint marketing campaigns with reputable projects in the space to increase adoption and educate users. Exchanges and Trading: More pooling and sharing of liquidity, more trading and arbitrage opportunities. Kyber will invite more centralized and decentralized exchanges to leverage the on-chain liquidity pool that is available in the network. We will also connect to other on-chain liquidity sources to integrate them to the combined liquidity pool. On the other hand, the team will provide more tools, API documentation for other traders and takers to easily trade with Kyber. Payments For NFT and Commerce: Increase usage of crypto to make payments for goods, services, and NFTs (Non-fungible tokens e.g. Etheremon), in a completely decentralized manner. Kyber will drive adoption of crypto payments, especially those involving stable coins, to make it easy for anyone to pay from other tokens, and for merchants to accept cryptocurrencies without the worries of value volatility. Decentralized Finance: Emergence of a variety of advanced financial instruments and options to manage assets in ways that provide either stability or leverage, and independent of barriers, exorbitant fees and opacity. Several financial DApps and protocols have already integrated with Kyber for their liquidity needs in their lending networks, decentralized funds and so on. Kyber will keep collaborating and working with other teams and protocols to deliver more integrations and strengthen our position in DeFi. Liquidity Providers: Providing a range of options to allow token holders to contribute their assets seamlessly in order to earn fees, while facilitating liquidity for the growing variety of ecosystem needs. Kyber will connect with more on-chain liquidity sources (e.g. Uniswap, Bancor) to provide an aggregated liquidity pool for users, while at the same time making liquidity contribution much easier for end users with permissionless order book reserves.

2019 Plans

So far in 2019, Kyber has been enabling in-wallet token swaps for Enjin Wallet, facilitating payments for real world items through EDCON’s acceptance of Kyber-supported tokens for ticket purchases, and we have continued the expansion of our reserves with The Abyss onboarding as the 16th reserve. We have also started working with major players on ecosystem initiatives, for instance an open initiative with ConsenSys and other partners to simplify crypto-compliance around the world.

We will be launching KyberSwap as a standalone token swap service in order to better boost end user adoption. There will be a clear distinction between KyberSwap the token swap service, and Kyber Network, the protocol that powers the service. Within this context, KyberSwap will soon move out of kyber.network to its own dedicated domain KyberSwap.com. This move will be accompanied by a host of new features, including a brand new interface, AI-powered token analytics to help you decide on which tokens to swap, and many others. Read the KyberSwap.com launch announcement here.

Besides the above mentioned efforts, we will also be working with the rest of the larger crypto ecosystem to promote and innovate on more daily use cases that can be incorporated into the lives of regular investors and users. This will take the form of joint marketing efforts, hackathons and awareness building. Growing the decentralised economy is not the role of a single project, but requires the joint effort of all the passionate users, committed developers and prominent projects in the space.

Towards a community that will maintain, grow and govern Kyber together

The long term goal of Kyber Network is to become the main transaction layer for the decentralized economy, facilitating the essential instant liquidity between all types of tokens - a property that is necessary for a large number of economic use cases.

As the initial builders and maintainers, the Kyber team will ensure that the initial implementations are executed and we will bootstrap adoption for these implementations. We aim to install the technical framework for the creation of projects such as KyberSwap and reserves that are both profitable and have the potential to become key anchors of the Kyber protocol, while we grow the necessary community.

To achieve long term sustainability for Kyber, we will need to have a strong community of developers, network maintainers, and KNC stakeholders who can maintain, grow and govern Kyber together. This community will need to be able to work together to: build tech, understand the overall system to make good proposals and decisions, and help to drive adoption in terms of end users, applications, and implementations on other chains. Growing this community will take a few years and mainly take on 3 forms:

Continued awareness, education, and technical training to reach a critical mass of community members with the required knowledge and expertise. Creating a fertile ground for the community to contribute to decision making, protocol evangelism, creation of new use cases and improving the core source code. Putting in place an open, transparent and sustainable incentive system to reward contributors. This will take the form of open grants, treasury for proposals and participation rewards.

It is important to incrementally move towards a future where adoption and technical contributions comes from an educated, engaged and empowered community, rather than a single centralized entity.

KNC: Economic, Governance, Treasury Functions

The goal of KNC (Kyber Network Crystal) is to make Kyber function as a cohesive community and robust economic system.

Besides KNC’s current role in facilitating the smooth operation of the reserves system and being utilized for network fees, we will continue to observe how best to utilize KNC to enhance the economic value of the various implementations Kyber will be on. Steps will be taken to propose any changes or improvements. In the meantime, plans will be made for KNC to be used in the context of community governance and treasury for any smart contract-enabled blockchain the Kyber protocol is implemented on.

Firstly, KNC will be utilized for DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) governance, both at the protocol level and for the individual implementations on the various chains. For protocol level specs and initiatives, we expect there to be an overall DAO which will make decisions for the overall direction. For individual implementations, there will be a host of tokenomic parameters, token listings, and upgrade decisions which the community will in turn be able to vote and decide on. This DAO will be one manifestation of our community building efforts moving forward.

Secondly, on top of the economics and governance usage of KNC, we expect there to be a KNC-based treasury where the network maintainers and DAO members can leverage as a source of funds to fund development, marketing and growth of the Kyber protocol via open grant programs and proposals. This will allow a network of the most important contributors — those who understand Kyber well, drive adoption, and build the core platform — to earn part of their income with KNC. By getting KNC into the hands of contributors, and giving them an economic interest in the success of the platform, we will chart the way forward towards a sustainable, decentralized system and community.

KNC is an integral part of Kyber, both at the protocol and the governance level, and will serve increasingly important roles in our push for community participation and governance.

2019 Plans

In 2018, we made good strides in community development, setting up a developer community that regularly engages in meaningful discussions to improve the protocol and assist fellow community members in solving technical issues. We also had the opportunity to interact with many talented developers and crypto enthusiasts by participating in various global hackathons, conferences, and meetups, which we have highlighted in our August, September and October-November community updates.

That said, community involvement so far has been mostly limited to basic feedback and discussion, as opposed to active participation. We will be working hard over the next few years to start putting in place a KNC-based technical, treasury, and governance system that facilitates effective collaboration, coordination, and convergence between all the stakeholders.

In 2019, the plans will take the form of DAO experiments where KNC stakeholders and the broader Kyber community will be able to vote on important tokenomic parameters, opening up the ability for the community to contribute to marketing and engineering efforts, as well as ensuring an open, transparent grant system for anyone to propose projects.

These plans will be rolled out gradually over the course of the year. It will be accompanied by a consistent push on awareness to broad sections of the crypto space, education to existing community members, and training for developers to understand the Kyber protocol.

As such, it is best to understand this year as laying the foundation for creating a long term and sustainable communication, governance and treasury framework. Governance changes, in particular, take a long time to be fully understood, adopted and accepted by the community and achieve legitimacy. It is critical that we, as a community, do not optimize for the short term but focus on making Kyber a vital backbone of the decentralized space for the long run.

Forward, Together

We hope this post articulates the rationale and the objectives to everyone who is involved or interested in being involved in the Kyber project. As the initial protocol maintainers, we are focused on the key objectives outlined in this post.

Helping Kyber the protocol become implemented in blockchains where vibrant decentralized economies are taking shape.

Driving awareness and bootstrapping adoption of Kyber and the decentralized economy in general.

Establishing a sustainable collaboration, governance and treasury system for the key stakeholders to effectively work together.

2019 will represent both an affirmation of the work that had been done, while simultaneously expanding the scope of Kyber. The decentralized world shines bright, and it is critical we let go of false prophets, platforms and promises, and focus on delivering, shipping and adoption.

Ultimately, we have a plan to bring Kyber forward, where core developers, partners and stakeholders come together as one community to cultivate both the Kyber ecosystem and the wider decentralized space. For all of us, there will be many hurdles to cross, many lessons to learn, and many disagreements to overcome. But we are confident that we will emerge stronger out of every challenge, and together, we will do our part to move towards a more innovative, open and transparent world.

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