An Expedition Through The Cosmos

If there’s one part that has been consistent throughout our journey, it’s how the Universe (the Cosmos described as a complex, orderly whole) connected us with the most amazing advisors, investors, and business partners we could have imagined. Sometimes it blows me away with how everyone has helped drive this project forward and provided opportunities and value at every turn.

Kuende’s leading private sale investor is Dokia Capital, an important player in the crypto space. The fund has perfectly balanced risk taking with vision, therefore making only big and well placed investments in projects that changed the entire blockchain environment. They have invested in the early private stages in projects such as Ethereum, Polkadot, OmiseGo, Digix and Cosmos.

Dokia is a Cosmos Hub Validator with almost 9 million ATOMs at stake and they are one of the many reasons we fell in love with the Cosmos project and their community. Their CTO, Aurel Iancu, is also one of our advisors, and he has been more than supportive with us since the beginning. We always saw him as the blockchain mentor that helped us to better understand how Tendermint technology works. Even during early releases, he encouraged us to play with the Cosmos SDK to attain a better understanding of its intricacies.

Blockchain Guided By Our User Focus

After a thorough analysis of the strong points and limitations of various blockchain technologies, and considering the nature of our product, we arrived at the three features a viable solution would offer:

No user fee for micro-transactions

Ability to handle large transaction volumes

Minimal or no delay for transaction validation

One of the goals that Kuende’s team has had is to make sure that we are a user-friendly ecosystem. The blockchain can be complex, but we know that the best way to increase user adoption is through an intuitive system that can be accessed by anyone. To this end, having no transaction fees and the ability to handle large amounts of transactions were non-negotiable. We analyzed blockchain solutions that use either Distributed Proof of Stake (dPOS) or Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) as a method of consensus.

Unfortunately, existing solutions have massive trade-offs either in technological maturity or decentralization of governance. We concluded that the risks associated with the external factors are too high in these circumstances.

Some projects present great appeal, but they are little more than proposals at the moment. Kuende’s development roadmap shouldn’t, and will never be dependent on future releases of other projects. Our team concluded that we cannot rely on mere promises at this time. We needed a robust solution.

The Kuende users and the respective user experience are our top priorities. As a result, at this time we cannot broadcast all the transactions that happen in Kuende on the blockchain. Focusing on the quality that Kuende delivers to its end users made us embrace the tokenized gamification model for the Challenge Framework.

With that being said, as we are at this moment constrained by scalability limitations of existing solutions, we will approach the following 2-steps strategy:

1. Using Ethereum & Our Custom Internal Ledger

The first step in this process is to develop an unique on-chain/off-chain solution that uses both the Ethereum blockchain and our own open-source, internal ledger. We already begun the development on this a few months ago. This way, we can enable our users to engage with a working solution and make use of the tokens within the platform shortly after the ICO ends. On that note, registration ends October 15th, so be sure to join while you still can!

The fast hybrid release is going to provide insights for the second step, allowing us to calibrate the mechanics of our future, fully on-chain economy that is informed by user behavior.

2. Our Tendermint Based Blockchain as a Zone in the Internet of Blockchains - Cosmos Network

We believe in the nearly-unlimited potential of blockchain technology. Our team has found that the best long-term solution is developing our own blockchain that users can join and become parts of the governance. With our own blockchain, we have flexibility to build a custom solution that solves our needs, such as empowering users to interact with a blockchain without prior technical knowledge. Our own blockchain grants us the ability to provide the privacy, security, and performance without any trade offs or compromises.

Tendermint has enabled us to accomplish all this, and more. Thanks to their team’s amazing work, we can focus on developing application specific logic without having to invest undue time in network mechanics and the consensus that blockchain relies on.

Tendermint Core is Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) middleware that takes a state transition machine — written in any programming language — and securely replicates it on many machines. In other words, a blockchain.

With Tendermint at our core and with the Internet of Blockchains in mind, Kuende will be one of the pioneer zones in the Cosmos ecosystem, and the first all-in-one social media network within the Cosmos Hub.

Cosmos is a launch pad for new cryptocurrencies, upgrades to existing cryptocurrencies, innovation decentralized applications and a platform for smart contracts. Cosmos goes beyond a single distributed ledger, paving the way for a free market “Internet of Blockchains”. Developers can use this technology to create their own blockchain to compete or complement the Cosmos Hub.

This will allow Kuende to seamlessly interact with other blockchains that are part of the network as well as with external chains too (eg. Bitcoin, Ethereum). By having this seamless way of interacting with other chains, Kuende can easily provide businesses that use blockchain technology with a way to challenge and reward their audiences not only with Kuende’s tokens, but with their own tokens as well.

Happy Anniversary Present

I can’t think of a better anniversary present for Kuende’s ICO than to see this dream come true! Kuende is now officially one of the projects confirmed in Cosmos & Tendermint Ecosystem (see the entire list here).

To summarize, Kuende is creating its own Tendermint based blockchain using the Cosmos SDK. Building our own solution enables us to focus on our top product priority, the user experience. We can tackle any scaling issue head-on, and focus on the user instead of getting bogged down by technicals. Working with Dokia Capital is a big reason for this move forward and we owe much to them, and I am eternally grateful for Aurel Iancu’s assistance.

As we move onward, closer and closer to our public sale date of October 15th, the team and I are excited to have such a powerful solution available. Thank you for joining us on this special day, I can’t wait to share more with you very soon!