Imagine a platform where decentralized finance isn’t just a wild ride, but a carefully navigated journey. Picture a blockchain that goes beyond the chaos, embracing ‘grown-up DeFi’
Well, today we are diving into the world of Kujira!
Kujira, also known by the market ticker KUJI, is a layer-1 blockchain created to provide sustainable financial technology, or FinTech, for the often turbulent web3 landscape.
At its core, Kujira plays into what they have dubbed “grown-up DeFi”, offering sensible, and sustainable financial products and smart contracts that allow for speed and security in the otherwise chaotic world of decentralised finance, or DeFi.
But how does it all work? Today we find out!
What is Kujira?
Kujira is a semi-permissioned, layer 1 Proof-of-Stake blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK that aims to bring sensible, sustainable FinTech and DeFi applications to the Cosmos Interchain.
Don’t worry, I will come back to what that all means shortly.
Kujira was created in 2021 by Brett, Dove, and Hans – not their real names. Regardless, Brett acts as the central front-end developer, Hans as the central back-end plus smart contract developer, and Dove is the CEO and public face of the project.
As part of the Cosmos Interchain, any smart contracts written on Kujira can work seamlessly, instantly, and cheaply with all the other independent blockchains on the Cosmos Network, which currently sits around 50 blockchains.
But, to really understand how Kujira works, we should probably first go over some definitions.
How does Kujira work?
Starting with the word semi-permissioned, as in semi-permissioned blockchain.
To help us understand, a permissionless blockchain allows you to create smart contracts without seeking approval from the network’s nodes.
Crypto nodes, just to be clear, are computers that participate in a blockchain network, maintaining and updating a copy of the distributed ledger of transactions.
As Kujira is semi-permissioned, it means it is open for anyone to build, create, and attempt to distribute apps, smart contracts, or new FinTech on their network.
However, before it goes live it is checked to ensure its quality. This is where the semi-permissioned comes in. It is open to everyone, but that doesn’t mean just anyone can launch something on their network.
This is grown-up DeFi, after all.
Moving on, we have layer-1. Simply put, a layer-1 platform is the foundation on top of which applications are built.
As an easy example, Ethereum is the layer-1 platform of its network, but projects like Optimism are layer-2 projects, as they are built on top of Ethereum with one specific task – in this example, to help Ethereum process data.
Next, we have Proof-of-Stake.
Proof-of-Stake is a consensus algorithm in blockchain networks where validators are chosen semi-randomly to create new blocks and confirm transactions based on the amount of cryptocurrency they hold and are willing to deposit as collateral.
Subsequently, we’ve got the Cosmos SDK.
To summarise, the Cosmos SDK is a framework for building decentralised applications and interoperable blockchains.
Essentially you can think of the Cosmos SDK as a library of pre-built crypto parts, allowing developers to easily, quickly, and cheaply bring their projects to life.
Projects built using the Cosmos SDK are interoperable with all other projects created using the Cosmos SDK if they have the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol, or IBC, enabled.
If the IBC is enabled, the platform can access the Interchain, which is a collection of independent, layer-1 blockchains that can fully interact with any other blockchain on its network using Cosmos as a Hub for communication.
Lastly, we have Tendermint.
Tendermint is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant, or BFT, consensus algorithm and software that provides a secure and consistent way for distributed nodes to agree on the order and validity of transactions in a blockchain network.
And, just for clarity, the Byzantine Fault Tolerance is a property of distributed systems that enables the blockchain to maintain consensus and operate reliably even when some nodes in the network are faulty or malicious.
What makes Kujira unique?
What makes Kujira unique is that at the heart of its platform, there are four key applications. FIN, ORCA, BLUE, and FINDER.
All of these serve a specific purpose which helps users take advantage of the various income-earning opportunities found when trading in DeFi.
To break that down, FIN is the decentralised and permissionless token exchange on the network.
Unlike typical networks, Kujira has removed inflation incentives and bots, which ultimately keeps the network fairer and cheaper for its users.
Next, ORCA is the world’s first public marketplace for liquidated collateral, which also allows users to easily liquidate multiple assets at once.
Moving on we have BLUE, which acts as the control center and dashboard for the Kujira network.
Here you can stake, vote on governance, swap assets, bridge assets to other platforms, and claim any network rewards.
Finally, we have Finder.
In short, Finder makes it easy to conduct market research by allowing users to track addresses, validators, and more.
But how about the tokenomics?
KUJI Tokenomics
Like most Proof-of-Stake tokens, KUJI can be used for all the classics like paying network fees, staking, and governance.
In total, there were originally 150 million KUJI tokens, though this has since been reduced to around 122 million after voting by the community.
The distribution was broken down as follows.
27 million went to the team, and 7.5 million to advisors behind the project.
28 million was sold in private sales, and then 21 million in public sales.
Of the remaining, 6 million went to liquidity funding,11 million towards operational cost, 6 million to marketing, half a million in airdrops, 7 million to the treasury, and finally around 8.5 million in rewards.
Originally, these were released slowly over time, though their emission schedules have now all finished and all tokens are available for sale on the marketplace, should the holders wish to sell.
Kujira wants to make DeFi sustainable and fairer for its users by bringing sensible and sustainable FinTech to the emerging world of Web3.
Although I cannot predict if Kujira will be the platform of choice for DeFi in the future, what I can say is if DeFi is to become more successful over time, and scalable enough to adopt a planet’s worth of people, we are going to require by necessity some “grown-up DeFi.”
Though, of course, nothing is guaranteed in crypto!