Koinos FAQs

If you have more questions about Koinos be sure to stop by the Koinos discord server or telegram.

Follow Koinos Group on Twitter for information related to the company developing Koinos.

Follow Koinos Network on Twitter for information about the decentralized technology designed to make blockchain accessible to all

Index

1. What is the mission of Koinos?
2. What is the mission of Koinos Group?
3. When will mainnet be released?
4. How will mainnet tokens be distributed?
5. How is Koinos Fee-less (what is Mana)?
6. How does Mana regeneration work?
7. What is proof-of-burn?
8. How does Koinos get upgraded without hard forks?
9. What is Universal Language Support?
10. How decentralized is Koinos?
11. How does Koinos mainnet decentralize governance?
12. What is the TPS?
13. Was there an ICO?
14. What are the features of mainnet?
15. Ethereum compatability?
16. How is the team funded?
17. How will Koinos scale?
18. How composable is Koinos?

What is the mission of Koinos?

The mission behind Koinos is to accelerate decentralization through accessibility. Koinos is an evolving, fee-less, blockchain framework that powers Koinos main net; the most accessible blockchain in the world.

What is the mission of Koinos Group?

Koinos Group is the company that invented Koinos and a group of people who share the mission of accelerating decentralization through accessibility. We further this mission by helping organizations leverage Koinos to leverage decentralization to create more value.

When will main net be released?

Main net was released on November the 5th, 2022 and fully decentralized on December 5th, 2022.

How were main net tokens be distributed?

The initial token balances on main net were be determined entirely by the token balances of the KOIN ERC20 (i.e. the KOIN tokens on Ethereum that were distributed through proof of work mining). This mechanism within the smart contract allows for the creation of a decentralized record of all token balances and total supply at the time of use (i.e. a “snapshot”). The snapshot occurred on October 31st, 2023.

How is Koinos fee-less?

Koinos features a new concept called “mana” that is the most innovative solution to the halting problem since the invention of Ethereum’s “gas.” It is a property of the KOIN token that gets “consumed” as a user performs fee-less transactions, but that also regenerates over time. This means that even if all of a user’s mana gets consumed, all they have to do is wait if they want to perform more fee-less transactions without having to purchase additional KOIN. Once any mana in a token is consumed, that token becomes locked (non-transferrable) for the duration of the regen period.

To learn more about mana, read the whitepaper!

How does Mana regeneration work?

Mana recovers continuously over 5 days. Imagine you have 100 KOIN. That means you can consume 100 Mana worth of network resources without spending any tokens (i.e. for free). Since Mana regenerates continuously, and not all at once at the very end of the 5 day period, that means after two days you will have recovered 40 mana. In other words, just because you use up all of your Mana, that does not mean you will have to wait 5 days to use Koinos again.

Users will always not only be able to know exactly how much Mana they have at any time by querying the Mana smart contract, but they will also be able to get a very good idea of how much they can do on the blockchain at that moment in time. This is because the Mana contract calculates what the recharge would be if you used Mana at that exact moment in time. In the CLI wallet, mana is returned along with KOIN using the balance command.

What is proof-of-burn?

In addition to being fast with zero fees, the KOIN token is intended to deliver on Satoshi’s original vision of a truly peer-to-peer electronic cash that utilizes spare computational resources and does not require dedicated hardware. In other words, it is provably egalitarian. Iain Stewart proposed proof-of-burn in 2012, a year after proof-of-stake was proposed, and we believe this represents the next stage of evolution in consensus algorithms. Proof-of-burn enables Koinos to accomplish provable egalitarianism by delivering the economics of proof-of-work with even higher efficiency than proof-of-stake. The end result of this implementation is a consensus system that should be more decentralized than proof-of-work and more efficient than proof-of-stake.

To learn more about proof-of-burn, read the whitepaper!

How does Koinos get upgraded without hard forks?

Koinos mainnet can be upgraded without hard forks thanks to its use of the Koinos blockchain framework. The Koinos blockchain framework is effectively the world’s simplest, fully functional, general purpose blockchain contained within a microservice architecture. The blockchain (i.e. the chain microservice) features natively implemented system calls that contain only the cryptographic functions necessary for constructing a technically true blockchain along with logic for dispatching a node between the native system calls and newer system calls implemented as smart contracts (i.e. WASM implementations) running in the virtual machine. This combination of native implementations and “system smart contracts” form a high-performance, vertically scalable, and upgradeable blockchain “kernel” (the framework) that allows for any behavior to be added to the blockchain without requiring a hard fork.

To learn more about fork-less upgrades, read the whitepaper!

What is Universal Language Support?

Ethereum dramatically expanded the creative space available to developers by allowing them to leverage a single, custom-built, Turing complete programming language; Solidity. Koinos dramatically expands that creative space once again by allowing developers to work in all of the most used Turing complete programming languages, starting with C++ and TypeScript (using AssemblyScript), but with more languages to come. Koinos accomplishes this through the combination of three open source technologies built and maintained by the best teams in the world, all of which have ever-increasing language support. They are: (1) WebAssembly, (2) Protocol Buffers, and (3) the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol.

To learn more about Universal Language Support, read the whitepaper!

How does Koinos mainnet decentralize governance?

The high degree of upgradeability enabled by the Koinos blockchain framework makes governance the bottleneck instead of the hard fork process. Like every system behavior, governance is “just” another smart contract on Koinos, albeit one with system level privileges and special importance in the upgrade process. The governance contract is modeled off of how the Bitcoin network manages upgrades (e.g. SegWit) and can be thought of as the world’s simplest Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). It allows people to: (1) Propose upgrades, (2) Review upgrades during a “review period,” (3) Cast votes on upgrades during a “vote period” and (4) at the end of the vote period, the proposal must pass or fail.

Since the governance system is itself a Koinos smart contract, all of these parameters can be changed without a hard fork. In fact, this is what ultimately distinguishes Koinos as the only blockchain truly capable of evolution; governance can upgrade itself! But as the most important component of the system, it should be much harder to change governance than any other part of the system. For that reason, a 75% supermajority vote is required for governance upgrades, while only a 60% majority is required for non-governance system upgrades (system call overrides and system contract promotions). But again, even these numbers can be modified by governance (with a 75% majority).

To learn more about the mainnet governance system, read the whitepaper!

What is the TPS (transactions per second)?

Koinos is a blockchain framework (layer 0) designed to deliver the best blockchain-based user experience in the world, not necessarily the highest TPS number. It is a minimum viable blockchain waiting to get features from smart contracts that are uploaded by developers. How many transactions a given blockchain can process per second is a function of its block size and its block time (how frequently it produces blocks) which will be parameters that are set by developers launching Koinos blockchains.

Koinos Group is designing a flagship implementation (“layer 1”) of the Koinos blockchain framework (the “mainnet”), but the high level features have not yet been disclosed because the related smart contracts have not yet been developed. This highlights how the modular upgradeability of Koinos reverses the development process allowing developers to defer commitment on high level features until late in the development process.

Was there an ICO?

No. The KOIN token launch was modeled off Bitcoin to maximize accessibility and made innovative use of the Ethereum blockchain to further maximize accessibility. Instead of having to access an entirely new blockchain, people could use an incredibly easy-to-use, free, and open mining program to submit CPU-optimized proofs-of-work to an Ethereum smart contract which would in turn distribute KOIN tokens based on the size of the proofs.

The purpose of this Ethereum-based token is to pre-seed the Koinos ecosystem with a base level of decentralization. This means that the only way to acquire KOIN was through PoW mining or open market purchases so there was no pre-mine, ICO, IEO, or any other IxO (lol).

What are the features of mainnet?

Koinos mainnet is a general purpose blockchain-based decentralized network that allows for free-to-use applications through a “Mana” mechanism that dynamically prices network resources in opportunity cost (not tokens) and allows for free-to-use dApps through Mana “delegation.” Proof-of-burn is implemented as a consensus algorithm to maximize efficiency, decentralization, and provable egalitarianism while thwarting the exchange attack and mitigating spam. The Koinos blockchain framework is used for fork-less upgrades as a result of its modular upgradeability. This creates a free-to-use and truly decentralized general purpose blockchain with a mainstream user experience that maximizes accessibility to end-users, developers, and node operators.

To learn more about mainnet, read the whitepaper

Is Koinos “Ethereum-compatible”?

Koinos is a WASM-based chain which it gives it far higher performance than Ethereum, but also means that it does not use EVM. However, maximum accessibility is the ultimate compatibility. Koinos is designed so that developers can use the programming languages they already know and love to build their applications, not learn new languages like Solidity. Any developer who can write a smart contract in Solidity can easily rewrite that smart contract in C++ or TypeScript, which are the first two languages Koinos will support.

How is the team funded?

Koinos Group is being modeled off traditional tech growth companies that sacrifice profits in the early years to build a user base and leverage unique knowledge of an ecosystem to find product-market fit for a high-margin software product.

Koinos Group was founded by the core development team behind the Steem blockchain to accelerate the transition to a more decentralized future by focusing on accessibility. This team worked together for 4+ years at Steemit on the Steem blockchain, at the time the most accessible blockchain by orders of magnitude, and we have now been working together for nearly 2 years on Koinos. Every member of Koinos Group has been working solely for equity in the company, which means they believe in the product and the business plan, and have a vested interest in seeing both the platform and the company succeed.

Koinos Group had to acquire its KOIN like everyone else through either PoW mining or open market purchases, making it impossible to confuse holding KOIN as any kind of investment in Koinos Group. This aligns its incentives with the incentives of the Koinos community.

How will Koinos scale?

The ultimate scaling solution is the ability to rapidly integrate the most efficient, secure, and well-maintained scaling solutions as they emerge. In other words, upgradeability is the ultimate scaling solution which is why Koinos is designed to be the most upgradeable blockchain in the world. Whether the best solutions leverage inter-chain communication, sharding, or something else entirely, Koinos will be ready to take advantage of any or all of these.

How Composable is Koinos?

Koinos has the highest degree of composability possible because it is the only blockchain framework to move all of the system logic into smart contracts. When we’re talking about composability in the blockchain context, what we are talking about is the ability for decentralized application developers to repurpose code that is already running on the blockchain within their applications (i.e. to “compose” their applications).

Most blockchains that claim “high composability” are just saying that they don’t have sharding, which is an attempt to rebrand a limitation as a value-add. Koinos is optimized for flexibility which means that it could shard, or not shard, based on the smart contracts that are running on it.

Because all of the system logic is contained in smart contract modules, application developers will be able to not just repurpose the smart contracts written by other dApp developers, they’ll be able to repurpose the code written by the most experienced blockchain engineers in the world; the engineers building Koinos-based blockchains.

But wait there’s more! Because these smart contracts will be written in an ever growing number of the most used programming languages in the world, developers won’t just be able to find the perfect smart contract for their needs, they will be able to find smart contracts written in their preferred programming language! This takes the composability of Koinos, already far greater than any other protocol, to an entirely new level!

If you have any more questions you would like to answer, feel free to leave them as comments or stop on by one of our weekly AMAs on Thursday at 2:00 PM EST.

Follow us on Twitter for updates and the latest AMA location.