Koinos, the first blockchain with the same free-to-use experience that originally allowed the internet to reach mass adoption, achieved a major milestone with the release of a feature complete testnet on August 23rd.
Unlike Ethereum, Solana, and Polkadot, Koinos users don’t have to buy tokens to use the blockchain because KOIN (the currency of Koinos) contains “Mana” which gets spent instead of tokens.
Unlike token fees (“gas”), Mana regenerates, allowing for indefinite free usage and it can be delegated to others for truly frictionless onboarding.
“The internet went mainstream because it was free-to-use. Koinos is the first and only blockchain to do the same thing. This is truly historical because there’s never been a blockchain anyone could just use without first having to buy tokens, and the performance so far has been spectacular,” said Andrew Levine, CEO and Co-Founder of Koinos Group.
Jesse “Aggroed” Reich, CEO and Co-Founder of Splinterlands, the top play-to-earn blockchain game, said:
“Koinos could be revolutionary for gaming because there are a lot of additional costs that come from building on a blockchain, like account and NFT creation costs, all of which Koinos will eliminate.”
Splinterlands was originally built on Steem, the Koinos team’s previous blockchain, famously the victim of an exchange attack. That incident inspired the creation of Koinos and its novel consensus algorithm; proof-of-burn.
Proof-of-burn has no wasteful hardware mining. Users simply destroy (“burn”) KOIN for “virtual hash power.”
This doesn’t just make Koinos more efficient and environmentally-friendly, it means the token supply dynamically adjusts to network conditions.
When there’s heavy usage, the token supply decreases to discourage overuse. When there’s low usage, the token supply increases to encourage participation.
Steve Gerbino, Co-Founder and CTO of Koinos Group explained,
“That’s what motivated me to create an alternative consensus algorithm. After discovering proof-of-burn as described by Iain Stewart, I knew we could use these concepts to implement an algorithm that’s more efficient than proof-of-stake and more decentralized than proof-of-work.”
The next milestone for Koinos is the ERC20 snapshot, followed by the fully decentralized launch of mainnet before year-end.
