Participate in our live AMA on September 19, 2022, at Noon UTC for a chance to win a share of $5,777 in KMD!
Join Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann and COO Tony Lysakov in celebrating our 6th birthday with a live AMA on Binance Live.
Your Chance to Win $5,000 in KMD
How to Participate:
- Drop your AMA questions in our Discord or reply to this tweet. Add your Binance UID.
- Add a reminder and join the AMA.
Additional Prize of $777 in KMD for Randomly Selected Participants
How to Participate:
- Follow @AtomicDEX @mybrainforked @binance @0xca333
- Reply to his tweet with Komodo (KMD)'s exact birthday.
- Like and retweet this thread.
- Join our Discord.
AMA Summary (Paraphrased Text Format)
1. What is Komodo and what are you doing? (TONY)
Answer: Komodo is an open-source blockchain technology provider that specializes in interoperability tech. Our team has been working on these technologies for almost 10 years.
2. How long have you been in the space? (TONY)
Answer: KMD publicly launched in September 2016, with preparations going on since late 2015. However, the Komodo team consists of many well-known crypto veterans who were in space back in 2013 and 2014. Our team has a decade of experience in this industry.
3. What’s your product? (KADAN)
While the first Komodo block was mined in 2016, we have been working on cross-chain atomic swaps for many years before that. We saw a need to connect all the protocols and their assets together because interoperability was missing. Our flagship product is AtomicDEX — a third-generation DeFi framework. It consists of two layers — a wallet and a P2P DEX network. Users can swap any coin or token for any other coin or token to any other protocol. For example, users can bridge BEP-20 tokens and ERC-20 tokens to the Bitcoin blockchain or the Komodo blockchain, and more.
4. Where is your project located? (TONY)
Answer: Our team is very International with offices in the Netherlands, Panama, U.S., and Russia. We have close to 40 team members spread across the globe and pretty much all the world’s time zones. We consider ourselves multicultural. We just recently had a meetup with team-building days in Spain where only a small part (20-30%) of the team joined and yet we had like 10 different nationalities.
5. Are you building on BNB Chain? (KADAN)
Answer: We built an independent P2P interoperability network — a DEX network — which does support BNB Chain and the BEP-20 standard. Any BEP-20 token is natively compatible with AtomicDEX. The same goes for Ethereum and other second and third-generation blockchains. We support 99% of cryptocurrencies listed on sites like CoinMarketCap.
6. What was the craziest thing you experienced in crypto? (KADAN)
Answer: The Agama hack back in 2019 was the craziest. Agama was our non-custodial wallet software at the time. There was a vulnerability we discovered that would have allowed a hacker to steal literally all user funds. It was two days working with our security team non-stop without sleep to fix the vulnerability. I bought twelve cans of Red Bull to stay awake. We realized we had to be faster than the actual hackers, so we “stole” all user funds via the exploit. Then, we returned the funds to users after fixing the vulnerability. Our users didn’t lose any funds, and our team gained a lot of respect in the industry.
7. Why did you get into crypto? (KADAN & TONY)
Answer:
TONY: For me, financial liberty and freedom was the main reason for me to get into this industry as I understood that our financial system is outdated and corrupt. Plus, I wanted to join this technology field to work on the future of finance and make it better and improve it from many perspectives.
KADAN: Very similar reason for me. You realize that blockchain has the ability to improve the world not only from a technological perspective but also from a socioeconomic perspective. I want my kids to live in a better world than the one I grew up in.
8. With volumes on DEXes being considerably lower than those on CEXes, do you believe that people tend to choose convenience over trust? What do you think will turn the table? (TONY)
Answer: Right now most people do obviously pick convenience over trust/security which is a dangerous trend. However, with increasing hacks and the regulatory landscape becoming more strict, we do see that a lot of players start to move to DeFi space. Another important factor is the infrastructure perspective. CEXs usually run on heavily centralized infrastructure which poses a risk as it's a single point of failure (e.g. hacks, going down, etc.) whilst in DeFi many protocols run on decentralized infrastructure (P2P network).
9. What is Komodo product & what problems does it solve? What is the technological stack on which the product is built? How does your product level compare to competitors on various attributes/features? (KADAN)
Answer: AtomicDEX is our main focus. We’re solving the problem of interoperability. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to trade BNB into native Bitcoin. I was struggling to find a decentralized solution. The answer/ best solution for this is AtomicDEX.
The AtomicDEX low-level/ cryptographic network is built on Rust. We chose Rust because this web stack’s growth is extraordinary and the fact that it’s Web3 compatible. AtomicDEX is cross-protocol. Other DEXs out there are dependent on a single chain. For example, most DEXs are focused on swapping BEP-20 to BEP-20 or ERC-20 to ERC-20 tokens. AtomicDEX bridges multiple blockchains together and doesn’t depend on a parent chain.
10. Can I mine KMD without being a Komodo Notary Node? (TONY)
Answer: Yes, anyone can mine KMD without being a notary node. All you need is mining gear (ASICs, GPUs, etc.).
11. With no proxy tokens, no gateway, no centralized order books just peer-to-peer, how to increase liquidity (volume) on AtomicDEX? (KADAN)
Answer: We recently reached our Stable Beta stage and are now working to bring AtomicDEX into the web environment. First, one solution will be professional LPs (liquidity providers), such as institutions that have access to immense amounts of funds. We’re waiting for a third-party security audit before onboarding more LPs. Second, each user on AtomicDEX has the potential to be a liquidity provider. We have been cautious and given warnings for users to not put in too much money — unlike many DEXs out there that have done so and later users lose funds due to rugpulls, exploits, etc. We are focused on technology first. Once we get verification from third-party security reviews, our organization itself may run as a professional LP on AtomicDEX.
12. I read something about ShibaDEX a few months ago, can u explain how will it benefit AtomicDEX and the Komodo community? (KADAN)
Answer: ShibaDEX does run on the same network as AtomicDEX, but is its own product. ShibaDEX is the same as a number of white-label DEX products out there that use AtomicDEX API. Any project can take the AtomicDEX source code and just change the configurations to launch their own product with a multi-coin wallet and DEX within it. Some people ask, “Why do we want other parties to use this tech and basically take our users away?” We don’t look at it like that. At the end of the day, AtomicDEX does use a unified liquidity pool. For example, even if Binance were to use AtomicDEX to build its own DEX, it would benefit everyone else on the network. The same goes for ShibaDEX. It only benefits the bandwidth of the AtomicDEX network.
13. How do you feel about the Tornado Cash sanctions? (KADAN)
Answer: We were in the Netherlands and read that one of the Tornado Cash developers had been arrested in Amsterdam. There wasn’t public evidence to show that the developer had been doing something shady. It was just someone who was contributing open-source code. For us, it was a super critical/ sad precedence case. What happens tomorrow if authorities decide to do something similar with developers of the Onion routing protocol, for example? This technology is being used by many bad actors, but it’s also being used by good actors. At some point, we might be arresting knife makers. Luckily, I’m not working on any project that is too controversial. I recommend that developers of these technologies go 100% anonymous. Developers of many of these technologies have doxxed themselves. Obviously, Tornado Cash was being used for many bad activities, but the core vision (privacy) is critical.
14. Will AtomicDEX support Ledger at some point? (TONY)
Answer: Yes, currently we’re working to add Trezor support and later will work to add Ledger support.
15. Have you raised any funds from famous investors like Binance? (KADAN)
Answer: No, we haven’t. We raised a small amount of funds in 2016 during our ICO, but we’ve been able to reinvest throughout the years and multiply those funds. This has enabled the project to have funding so that we don’t need VCs. Our focus is more on developing the technology rather than raising funds. We have a combined pot of way over $100 million available for this project. At some point in the future, we may look to VCs. But the funding would be more strategic rather than about the funds. It would be more about the expertise we could get from these players. We don’t plan to raise funds anytime soon, but when we do we’ll get in touch with Binance Labs.
16. Can we stake on AtomicDEX? (KADAN)
Answer: Adding staking functionality is trivial. For us, it’s more about how to add it from a UI/UX perspective. We’ll be adding staking and delegation support in the future for multiple protocols. This is definitely on the AtomicDEX roadmap.
17. What will be Komodo’s first step after the bear market? (TONY)
Answer: We’ll continue building and improving AtomicDEX regardless of market conditions.
HODL and Trade on AtomicDEX
Have you tried AtomicDEX yet? AtomicDEX is a non-custodial wallet, cross-chain/protocol bridge, and cross-chain/protocol decentralized exchange rolled into one app. Users trade crypto P2P, cross-chain between numerous blockchains, including BNB Chain, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Dogecoin, and more.