Koinos (KOIN)

A zero fee project that allows developers to launch their blockchains on top of it.

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on:
• Testnet release:
• Mainnet release: "Mainnet features should be completed by early 2022." (9-9-2021), went live 5-11-2022.

History

• From its FAQ (9-9-2021):

"Koinos Group worked together for 4+ years at Steemit on the Steem blockchain and we have now been working together for nearly 2 years on Koinos."

• From Cointelegraph (13-10-2020):

"Andrew Levine — who described himself as the Steemit “designated non-engineer” executive — co-founded OpenOrchard with six of his former teammates. The new-old team set to design a blockchain from scratch, Koinos, something of a Steem 2.0 that would fix all of its technical deficiencies."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Governance

DAO

• From its whitepaper (21-11-2022):

"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. Votes are cast by producing a block so influence over governance is based on how many tokens a user has burned, not how much they hold (stake). Application of the upgrade is delayed 1 week to ensure developers and businesses have time to adapt their systems to the upgrade. To prevent the spamming of proposals, users must burn KOIN whenever they submit a proposal. In order to ensure this fee can be calculated in a decentralized and autonomous manner, the burn fee is equal to the total supply divided by 1,000,000. Since all actions on the blockchain must also pay a fee in Mana, the “resource credit limit” for submitting a proposal is 1/10th of the burn fee, or 10 Mana in the previous example. 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)."

Token

Launch

• From its FAQ (9-9-2021):

"The initial token balances on mainnet will 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). That ERC20 was implemented using OpenZeppelin’s tooling including their snapshot mechanism. 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”). No date has been announced for the snapshot that will be used for mainnet."

Token Allocation

• From its whitepaper (21-11-2022):

"The KOIN token supply will expand and contract based on market conditions, thereby delivering the kind of economic “levers” featured in the most advanced global currencies, but administered in a fully decentralized and algorithmic manner.

VHP is always treated on a 1:1 basis with KOIN. For every unit of KOIN burned a specified account will receive that many units of VHP. When an account with VHP receives units of KOIN as a block reward, their VHP balance is reduced by that many units. In this way VHP acts as a proxy for KOIN and the total supply of VHP and KOIN can be summed to establish the “virtual token supply” for the purpose of setting a maximum rate of new token creation. To ensure that there is always incentive to produce blocks there must be a net positive rate of new token creation. Initially, the target rate of new token creation on mainnet will be 2%."

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found here.
• Code can be viewed here.
• Consensus mechanism: Proof of Burn
• Algorithm:
• Virtual Machine: WASM
• Development language used: C++, TypeScript, Python, Go (9-9-2021).

Transaction Details

• Regarding TPS, from its FAQ (9-9-2021):

"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."

• Latency:

How it works

• From its FAQ (9-9-2021):

"Koinos is not just a blockchain, it is a blockchain building technology that makes it far faster and easier to launch blockchains with no fees and capable of evolution. This step up improvement in ease of use for developers is accomplished through the engineering of a framework that allows for any feature of a Koinos blockchain to be added or modified simply by writing smart contracts in the most used programming languages in the world (C++, TypeScript, Python, Go, etc.) and uploading them to the blockchain."

Fees

• From its whitepaper (21-11-2022):

"The basic premise of the Mana system is that every KOIN token is “born” with 1 Mana which can be consumed when a user consumes network resources. Mana is a property of the KOIN token, it is not a token itself. It therefore cannot be bought or sold and cannot acquire its own price distinct from the KOIN token. Users can, however, delegate their Mana to other users, thereby allowing non-token holders to begin using the blockchain while still effectively mitigating spam. That Mana is still tethered to the delegator’s KOIN to ensure the economic sustainability of the system and maximize liquidity for the delegator who can undelegate at-will. Like Ethereum’s gas, every VM instruction will have a specific cost in Mana. Since only a limited amount of instructions can be included in a block, Mana is tightly coupled to the network resources available to users. Whereas Ethereum requires the user to purchase gas from miners which then gets consumed by the transaction, the Mana system autonomously consumes the appropriate amount of Mana from a user’s balance based on the resources consumed by their transaction."

• From its FAQ (9-9-2021):

"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. The mana whitepaper is now LIVE. Read it here"

Upgrades

• From its whitepaper (21-11-2022):

"The Koinos blockchain framework allows any behavior to be added to the blockchain as a smart contract. The fundamental assumption of this framework is that any smart contract can be upgraded by an authorized party. In the case of system logic, the system governance contract has the authority to make a “user smart contract” into a “system smart contract” in-band (no hard fork) that overrides some basic, native implementation."

Virtual Mining

• From its whitepaper (21-11-2022):

"A user who wants to earn block rewards burns their KOIN, decreasing the total supply of KOIN. The blockchain distributes “virtual hash power” fungible tokens (VHP) to the block producer which can be used to mine a block without needing to run expensive hardware. As the block producer mines blocks, their virtual hash power (VHP) diminishes over time, requiring them to burn more to continue producing. In this way, burning tokens is equivalent to buying mining hardware which degrades over time and the electricity required to perform proof-of-work."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found here.
• From its FAQ (9-9-2021):

"Koinos Group worked together for 4+ years at Steemit on the Steem blockchain and we have now been working together for nearly 2 years on Koinos."

Funding

• From its FAQ (9-9-2021):

"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."

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