Antara Framework & Rebrand AMA

On Tuesday we hosted an AMA about it and answered a lot of questions our community had.

How We Got Here

Komodo is an open, modular multi-chain platform with blockchain development roots going back to 2014. Since Komodo is a fork of Zcash, it started its journey as a privacy-oriented project but has since expanded far beyond that.

Now, Komodo is recognized as a pioneer of multi-chain architecture in the blockchain space. Komodo focuses on providing business-friendly blockchain solutions that are secure, scalable, interoperable, and adaptable.

The main motivating factor for Komodo’s rebrand is that many people thought we were just a privacy coin. Komodo’s full vision is largely misunderstood, which means most people don’t understand the magnitude of Komodo’s full technology offerings.

As we started out as a dev-focused open source project, branding has never been a priority, leading to confusing terminology and explanations, as well as inconsistent messaging and visual presence.

A lack of dev resources was also a huge issue, which we've addressed in the rebranding process. We will continue to improve, creating more developer resources, tutorials, and content, to help get more devs into the ecosystem.

Komodo is pleased to be releasing several new products and features this summer: the Antara Framework and Smart Chain technology, the Antara Blockchain Composer, and a hybrid multi-coin wallet with atomic swap, peer-to-peer trading functionality built in.

Marketing & Rebrand Questions

What does Antara mean? Why was it chosen, how does it relate to the Komodo theme?

Komodo is an island in Indonesia (it’s where the Komodo dragon lives). Agama, the name of our wallet, happens to mean “faith” in Indonesian. While Komodo as a project has no connection to the country, it just happened that our branding does.

When we were looking for a new name for our Smart Chain framework, we wanted to choose something that’s consistent with this accidental theme. “Antara” means “inter-”, “cross-” or “between” in Indonesian, so it plays very well with our interoperability messaging.

The name was ultimately decided by our core community, key contributors to the project and notary node operators. We had six variations on the ballot and Antara won by a very large margin.

What is the general timeline of marketing efforts following the rebrand?

The evolution campaign was meant to introduce our new Antara Framework and smart chain technologies, as well as give a preview of what’s in store for the rebrand. We also wanted to message test some of the new messaging and terminology that we’ve been developing in support of the full rebrand.

After the launch of the new Komodo on July 15th, we will continue to release regular updates regarding the smart chain ecosystem, along with a comprehensive beta program to bring our new atomic swap DEX wallet to full production.

We are also going to have a dedicated Komodo community platform to drive up community engagement. As an open source project, we rely on community contributions and we need better tools to build up our ecosystem vision and to support the KMD coin adoption.

Are all the 'Komodo' products going through the rebrand?

Yes - the rebrand will include the introduction of two entirely new products (Antara Composer & our hybrid DEX wallet) that have been developed from the ground up by our development team with our agency partner Ideas by Nature providing the UX/UI design. In addition, we will have a “design system” to provide ecosystem developers with the resources to design UIs that align with our new brand.

KMD & The Ecosystem Questions

How does the Antara Framework benefit KMD coin? How does the KMD token fit into the Komodo ecosystem in general?

Our mission is to provide end-to-end blockchain development solutions that empower others to come in and build a multi-chain ecosystem. The bigger the ecosystem grows the more KMD (the coin) will benefit as there will be more opportunities, users, and blockchain innovations. On the other hand, the more users and features KMD has the more it will benefit the ecosystem and businesses within it. We have a mutual symbiosis between the two.

Antara Framework will realize our mission about a large Komodo ecosystem and KMD adoption.

With the upcoming release of our Antara Smart Chain Composer web application, we’ve created a user-friendly self-service tool that can accelerate the development of smart chains for nearly all use cases. Providing a comprehensive set of tools and white label tools that accelerate development should lead to more smart chains, which will lead to more chains needing dPoW and cross-chain and scaling capabilities, driving demand for KMD.
The more Smart Chain projects there are, the more Antara Modules will get developed. The modules will be available for also KMD and with an upcoming sidechain technology where anyone will be able to setup KMD sidechains that can have any features that have been developed on the Komodo ecosystem.
KMD will play a major role on our atomic swap DEX as we expect most of the liquidity to flow through KMD. The more Smart Chains there are on the ecosystem the more demand and use there will be for our DEX solution. The demand will naturally spill over to KMD as it is one of the most trusted and used coins within the Komodo ecosystem.
The larger our ecosystem grows the bigger our community will grow. Along with large community also come more and more talented and passionate developers who will start to poker around KMD and build new products, host events, and launch other new KMD initiatives. We want KMD to be a community-run open source project.

Summary:

Smart Chains need KMD for dPoW, cross-chain and scaling capabilities
Antara Modules can also be deployed as KMD sidechains increasing KMD coins’ utility.
KMD will be one of the main base coins of our atomic swap DEX.
The large ecosystem also gives us a bigger KMD community, more news coverage, larger events, and so on.

What are the next planned steps in growing the KMD ecosystem?

As a short high-level answer, we will mention the following three things

A New Komodo Community Portal. Through the use of the portal, we are looking to build a developer community and overall support for KMD. Right now our community largely interacts through Discord live chat, and this portal would be an addition to that providing more tools for interaction and engagement.
Komodo Partnership Program. We are providing a broad range of general blockchain innovations and a base layer for others to come in to build higher level solutions. In other words, we have to build an extensive partner program that allows us to work with others to build up a large Komodo ecosystem.
More Blockchain Innovations. We have been and will continue to be a very technology focused project. Our core focus will always be to innovate new blockchain solutions and push our industry forward. You can expect more from us in the future.

Will the rebrand provide a single point of access to all of the KMD ecosystem information?

We are currently working on a new community and ecosystem portal to complement our real-time Discord community. This will be built on a Facebook-esque platform that will support the following features:

Group creation around technology topics and solution use cases
Content repository
Ability to create project teams and subpages
Ecosystem Partner Portals
Bounty programs
Job postings & other opportunities
Discussion forums and other static content

Business & AWS Questions

What is the relationship between KMD and AWS?

We have an advanced technology partnership with AWS, who will serve as our key cloud infrastructure provider for Antara Smart Chains. We are also exploring other cloud provider partners as well as privately hosted options to offer our customers more choice in the future.

Are there any potential customers already lined up to use the Antara framework?

We have an active pipeline of potential customers currently evaluating smart chains and Komodo’s new Antara Framework. We are currently working on a few strategic opportunities while building out a partner network to provide subject matter expertise across all major industry verticals. We will also be releasing an easy to use web-based application that will allow users to create custom and independent smart chains on AWS in minutes.

Technical & Development Questions

Can Ethereum tokens be switched to Antara Smart Chains?

Yes - all ETH based tokens (ERC) can technically switch to KMD. The process is simple: You create a snapshot at a specific height (after publicly announcing it as the snapshot height in advance so that users can take their tokens off of exchanges).

Next, you create an Antara Smart Chain with the coincap of the snapshot height. And in the last step, you generate an “airdrop script” out of the snapshot, which funds the ETH-corresponding KMD smartchain addresses (which were transformed from ETH/ERC to KMD Antara format). Each user will then be able to reuse his/her ETH/ERC privatekey to be transformed into an Antara Smart Chain compatible keypair that holds the funds, matching the exact amount on the legacy ETH chain.

What does nSPV do for crypto?

Our engineers are constantly working on cutting edge blockchain technology and innovations that improve current architectures and concepts. “nSPV” will increase the security level of “lite-wallets” while enhancing the protocol layer and increasing overall efficiency, resulting in heavily reduced infrastructure requirements.

Is the Antara framework based on Komodo's Custom Consensus/Crypto Conditions (CC)?

The Antara Framework is the rebranding of Komodo’s Custom Consensus/Crypto-Conditions technology. To clarify, Crypto-Conditions was a spec of the Interledger Protocol (ILP) that was enhanced by Komodo to complement our multi-chain architecture.

Now, to make all of this easier to understand and t keep pace with development, we are introducing the Antara Framework, which includes Smart Chains (formerly known as assetchains but now considered “Smart” because of custom consensus capabilities); Antara Modules (which were previously known as CC modules but now more modules exist and offer more advanced functionality); and the Antara Integration Layer, which is a new feature within the Komodo ecosystem.

How does the recent hack affect Antara's ability to provide white label products like the Multi-Asset wallets?

It has absolutely no impact on our new white-label products. Our new hybrid DEX wallet was coded from scratch on an entirely new backend (Rust/Flutter) to support new features and functionalities.

We’d like to re-emphasize that the Verus Coin team has been maintaining their own unique version of Agama for many months. The Verus Coin version of Agama was not affected by the recent Agama vulnerability that was discovered in Komodo’s version of Agama.

Now, we’re working closely with the Verus Coin team, who will be taking over the Agama code base and continue development and support for that product line. More details about this transfer will be released soon.

What is the status of crypto conditions development?

Developer resources have been a main focus area for the rebrand, including but not limited to documentation, training, tutorials, SDKs, Antara Modules, etc. The goal is to work with partners and our ecosystem to build out a library of Antara Modules and turn-key solutions so anyone can build custom, application-specific Smart Chains rapidly without the complexity or vendor lock-in imposed by competing offerings.

Questions From Live AMA

Are there established companies showing interest in Komodo platform? If so, which ones and in which sectors

What is the weakness of Komodo platform and what are the Komodo as an organization?

As for weaknesses, that's a great question. I'd say our biggest weakness is extreme decentralization! Which might sound crazy. But we have a globally distributed team, with people on 4 different continents, so it's tough to coordinate meeting times and stay in step with each other. We end up communicating through chat most of the time.

I found no roadmap. Is there one roadmap?

Yes, there are details to be revealed at & after the rebrand.

How is Komodo as a company sustained during crypto winter, whats long term sustainability strategy

Komodo's financial position is stable. The company was even hiring when BTC was 3k (that's when I joined, hah!). We were maybe the only project expanding during the bear market! We've always been very careful with our spending (no lambos), and use the funds to develop groundbreaking tech.

Any fortune 500 companies or big names are testing Antara or interested in it already?

Yes, there is interest from very big companies. We can't disclose more at this point.