New Features for KiX Beta: Coming Soon!

Hi KiX Krew

Our apologies for the length of time the KiX test platform has been down. This was not our choice — initially at least!

The Ethereum Dencun upgrade in April 2024 had some ripple effects in L2s, and Polygon was no exception; the highly stable Mumbai network was decommissioned and required a brand new testnet to be deployed.

Amoy is the latest Polygon testnet. Its release has been a success, but it was no small feat to transfer all of our infrastructure over. We had to make sure that all balances were migrated, all liquidity and winnings pools were recreated and many other aspects that go into creating The World’s Most Advanced Sports NFT Exchange were also attended to.

All of this was time-consuming, but as previously noted on our socials, we also saw an opportunity in our offline time to reduce the inconvenient development resets we occasionally have to make. We achieved this by pushing ahead and rolling the Amoy migration AND our outstanding Beta feature deployments all into one, meaning that when we launch our new platform update at the start of the UEFA Euro 2024 football tournament, we’ll have integrated and deployed all of the features for our Beta product — a significant project milestone and an exciting prospect for everyone we hope!

The objective of a Beta is to lock in product features before going to mainnet and officially launching a complete product. For KiX — a web3 project — this presents a difficult balance to maintain because the immutable nature of smart contracts in blockchain development means we’re unable to adopt the standard tech industry culture of ‘continuous integration and continuous deployment’ (CI/CD). This means we don’t have the same agility as other tech projects that can upgrade deployments after they go live; indeed, there are many examples in crypto history where highly disruptive forks were required after launch for precisely this reason, the most famous being the 2016 Ethereum hard fork.

This leaves web3 projects like KiX with the unenviable task of potentially overengineering a product before launching. The question is where to draw the line on smart contract development and sign off the feature suite as mature enough to launch — with no revisions allowed later!

Sometimes external factors can help you make that call, though, and for KiX, that point is irresistibly the start of the football festival — the Euros! So, the second week of June 2024 is now penciled in as the launch date for our Beta.

So what’s being released?

Well, at a high level we’ll be introducing the following:

DAT2DAT Swaps: Like cross chain swaps in crypto or term structure swaps in TradFi, the requirement for swaps within a trading platform is easily understood and KiX recognizes this with DAT2DAT swaps being the ability to sell one footballer DAT and buy another all in one trade.

This may seem like a simple task, but from an engineering perspective it’s huge. We all want to be able to optimize our portfolio as we see fit, with KiX this is possible because one of the advantages of our exchange is the ability to trade instantly with locked liquidity. However, having to execute two trades in order to make a swap is asking the trader to do double the work and more importantly pay double the commissions.

In one way this is not fair, if a trader is showing commitment to keeping their $KIX locked in a liquidity pool, and they are just moving their $KIX from one DAT to another, then they shouldn’t be disincentivized from doing so.

Step in DAT2DAT swaps, not only will traders be able to buy and sell DATs in one trade, we are also going to reward this commitment to the ecosystem with a 50% discount on commissions. The sell-to-close leg of the trade will still be charged at 1%, but the buy-to-open leg, the trade of buying a new DAT NFT, will be commission free!

$KIX Exchange: Now we are getting ready to launch our $KIX platform token, we will need to deploy our internal market maker for the provision of trading it with USDT.
KiX is an eco-system with its own DeX AMM, it will allow traders to on-ramp via service providers from fiat and directly buy our platform token $KIX — this is the lifeblood of the platform, paired with the USDT stable coin.

However, before we can do this, we need to test the $KIX/$USDT AMM, so again we’ll make this available for Beta in June. In this iteration traders will be able to buy and sell FreeKIX directly from within the environment. Other projects list their tokens externally on 3rd party DeXs like Uniswap or Pancake Swap, but we want to keep the reserves as deep as possible to avoid slippage, so in order to achieve this goal our own $KIX AMM allows us to do that.

Further to this we want to note that the KiX project will be bootstrapping liquidity as we go, this means that all $KIX token issuance will be through the internal AMM as the primary market. However, because the token is an ERC20, there will be nothing to stop additional secondary markets from opening up.

FreeUSDT Airdrop: In the flow of buying FreeKiX, traders will be airdropped a new token called FreeUSDT. The objective of using this new version of the well known stablecoin is to test the issuance of $KIX and its AMM liquidity bootstrapping.

Vote Locked $KIX (vlKIX): The $KIX platform token doubles up as both a utility token and a governance token. The governance token version of $KIX is called vlKIX and is created once users lock their $KIX platform token into smart contract vaults, exchanging them in a 1:1 ratio for vlKIX.

All holders of the $KIX platform token are automatically made members of the KiX DAO foundation, but voting power is only granted with the governance token, so vlKIX allows active participation in the KiX DAO.

Again, this functionality needs testing and so it’ll also be deployed in the next release when traders will have the option to lock their $KIX in exchange for vlKIX and then vote for initiatives within the DAO.

There will certainly be more new features too in the KiX Beta, not least the introduction of new footballer DATs in time for the UEFA Euro 2024 tournament, but these four are likely to be our most important at this time; the introduction of the KiX DEX to allow for on- and off-ramping, the provision of a FreeUSDT airdrop to allow the free-to-play testing of the DEX, the ability to swap DATs in a single transaction once they’re purchased and the ability to lock and hold $KIX in exchange for voting power on the KiX DAO.

Lots to play with, we hope you agree, and we’re really looking forward to you joining in the fun in testing.

So stand by KiXKrew, Beta is Coming… Soon!

ℹ️ Ask us questions and join the conversation on the KiX Telegram Group