KYVE Mainnet Successfully Launched: Paving The Way For A Truly Trustless Data Future
We’re thrilled to announce that KYVE’s highly anticipated mainnet launch has arrived! Starting out as an Arweave smart contract, KYVE quickly grew into launching its own Layer 1 chain built with the Cosmos SDK, enabling the project to transform into an entire network built around solving data roadblocks for today’s developers.
After two years of intense development, KYVE mainnet officially went live at 14:03:14 UTC on March 14th, enabling the chain layer and a strong network to open the doors for easy access to truly trustless data via KYVE. With this, developers, data engineers, node runners, and more are that much closer to an easy, reliable solution for sourcing trustless data.
“We’re thrilled to see KYVE officially launch mainnet, bringing forward yet another innovative solution, built on Cosmos SDK, for enhancing today’s developer experience. With KYVE, free and easy access to trustless data is now possible.” Chris Zhong, Technical Director, Interchain Foundation.
Let’s take a look at what mainnet launch entailed, and a look back at what it took to bring KYVE to where it’s at today.
As the Web3 space expands, decentralized, completely accurate data becomes harder and harder for the public to access. Ultimately, this can lead to major scalability issues and dangerous data inconsistencies throughout today’s solutions.
In order to best solve these issues, decentralized data validation is a must for Web3’s data infrastructure. The KYVE Network does just that, revolutionizing customized access to on- and off-chain data by providing fast and easy tooling for decentralized data validation, immutability, and retrieval.
“With KYVE, we aim to make data a public good for a trustless future.” States KYVE’s Co-Founder and CEO, Fabian Riewe. “Anyone working with data shouldn’t have to worry about the data’s integrity or the roadblocks they might face when trying to get to it.”
Starting today (March 14th), we are focusing on getting KYVE’s chain layer stable and secure. For those not already aware, KYVE’s blockchain has two layers: the chain layer and protocol layer.
The chain layer is the backbone of KYVE, securing the network with DPoS, governance, and maintaining the overall structure. The protocol layer acts as our decentralized data lake, where protocol nodes can participate in fetching, storing, and validating data.
In order to bring forward a well-functioning data-sourcing solution, it’s crucial that we first focus on making the chain layer as strong of a base as possible. Once this is settled, we will focus on the protocol layer.
Day 0 Roadmap
In case you missed our March 10th update, KYVE’s mainnet will roll out in the following minor phases to ensure the overall security and proper flow of the chain’s setup:
- TGE: Start with the fixed 14 genesis validators; staking and inflation are disabled, governance proposal period is only 1 hour. KYVE’s Core Development Team will focus on the chain’s stability after launch, and the KYVE Foundation will delegate to the genesis validators.
- TGE + 1 hour: A governance proposal will go live, proposing to enable validator creation and update the voting period to 1 week.
- TGE + 2 hours: Staking will be enabled, allowing anyone with $KYVE to spin up a chain node if they’d like. A second governance proposal will go live, proposing to introduce inflation after a 1 week voting period.
Now that our mainnet has launched, KYVE can really get started! We’re very much looking forward to all of the opportunities awaiting KYVE in the next few months and beyond.
In one week (March 21st), the governance proposal for enabling inflation will have passed, providing a fully functional and secure KYVE mainnet chain. The next step will be $KYVE’s official listing*, enabling all to join in and participate in KYVE’s network!
Once our node network on the chain layer is flourishing and $KYVE is officially listed, we can focus on the protocol layer, which enables KYVE’s true purpose of making trustless data easily accessible.
The first data pool will be launched 6–8 weeks after TGE with the following process: The data pool creation will be proposed to governance, once passed, it will be created on Kaon for initial testing. After a few weeks of running on Kaon, a further proposal will take place on governance to launch the pool on mainnet. Once this is passed, the data pool will be officially live.
During this time, you can also expect more $KYVE listings and rewards opportunities, new partnerships and collaborations, community events, and much more… There is a lot to come! Developers, node runners, data engineers, and others who work around data can look forward to using the KYVE data lake on mainnet as a reliable solution for sourcing trustless data when building, researching, and operating.
KYVE aims to be a fully decentralized blockchain via the support of our governance. Therefore, it’s up to governance participants to propose and vote on what they believe is best for the KYVE Network, whether that’s new data pools, network rules, chain parameters, and so on.
Data Pipeline
We’re pleased to share that KYVE’s Data Pipeline, the no-code solution for accessing KYVE’s trustless data, is also live and ready to use! We have partnered with the Airbyte team directly in order to best bring forward a user-friendly experience with many popular backends supported.
Please note that it will take 6–8 weeks before the first pools launch on testnet and mainnet; therefore, at the moment, the Data Pipeline will continue to pull from Korellia’s data pools. Korellia is KYVE’s devnet and is not as reliable as mainnet.
From a small bounty project bridging Polkadot data to Arweave, to an EVM-Based smart contract, then officially launching as its own Layer 1 Cosmos-based chain, KYVE went from being a simple solution to an entire network built toward changing the data world for the better.
Along its journey toward mainnet launch, KYVE hit many key milestones, expanding its reach and capabilities along the way…
From Korellia to Kaon
KYVE’s first testnet, Korellia, was used as an incentivized testnet in order to best put KYVE’s features and functionalities to the test. This incentivized testnet was a huge success, with over 43,000 active users funding, staking and delegating in pools, and/or participating in KYVE’s governance.
From this, we were able to collect a plethora of community learnings and suggestions on how to enhance KYVE, releasing multiple upgrades and, eventually, a testnet v2 dubbed Kaon. Kaon is our “mainnet testnet,” meaning it’s our official staging environment before taking new features and data pools to the KYVE mainnet.
“It’s been very exciting seeing all the pieces come together.” Said KYVE’s Co-Founder and CTO, John Letey. “With Kaon replicating mainnet as much as possible, its launch has given us a preview and great insight as to how KYVE’s mainnet launch will go. In the long run, it will be the perfect staging environment, stemming from all our learnings from Korellia.”
Partnering with the Top L1s
At its start, KYVE was already partnered with Polkadot and Arweave and quickly gained support from NEAR, Cosmos, Avalanche, and Solana.
As our testnet grew throughout 2021 and 2022, we brought on ten new partnerships and collaborations with projects such as Injective, Evmos, Axelar, Umee, Sei Network, Archway, and more. We look forward to bringing these solutions onto mainnet!
“Congratulations to KYVE on their mainnet launch, which will make access to reliable decentralized data across Web3 easier for all. NEAR’s focus on ease of use for developers and users with the Blockchain Operating System relies on accessing data from various blockchains, which KYVE provides.” Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder, NEAR Protocol.
Raising $13M
Throughout these two years, KYVE held three funding rounds, providing a total of ~$13M raised. The first round was led by Permanent Ventures and comprised of notable investors, including Hypersphere Ventures, 4SV, Compute Ventures, Arweave, Avalanche Foundation, Interchain Foundation, NEAR Foundation, and others.
The second round was led by Permanent Ventures and Hypersphere Ventures, as well as outstanding crypto funds and networks such as Volt Capital, Mechanism Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Distributed Global, 4SV, Compute Ventures, Zee Prime, CMS Holding, Ternary Capital, Mina Foundation, and more. Finally, the third round totaled $9M, led by key players such as Distributed Global, Wicklow Capital, IOSG Ventures, Anagram, Cerulean Ventures, Huobi Incubator, and MEXC.
“We’re constantly impressed by the KYVE team’s ability to ship products and engage their community with a developer-centric approach to data availability. We see their web3 infrastructure as critical to climate data use cases, both web2 and web3, in this decade. What we’ve seen recently is that fighting climate change is as much a coordination problem as it is a technological problem, and providing trustless and easy access to climate data will go a long way toward addressing these core coordination issues.” Jahed Momand, General Partner at Cerulean Ventures.
Creating the KYVE Genesis Validator Program
Our team has specially selected 14 experienced validators from all over the globe to take on the role of genesis validator and partake in KYVE’s genesis validator program.
Felix Lutsch, Chief Commercial Officer at Chorus One, stated, “The KYVE stack has the potential to bootstrap many data innovations by enabling developers to outsource collection, storage, and retrieval of data to the trustless KYVE protocol. Today, the launch of the KYVE Cosmos SDK blockchain marks a huge milestone building towards this idea, and we couldn’t be more excited to support this community with our infrastructure and expertise.”
LOA Labs team also jumped in, mentioning that “KYVE Network’s talented team is on a mission to build novel data services on decentralized, trustless blockchain ecosystems. LOA Labs is aligned with KYVE’s vision and supports KYVE’s work in making data a Public Good: accessible and secure for all.”
In order to best prepare these genesis validators and finetune the launch process, we completed a successful dress rehearsal when launching Kaon, KYVE’s official testnet and mainnet replica. With this, we were even more confident in our selections and grateful for their support.
Growing Our Community
From the different partnerships, community events, incentivized testnet, and more, KYVE’s community grew strong quickly! More recently, from 2021 to 2022, we saw a 368.34% growth in Twitter followers and a 24.20% peak engagement rate (compared to 3.10% in 2021). We also grew 40% on Telegram, 304% on Youtube, 686% on Discord, and 964% on Medium!
“We believe that KYVE solves data availability issues for high-performance blockchains. By meeting the needs and trends of the market, KYVE will become the core pillar for other blockchains,” stated John Park from a41.
Overall, a lot of hard work, dedication, and support has gone into KYVE, helping it get to where it is today. We cannot thank our amazing partners, investors, beta testers, ambassadors, community, and friends enough for all of your support along the way!
Mainnet launch also marks $KYVE’s official TGE, meaning that those who earned $KYVE rewards via our Incentivized Testnet can claim their tokens and get started delegating to chain nodes! Note that even if your tokens are vested, you can still delegate the full amount on-chain. You can also participate in governance.
$KYVE’s official listing will come sooner than you expect. Visit our Docs to get caught up on KYVE and prepare for upcoming token listings and rewards, as well as the launch of our decentralized data lake.
