AMA Transcript: SpykeFast x Kira Network

10 min readSep 5, 2020

This AMA (short for “Ask Me Anything”) with Spykefast Community was attended by the Team of Kira_Core, Mateusz Grzelak (Founder and CTO)and Milana Valmont (Co-Founder and CTO).

In this blog post, you can find a wrap-up of the key outtakes and ideas that were presented by KIRA team in the AMA.

Host: Spykefast Team

Guest: Mateusz Grzelak (Founder and CTO)and Milana Valmont (Co-Founder and CTO)

Time: September 3rd, 15:30 (UTC)

Venue: https://t.me/spykefastofficial (updated)

Rewards: 100$ USDT i.e. 50$ each to the best 2 questions by group members.

There were 3 rounds of AMA conducted (for about 70 minutes of in-depth discussions with KIRA Network team). In First round, Spykefast Hosts asked the questions. In Second round, questions were selected from twitter/TG group. In Third round, Spykefast Community members put up their live questions to KIRA team.

Round 1 Transcript:

Team Introduction — (Some Rich Experience in the field!!)

a) Asmodat | KIRA Staking | WON’T PM YOU FIRST:

My name is Mateusz, Kira’s CTO.

I am an electronics engineer, worked as R&D developer for Barclays Bank, then as lead infra engineer for US based Settle Finance then as product manager for the crypto exchange in Switzerland called Bity, shortly after that we started Kira with Milana.

I have been in crypto since late 2011 about which I learned from Reddit, started by mining BTC on my GPU , for the past 3 years I was involved with the web3/interchain ecosystem

b) Milana Valmont | Kira Network | WON’T PM YOU FIRST:

Hi everyone again, my name is Milana Valmont, I grew up in LA but moved to NYC to study economics and psychology at Fordham University. After graduating I have worked in corporate finance for a couple of years as a private equity analyst. I became involved with the crypto ecosystem first as an investor in early 2017 and later the same year I joined Binance exchange as a community volunteer. After that I have worked as project manager for Adcoin.com and was an adviser to Sentinel. In 2018 I went to Tel Aviv to join Knoks platform as head of strategy, and by mid 2019 I dedicated my full attention to Kira as CEO.

Spykefast team: I have a question… What makes KIRA different from the other exchanges out there?? (an early eye opener to many..lol)

Asmodat: We are not an exchange, we do have exchange protocol embedded into our network : ) The IXP (Interchain exchange protocol) — our simplest DeFi app is sharded so provides CEX experience with DEX security and also we have a very unique way of inducing liquidity into dApps that require it / DeFi — by using value of assets at stake that also secure the platform at the same time.

Spykefast team: When can we expect the protocol to be live?

Milana Valmont: we are targeting main net at the end of Q4.

Spykefast team: I see there is a huge interest in KIRA.. All over the crypto space. Private sale went oversubscribed.. When can our community get a chance to be a part of the project??

Milana Valmont: yes private rounds are closed, we are planning our public round very soon where community would get the chance to participate, stay tuned for our latest updates :)

Spykefast team: What motivation do the Investors of $KEX have in the long term?

Milana Valmont: Staking KEX is the most efficient way of claiming block and fee rewards. Protocol makes money regardless of whether the market is up or down, which means any one who stakes KEX can claim the fee rewards that the network generates

Spykefast team: How does KIRA plan for achieving mass adoption?

Asmodat: We have a positive feedback loop built into our network which attracts holders of any asset types, here is an iconographic that explains that in few simple bullet points:

Spykefast team: Why did team decide to build kira on Cosmos?

Milana Valmont: We choose Cosmos because its cross chain protocol for trustless asset transfer is way more mature than other solutions but we are still going to integrate with Polkadot XCMP as well. We are not cosmos exclusive but we cannot wait for polkadot to deliver their cross chain protocol in order for us to build Kira. With Kira we use a costume consensus, so we heavily modified Cosmos SDK, with Substrate/Polkadot it would be way more difficult and we don’t want to get locked into a single ecosystem, because we are not exclusive.

Spykefast team: Why does Kira use the Multi-Bonded Proof of Stake (MBPoS) consensus rather than other consensus: Pos, PoW?

Milana Valmont: MBPoS is our native consensus on Kira. The advantages is that it allows users to generate revenues from staking both cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, NFT’s and real-world assets such as digital fiat and commodities.

MBPoS increases the network security with every new token at stake and does not create honeypots like other PoS solutions in the ecosystem.

Asmodat: PoW does not have fast finality so is useless for financial apps especially in the cross chain environment.

Spykefast team: Thanks for the detailed answers.. so this ends round 1 here.

Round 2 Transcript:

Q1. Regarding Products and Services (e.g. IX Protocol, MBPoS Consensus, IVO Crowdfunding, etc), how far are Kira Core in them at the moment? What is the main focus of Kira Core in terms of technology at the moment? Twitter — @jalakb4li

Asmodat: Right now we are focusing on the public testnet release which we anticipate to come within 2–3 months. Part of the gov system is already done, basic gov-permissioned consensus, local dev deployment management tools that you can use to start kira already, IVO backend. Our goal for the testnet is to provide the community with an easy way to host validator nodes without need for much technical knowledge.

We are targeting the end of Q4 for the mainnet and will be launching in a similar fashion to polkadot.

Q2. As I understand it you will have Kira hub and then a number of zones for reputable projects and unknown with varying degrees of liquidity etc.

Are each of these zones secured by a separate set of validators or will the same set of validators encompass the entire Kira exchange? Twitter — @juliawhite22

Milana Valmont: Each zone will have independent validators set, and be interchain slashable on the Kira Hub. Zone validators simply need more value at stake then the value deposited to the zone to actively trade or use some other DeFi app deployed there.

Q3. In building a public chain ecology of multi currency integration, how robust are you, what is your TPS and how do you determine currencies to be integrated? Also explain about your Interchain exchange, multi asset staking?Twitter — @endtimeprophet2

Asmodat: First question — For multi asset market access we use existing protocols for cross chain connectivity e.g. Cosmos IBC and Polkadot XCMP so any token will be supported evenutally (interchain projects first). All token deposits are trustless, no single entity or actor in the network owns your money. We use Hub Spoke architecture similar to cosmos, for the purpose of sharding, so if any shard would top up with tx’es we can simply deploy more, TPS is not an issue for that reason.

Second question — Interchain exchange simply means that you have access to all tokens from many different chains on a single marketplace. Multi asset staking means that you can stake many different assets instead of one like with your typical PoS.

Q4. I follow your project ever since I heard it and I see you are doing many AMA’s in different groups in Telegram and more already line up. So how did AMA helps your platform and what is the positive effects? What is the good result that it brings to you? TG — @aisha73331787

Milana Valmont: Yes we have done few AMAs. It helped connect with the community and share what we are building with Kira, why we are building that, and will this benefit the users. Community is very important to Kira because community members who have skin in the game will participate in our governance system.

Q5. You mention about NFT market in your site. Will you introduced NFT market in your platform? Can you explain in details how it will work? Also how effective is the NFT mechanism in the exchange transaction? TG — @aminapeter8

Asmodat: There will be 3 mechanism for using NFT’s with Kira outside of having ability to stake and earning rewards from them

OTC
2. Highest-bid auction for highly valuable NFT’s
3. Buckets for creating a single fungible asset out of multiple NFT’s with similar use and value — which can then be traded as any other asset.

NFT’s can provide a real value at stake to the network does not necessary have to be actively trading in case of Kira to be valuable or effective/worth bringing in to the platform

Q6. Kira is the first network in the crypto ecosystem that increases its own security the more coins are deposited (and staked) into it. What can Cross chain transactions do to solve the existing blockhain problem? Twitter — @huntercrypto5

Milana Valmont: Cross chain asset transfers enable ecosystem of independent blockchains to specialize in providing independent scalable services rather than trying to do everything on their own (masterchains) — such an approach we know from the practice simply does not work. Kira is one example of a specialized interconnected chain that facilitates market access and liquidity for all assets at stake.

Q7. Why Kira choosed Cosmos as hub validator as compared to other Blockchain ? What are the benefits of using Cosmos as a hub validator ?Twitter — @engineers0786

Asmodat: We are not using cosmos hub to be precise we have our own independent network. We will however interconnect with Cosmos and Polkadot. Previous question was somewhat similar.

Q8. Kira is to offer cross-chain intereoperabilty, staking, lending and democratic style of governance. How will you carried out all these at the same time with ease and best? TG — @kenjosh21

Asmodat: We are bootstrapping off existing interchain protocols regarding interoperability, regarding staking and derivative issuance we designed our own consensus mechanism that supports it MBPoS (I would not call it lending), regarding governance system we used utilitarian principles and designed it using a role based permission model — and gave network ability to self curate its own permissions, validator set and governance set — so fully control all aspects of the network operations : )

Q9. What is the main problem in Defi that Kira wanted to solve? TG -@adiz52

Milana Valmont: Its simple — Lack of scalable market access and liquidity without need to lock up the capital.

Q10. I am very interested in KIRA NETWORK, What would be the use case for own $KEX token in the Kira Network ecosystem? How will the demand for $KEX will increase in the future? What steps would you take to increase the demand? What are the incentives and usefulness of the Kira Token “$KEX” in bidding and collection mechanisms? TG — @Fadang

Milana Valmont: Staking KEX will be the most efficient way of claiming block and fee rewards. KEX acts as reserve currency in terms of which staking of all other assets is valued. KEX is the most efficient way of claiming revenue from our network operations in the form of block and fee rewards.

Owning KEX also enables you to become part of the validator and governance set to take part in decision making processes, such as defining inflation or interest rates.

This ends round 2.

Round 3 Transcript: Open TG Chat questions

Within flash of seconds, the TG group was flooded with questions for KIRA team. Spykefast team was overwhelmed with the response of Community Members.

Most of them were repetitive though. Best questions mentioned below:

Q1: James Kingston: Can you tell us about the scalability of the KEX Token? How many TPS (transactions per second) can it process? What’s the expected processing time on the DEX, is it automated?

Asmodat: Dex module is sharded so each individual trading zone can have up to 5k TPS but there are no limitations in regards to how many trading zones there can be.

Q2: 🚀 — — Jack — — — 🚀: If you should do marketing about Kira Network based on just ONE outstanding feature of the DEX, what would it be and why?

Milana Valmont: Kira is not a dex. It’s a network with dex imbedded in it. If I had to choose one feature I would say — staking any asset and earning revenue.

Q3: Bayowa Sam: Did you know your competitors? Have you study their weakness and strength? If other projects come out today and offer similar services like yours, Are you confidence you will remain as the market leader?

Asmodat: I do not think we have many competitors at least I am not aware about any project that allows to stake multiple coins and allow to use them with their defi app at the same time.

Milana Valmont: Many people compare us to competitors but we don’t share the same business model.

With Kira staking happens directly on Kira Network to increase our network security and we won’t charge you a cent for that — you are the one getting paid and in full control of your funds and to whom you stake them. This is what increases the money flow, liquidity of our exchange protocol and network activity — therefore block and fee rewards that all stakeholders can claim. We created more in depth comparison here: https://github.com/KiraCore/docs/blob/master/vs/stafi-protocol.md

This ends round 3. Milana was asked to select the best 2 questions out of above. Winners 🚀 — — Jack — — — 🚀, Bayowa Sam were announced as winners.

End is the Beginning:

In the end, Spykefast team thanked KIRA Team for taking time out of busy schedule to answer all important and critical questions related to KIRA project.