The story of Kava begins with Cosmos.

With the successive rise of ecological projects represented by Terra and the final implementation of the Inter-chain Communication Protocol (IBC), people's cognition and value evaluation logic of Cosmos and its ecological projects have undergone new changes.

For a long time, the industry has been comparing Cosmos with Polkadot as the two Layer 0 protocols aiming to break down interoperability barriers between different blockchains. However, in the early years, when the infrastructure components of the two were not perfect and the ecosystem had not yet expanded, the reputation of Cosmos was always slightly lower than that of Polkadot, which has the founder's star halo blessing, for a long time.

However, the recent market changes have broken this situation and changed the solidified cognition in many people's minds. With the passage of time, when the concept came to fruition and the ecology began to spread and bloom, the development of Cosmos and Polkadot showed a completely different trend. When many Polkadot ecological projects were still trying to obtain online opportunities through the cumbersome auction process, with Many Cosmos projects represented by Terra and Kava have already completed several rounds of iteration and evolution through practical experience.

In this round of cognitive subversion of Cosmos, one of the more noteworthy things is the counterattack of its ecological project Terra on the market value of Cosmos. The reason for this "upside-down" is that Cosmos is different from other underlying protocols such as Polkadot, and it is not responsible for the transaction finality verification of ecological projects. In other words,Each project issued based on Cosmos is an independent public chain, but they can realize cross-chain interoperability through the IBC protocol.

This means that the market value of Cosmos will not become the "hard cap" of its ecological projects, thus opening up a greater space of imagination for many ecological projects including Kava.

Kava: Don't call me DeFi, call me Layer1

Speaking of Kava, many people's first impression of the project may come from Binance Launchpad.

Kava Labs, the development team of the Kava project, was founded in 2018. It had made some attempts in other directions in the early stage, but since 2019, it has foreseen the unlimited development potential of the direction of "cross-chain + DeFi", and then chose Based on the Cosmos SDK, we have worked hard.

A misunderstanding of many people about Kava is that this is an ordinary DeFi protocol, but we have emphasized in the previous article that every project based on Cosmos is an independently operating public chain, and we only use DeFi to introduce Kava Obviously cannot cover the full connotation of the project. Therefore, we tried to use our own understanding to reposition Kava:Kava is a Layer1 public chain with DeFi as the core scenario, which can realize interoperability with other ecological cross-chains with the help of protocols such as IBC.

As of this writing, the Kava mainnet has undergone nine major version upgrades, and according to the latest plan, Kava will implement the tenth major version upgrade of the mainnet next month, introducing support for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), at which time Kava will become the first An underlying public chain that supports both EVM and Cosmos SDK development environments.

Looking back at this long upgrade road, we can clearly capture the growth of Kava, and clarify how Kava, as a Layer 1 public chain, grew from 0 to 1, and then from 1 to ∞.

For ease of understanding, we will divide the development of Kava into three stages according to the timeline, and introduce them in turn.

Mainnet launch - Kava 8: Growth from 0 to 1

The stage from the official launch of the mainnet in November 2019 to the completion of the eighth upgrade in August 2021 represents the past of Kava.

During this period of time, Kava's main work is to improve various underlying infrastructures, which includes the inspection and optimization of the carrying capacity at the network level, as well as the creation of various basic applications at the ecological level.

As an emerging ecosystem that focuses on DeFi, in order to facilitate users to use reliable basic DeFi services in a timely manner after entering, Kava has built a set of applications for basic scenarios such as stablecoin minting, lending, and trading.

• In June 2020, Kava's stablecoin minting protocol Kava CDP (now renamed Kava Mint) was officially launched, allowing users to mortgage BNB and other assets to mint Kava's native decentralized stablecoin USDX.

• In October 2020, Kava simultaneously launched the v1 version of its lending market Harvest.io (which has since been renamed HARD Protocol and now Kava Lend again) in the fourth mainnet upgrade, allowing users to deposit BTC, XRP, BNB, BUSD, USDX and other ecological assets.

• In May 2021, Kava activated the v2 version of the HARD Protocol in the fifth upgrade of the main network, unlocking the borrowing function of the lending market, and realizing the automatic adjustment of floating interest rates between borrowing and lending.

• In August 2021, Kava launched its AMM-type decentralized exchange Kava Swap in the eighth mainnet upgrade, allowing users to seamlessly trade various assets on different blockchains, or earn by providing liquidity Get transaction fees and additional rewards.

So far,Kava has built a complete set of DeFi basic services on its chain.secondary title

Kava 9: ​​All roads lead to Kava

With the gradual improvement of the infrastructure, Kava has also begun to consider the next stage of issues - how to attract more liquidity for its ecology.

Before Kava, the outbreak stories of the new generation of public chains such as Avalanche and Fantom have repeatedly proved a "truth", that is, to build a large public chain ecology, opening up cross-chain communication is a necessary prerequisite. To this end, Kava completed the ninth major version upgrade of the main network in the past January.

The Kava 9 mainnet upgrade covers a number of important matters, the most core of which is undoubtedlyIntegration of IBCs. The full name of IBC is Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol. This is a cross-chain transmission protocol developed by several top development teams such as Tendermint, Agoric Systems, and the Interchain Foundation. It allows multiple different blockchain networks to Data and status information is transferred in the form of packet switching.

As a Layer-1 blockchain built on the Cosmos SDK, the integration of IBC is a huge leap for Kava, which not only means that all assets on all blockchains that support IBC (such as Kava Mint, Kava Lend, Kava Swap) can cross over to Kava, which also means that the service scenarios of basic applications such as Kava Mint, Kava Lend, and Kava Swap will expand to the entire Cosmos ecosystem.

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Note: Under the Surge plan, the user's potential income is estimated when the size of the ATOM liquidity pool is different.

Another important thing about liquidity bridging in the Kava 9 mainnet upgrade isImprove the basic module of the cross-chain bridge with the Ethereum network, enabling minting or burning wrapped ERC-20 tokens on the Kava network, controlling deposit limits and whitelisting specific tokens. However, this does not mean that the "Kava-Ethereum" cross-chain bridge has been activated at the same time as the upgrade, but the basic preparations have been made in advance so that the cross-chain bridge can be directly activated without chain upgrade.

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Kava 10: Cosmos SDK + EVM, a vision from 1 to ∞

The infrastructure has been perfected, the cross-chain channel has been opened, and the development of Kava has entered a new stage of development from 1 to ∞. In the new stage, the main question that Kava has to think about has become how to provide more flexible, better, and stronger support for ecological projects, so as to attract more projects to choose to settle in Kava.

During the explosion of public chains in September last year, several new-generation public chains achieved a big explosion at the level of ecological applications by virtue of huge economic incentives. At the same time, Kava also launched the first phase of an ecological incentive fund of US$185 million. To encourage more applications and developers to innovate based on Kava. However, judging from the ecological growth rate in the past few months, the actual effect of the Kava incentive fund does not seem to be as good as other public chains such as Avalanche and Fantom.

In our opinion, this is mainly because the Cosmos SDK development environment currently supported by Kava has not yet achieved mass adoption at the EVM level. Ethereum is the earliest and most successful programmable public chain, and its underlying development environment EVM has almost become the development standard in the blockchain world. Most of the emerging public chains that have exploded earlier are also EVM compatible chains. In contrast, although the Cosmos SDK has sufficient speed and interoperability advantages, it is obviously not realistic to replace the EVM in a short period of time.

To this end, Kava has decided to introduce EVM development environment support in the upcoming tenth large-scale upgrade of the main network, providing developers with richer environment choices. This decision sounds simple, but it is not easy to implement. Before that, no Cosmos ecological public chain that has launched the main network canProvides both Cosmos SDK and EVM development environments。

In response to this problem, Kava's solution is to build a co-chain architecture, which is characterized by providing two different chains for the Cosmos SDK and EVM development environment, and then allowing the seamless cooperation of the two co-chains through the translation module. Integrate into a unified network (note: hereinafter collectively referred to as the Kava network) on which developers can build in any environment they want without sacrificing access to users and assets in another environment. Kava officially made a very vivid metaphor for this: "You can think of it as two hemispheres of the brain, one optimized for developers of the Cosmos ecosystem, and the other optimized for developers of the Ethereum ecosystem."

According to Kava's plan, the Kava 10 upgrade will be divided into several small stages, as follows:

• On February 7th, Kava will launch the Pioneer Program to introduce incentives to promote the rapid growth of the Kava network before the mainnet launch. 100,000 KAVA will be rewarded for protocols deployed to the Kava network.

• On March 8, the Kava network will support a group of closed protocol partners to be deployed on the EVM common chain, and Kava's EVM compatibility and execution environment will be stress tested before the public test.

• On April 5th, ahead of the Kava Network mainnet launch, Kava will reward participants who test the co-chain architecture. Participants will earn rewards for hands-on experience with upcoming protocols and DApps on the Kava Network.

• On April 5th, the public beta of the Ethereum cross-chain bridge will unlock ERC-20 assets and ERC-1155 assets on the Kava network.

• On May 3, the Kava network will be officially completed and fully launched, with a common chain architecture of Ethereum and Cosmos. Developers will be able to seamlessly build in the EVM and Cosmos SDK execution environments, connecting the two largest decentralized ecosystems in the world.

• 6. Beginning in May, Kava will launch an incentive plan for various projects such as DeFi, GameFi, and NFT, and release a large number of rewards for developers every year to promote the rapid development of the ecology.

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The next heavyweight player in the public chain track

For a long time, Kava's vision has always been to become a cross-chain DeFi hub for Cosmos and the entire blockchain world. Looking closely at the many upgrades that Kava has completed and will implement, we can see that Kava has a clear understanding of its future development pace. Rhythm planning, knowing what you need and what to do.

From the gradual polishing of basic DeFi services such as stable currency, lending, and AMM DEX, to actively opening up cross-chain channels with other ecologies, and then striving to expand to more diverse development environments, Kava is approaching its ultimate vision step by step .

The outbreak of the public chain track has ignited the market investment sentiment in the second half of 2021. After entering 2022, investors are still actively looking for the next potential player on the track. If the tenth upgrade can be successfully completed, Kava, which has already laid a solid foundation in basic applications and cross-chain channels, will become the first Layer1 network that simultaneously supports the speed and interoperability of the Cosmos SDK, as well as the flexibility and developer support of the EVM.

With so much accumulation, Kava's potential to burst out cannot be underestimated.