Interview with Kinetex: Cross-Chain Innovations from the City of Lights

Interview with Kinetex, Finalist from EthGlobal Paris 2023

In late July in the City of Lights, EthGlobal Paris 2023 claims a lineage to revolutions and offers a global hub for developers, designers, and creators committed to shaping the decentralized future of Web3. The event included a hackathon weekend to "foster creativity and collaboration on the Ethereum ecosystem."

The hackathon included 965 participants, representing 321 projects from 67 countries. On the last day of the show, they announced 13 finalists.

One of the finalists is Kinetex Network, which uses an aggregation model instead of zero-knowledge technology or light clients, allowing greater control and reduced costs for cross-chain projects.

We spoke with Tigran Bolshoi, Strategic Development, from Kinetex Network, concerning their learnings from the event and their goals to create a more flexible and cheaper cross-chain solution. Their participation has led to new inquiries from other blockchain projects looking to incorporate their solution.

What does it mean for Kinetex to be selected as a finalist for EthGlobal Paris 2023?

"I was honestly pleased and surprised to hear that we were finalists. We arrived at ETHGlobal Paris with the idea of improving the current cross-chain market after the biggest multi-chain hack. At that time, our current focus was on zero-knowledge technology. We believe that waiting for a response from one message protocol while trusting one group of validators is the same as sending a transaction into a black hole because you never know what can happen on the backend. If we use aggregation mode inside light clients or zero knowledge, we can control it. I am glad that our solution is useful for the market, and we are receiving many requests from different projects regarding integration."

What is the vision behind the project? What does it provide for projects and users that's better than currently available?

"We are at the threshold of a new era of DeFi. The main difference is that at the current stage of technology development, if you want to make a cross-chain transaction, you need to be an expert and take all the responsibility and risk. Our vision is to move to a new standard called 'resolving.'

The main difference that we provide is that users can maintain complete control of their funds using account abstraction, but they don't need deep knowledge of all the technical parts. They can create a request as an intent and delegate their services to professional market makers who will compete to fulfill this order. It's like a booking service when you don't know how all the algorithms work on the server, but you always get a list with different solutions."

How does your liquidity pool product work? How is it helpful in the current bear market?

"We do not store TVL at all. All resolvers manage their risks independently and keep all assets on their side, just like the user. This is the revolutionary part of this technology as the pool, which a group of trusted validators controls, always tries to be attacked if an attacker has access to this pool. For example, from the smallest network or some logical error that can drain liquidity from all chains.

The solution can be useful for crypto projects that plan to operate multi-chain pools and often need super-fast and cheap liquidity movement and market makers who trade cross-domain. When we use pool technology, we need to pay for a validator, a liquidity provider, and a large smart contract, which commands a higher gas price."

How is Kinetex structured?

"We have a DAO that will serve the network and provide computing power to perform zero-knowledge calculations since they require a considerable amount of electricity and a powerful server.

We don't have a token right now. We already have a Discord DAO community, and they are already voting on the constitution and various campaigns like Testnet and Ambassador for the debugging system and community growth. Anyone can join our community and help build the protocol in a decentralized way. To do this, he will receive an exclusive collection of NFTs, which gives users the right to vote on further updates, including tokenomics."

What future in Web3 are you working toward with Kinetex?

"I believe "Resolving" will be the future and will work with user intent. Let's imagine, for example, that you have Bitcoin (BTC) in your wallet and want to put those assets into a yield pool to make a profit in a stable token like USDC.

Now, this is a highly complex path for the user. When you start with a Google search, find a bridge, and pay gas, you must go to a Decentralized Exchange (DEX), change it to a stablecoin, and pay gas again on a different network. However, if we delegate all these steps to professional market players like Resolvers, they can easily do all this in one transaction."

Summary

It's good to see that during this long and dreary crypto winter, blockchain projects are still building, focusing on infrastructure, and finding new and better ways to transact, store value, and earn on the blockchain in ways that provide a better and simpler experience for users. Solutions like Kinetex that help reduce costs for cross-chain transactions are on the critical path to helping to onboard "the next billion users" into the Web3 space. We look forward to seeing more about this project and the functionality it provides for other projects to help more users worldwide with greater ease of transaction.

Finalist projects shared a total prize pool of $475,000 provided by 39 organizations such as Metamask, Polygon, Worldcoin, Filecoin, MakerDAO, and 1inch.

Cover image source: Kinetex Network