Today, we’ll be having a look at Komodo, one of the earliest platform projects that have been around since early 2017. Komodo is also one of the few ICOs held in BTC instead of Ethereum, which was far more popular for fundraising at that time. The reason for this is that Komodo appears to have a strong affinity for the original Bitcoin blockchain.

Komodo first emerged as a source-code fork of the Zcash blockchain, which itself began as a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. Due to this, many of the essential parts of both coins are still included in the Komodo ecosystem. A delayed proof of work security mechanism was added to the Komodo Platform in order to provide stronger security for the KMD blockchain, as well as all other projects that create a blockchain with Komodo’s technology.

Let’s zoom in on some of the details about the Komodo ecosystem, who’s behind the platform and what we can expect to see in the future.

What is Komodo?

Komodo describes itself as “An Open, Composable Smart Chain Platform.” The goal for Komodo is for developers and businesses to build customized, application-specific blockchains, known as Smart Chains. These Smart Chains have their own network, consensus rules, and currencies. They also have access to a wide variety of modules, features, and technologies.

Komodo aims to have a large pool of developers contributing to the ecosystem and building with the use of the technologies created by them. Anyone that develops with the use of Komodo is not building on top of Komodo, but is, in fact, building their own autonomous blockchain. These projects are independent blockchains that eventually connect to the Komodo ecosystem, but they are no side chains or forks in any way. The reasons for joining the Komodo ecosystem are different for every project but there are a few essential parts that benefit each project.

Security

The Komodo blockchain is a Proof-Of-Work blockchain, using the Equihash algorithm. Although there is a slight adjustment to this system, the Delayed Proof-of-Work (dPoW) security system. What this means is the security level of Bitcoin, which is nearly impossible to overpower, is extended to Komodo and for each and every project out there that builds a Smart Chain with Komodo’s technology. Whenever Bitcoin remains safe, Komodo stays safe. With a decentralized network of 64 Notary Nodes, which notarize block hashes to the Bitcoin blockchain, the entire ecosystem remains secure. Anyone who tries attempts to alter a block in the Komodo chain or any Smart Chain would need to alter the Bitcoin blockchain as well. As we’ve seen for the past years, this is nearly impossible.

Privacy

As Komodo originated from the Zcash blockchain, the zk-SNARK protocol was inherited to the Komodo blockchain. The zk-SNARK protocol integrates both anonymity and privacy to the ecosystem. Anyone that wishes to develop a Smart Chain can choose between a chain that allows anonymous transactions or one that is fully transparent.

The zero-knowledge proof mechanism masks each transaction on the blockchain. This shields the amount of funds you hold, transact or to which address the funds are being sent to. At the same time, miners that are verifying the Blockchain are supposed to have the ability to confirm the right transactions and find out nobody is double-spending. This can be done with ‘Zero-knowledge’ given to the miners. This is important in many ways. Imagine anyone would be able to see the balance of funds in your bank account as soon as you transact with this account, that would be rather odd. Zero-knowledge proofs prevent this strange scenario.

Open-Source

With any decentralized company, the goal is to cut out unnecessary intermediaries and bring the power to the people. That being said, the act of opening up all your technology to the public eye is an act that’s not done by each and every project. This is the true test you can put yourself through in order to be able to back-up your own claims. With many ICO’s back in the day, the technology was far behind all the intensive marketing efforts, with Komodo that’s the other way around. The technology is open for anyone to see and for anyone to contribute to.

Scalability

The main selling point for many cryptocurrency projects is scalability. The main bottleneck for the Ethereum blockchain is that it cannot scale and has been attempting to introduce ‘Sharding’ for a long time now. Any chain that’s attempting to disrupt industries or to make a substantial impact on the global economy, should be able to handle an influx of transactions of immense proportions. Komodo has created a solution for this issue claiming to be able to achieve as much as 20,000 transactions per second, achieved in a stress test. Where most blockchains struggle to reach 1,000 transactions per second, Komodo allows any Smart Chain to do way more than that and to scale without limits; With each transaction 100 payments can be made. What this means, in theory, millions of payments can be done every single second within the Komodo ecosystem. These are the kind of numbers that are reached by payments companies like VISA.

Easy-to-use

With the new released Antara Composer, setting up your own Smart Chain is as easy as clicking a few buttons. Of course, you need to understand some basic technology and some basic principles of the blockchain industry. You need to know what a wallet address is, a public key and a couple more things, but besides that, it’s as easy as shopping online. Komodo will then do all the hard work for you and even let you decide how decentralized you want to make it, how many coins you want to pre-mine, the number of nodes, and more. It’s impressive to see how easy it is to set up a Smart Chain that’s working properly nowadays.

What is the KMD coin?

Back in early 2017, the KMD coin was sold during the ICO for 10 cents per coin. With the craze in the bullrun, the price of KMD skyrocketed all the way to 12 dollars, incredible. Nowadays, price is sitting around 50 cents per coin with the supply and market cap looking like this:

Market Cap: $66.811.408 USD

Circulating Supply: 116.429.169 KMD

Total Supply: 200.000.000 KMD

The beauty of the KMD coin is that it earns you 5% interest annually for simply holding the coins in a wallet you control. It functions as a native coin in the ecosystem bringing more validation to the network as the dPOW network wouldn’t be able to function without the KMD coin.

Who is behind Komodo?

Over the years, we’ve seen many anonymous developers hide behind a forum nickname or something similar to this. These people didn’t feel like putting themselves into the public eye and giving out their real names to anyone in the world. As for Komodo, it happened to be found by ‘jl777’ and ‘ca333’, the Lead Developer and Chief Technology Officer, respectively. While jl777 remains anonymous, ca333 has started using his real name, Kadan Stadelmann, and has even started doing a number of livestream interviews. The company has grown to around 30 members these days, with some bright minds all across the board. The team is backed up by a strong community of people that are actively contributing to the ecosystem.

What can we expect in the future for Komodo?

There’s a great deal of development going on at Komodo and, if you pay attention to their recent updates, that’s the core message. With a growing team and real solutions that are generating revenue across the board, Komodo is sure to be around for the foreseeable future. They have been contributing to the industry by releasing tons of products and are set to do more and more to evolve together. Some of the examples are the following:

AtomicDEX – The only ‘true’ decentralized exchange using atomic swaps

Antara Framework – A development toolkit for building blockchain-based solutions

Blockchain Security Service – extra security for smaller Proof of Work chains

With the market going down and many projects struggling to make ends meet, Komodo has been steadily growing and developing. Their project has only gotten stronger over time and now is the time they’re truly showing they can standoff against the tough competition in this industry. With dozens of companies jumping from the ground each day in this industry, it’s tough to keep up with the competition. Komodo has managed to do so for the past few years and has strengthened on their way. It’s a promising look into the future for Komodo, so let’s keep an eye on them and see what they have in store for all of us.