According to Crypto Head research, only 5% of crypto entrepreneurs are female. Today I decided to interview one of them. Please meet Milana Valmont, founder and CEO of KIRA, the first Layer 1 network that enables market access to any digital. Read more about her journey in crypto, an idea of KIRA, DApps market, the current pitfalls, trends, and the future of DApps.

Please share with us your background or story

My background is in finance. I graduated from Fordham University with a degree in economics and psychology and I worked in corporate finance in New York. First as a Private Equity Analyst then as an Investor Relations Manager. I joined the blockchain space in early 2017. I have worked as a project manager for Adcoin.com and served as an adviser for Sentinel dVPN. In 2018 I joined Knoks platform as head of the strategy, and by mid-2019 I dedicated my full attention to KIRA as CEO.

When and how did you discover crypto? When did you join this industry?

In early 2017 I talked to my friend who was a cyber security expert and we were discussing Bitcoin and Ethereum. He told me that he was trading cryptocurrencies but I didn't have a lot of background in it, so I started to learn more about buying cryptocurrencies and how different technologies worked in blockchain and why they are important. I joined a couple of crypto Slack and telegram groups and became more involved within the community. I started to get more involved in the space when I became a community volunteer for Binance exchange when Binance was first starting out in Tokyo, which was around May 2017. Later that year I quit my corporate job in New York and started focusing more professionally on crypto.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I'm working on KIRA. I'm the founder and CEO. KIRA is Layer 1 Network that allows users to deposit and stake any assets whether it's any cryptocurrencies or real-world assets issued in the digital form. All tokens staked on KIRA remain liquid and are represented 1 to 1 by transferable derivatives held trustlessly by the stakeholders themselves. Through KIRA's unique offering stakeholders would be able to benefit from the block and fee rewards generated by the network, as well as leverage stake their assets on multiple PoS chains and DeFi platforms simultaneously. To summarize: KIRA  is an L1 network capable of scaling value at stake without limiting the liquidity of users tokens.

KIRA rose up out of the idea to connect crypto assets with the real-world economy

Why did you decide to build a decentralized network for DApps? How was the idea of KIRA born?

Co-founder & CTO Mateusz Grzelak and I were both a part of the Interchain ecosystem for a few years before we started KIRA. We shared a vision that there's not going to be a single masterchain network that scales infinitely and provides all features that you might imagine. I think it was more rational to assume that in the long term it will have thousands of projects interconnected together and just in the world with thousands of smaller companies on the internet offering their services rather than just one large single website like Amazon. So we wanted to utilize Web3 structure and make sure that people utilize 100% of their capital with the minimum possible risk involved without fears of liquidation, fears of market volatility and we didn't want those people to just sit on their asses. KIRA rose up out of the idea to connect crypto assets with the real-world economy so that people can stake whatever assets they have in the digital world and earn rewards in a safe manner.

What does Multi-Bonded Proof of Stake (MBPoS) mean?

It’s a proprietary consensus that we created. As you probably know Bitcoin uses Proof of Work consensus that allows scaling of security with the growing hash rate but is unable to scale transaction throughput and does not offer finality. You are also likely familiar with Proof of Stake that now a lot of projects like Cosmos and Polkadot use. However, that consensus offers scalability of transactions and finality does not scale the security well.

We’ve created a customized consensus which is called Multi-Bonded Proof of Stake (MBPoS) and which allows you to get the best of both worlds by allowing staking of multiple assets to secure the network without locking up the capital

The consensus further puts the power directly into the hands of individual network participants who can decide which DApps they want hosting on KIRA thus ensuring their own security while offering maximum possible utility for the end-users.

Instead of the network getting secured by just one token which is not secure at all because it centralizes over time in hands of a few as its value fluctuates unpredictably on the market, people can stake stablecoins and even digitized real-world assets such as NFTs representing the real estate. Furthermore, because voting power and stake are NOT correlated with each other then no one can circumvent the consensus by hoarding or stealing digital tokens. Effectively you can quantitatively measure the security of the chain as the value at stake is distributed among a possibly large number of unique (non-Sybil) validators who operate the chain. All this brings clarity to the definition of what a “secure” means in the context of decentralized networks.

What’s Initial Validator Offering (IVO)? How does it work?

IVO is a crowdfunding platform. It works by enabling any validator or any project to deploy crowdfunding on KIRA where delegators (your investors) can earn that new token or mint the new NFTs without spending or locking up their existing capital. If you want to invest in the project right now there are crowdfunding platforms for Initial DEX Offering (IDO) so you send USDT or Ethereum and in return, you get tokens you invested in.

With the KIRA crowdfunding platform, it’s going to be different. The project that is raising money will host an IVO on KIRA by operating or partnering with existing validator nodes and the investors who are interested in acquiring new tokens will delegate their assets to the IVO validator/s. It doesn't matter if it’s USDT, Bitcoin or Ethereum so they delegate the asset and get rewarded with a new token. And if they decide that the project isn’t performing as they expected they can undelegate the asset and they still get to keep the token that they earned as a reward. It reduces the risk for investors to invest in projects as instead of exchanging your valuable asset such as stablecoins, NFTs or Ethereum for the new illiquid token, you can just stake your existing coins without losing custody or liquidity.

What problem is KIRA going to solve?

The key problem is the lack of security in the context of many small networks existing within the internet of blockchain to offer access to the Web3. The security assumptions of all currently existing Proof of Stake networks only work when the network exists in a vacuum like entirely alone. Cross-chain applications utilizing small PoS chains as their backbone consensus stop being secure when large values of assets are deposited to them. When the value of deposits from outside of the network exceeds the native value at stake the network operators become incentivized to misbehave - fork the chain and steal all deposits. Imagine sending $1B to the small chain with just a few validators and only $10M at stake vouching for the honest operation of the “dApp”, the incentives of $990M pose a huge risk of validators collusion to cheat. Please note that we also have to consider attacks where someone acquires a majority of stake/voting power in such a disadvantaged chain - as the costs of performing the attack (slashing) become justifiable. One of many examples of such exploits is centralized exchanges voting on governance proposals to help wealthy individuals acquire a “decentralized” platform.

The key problem is the lack of security…

KIRA solves such security issues because there is no cap to the value at stake that can vouch for the chain security as well as there is no correlation between voting power and the wealth of any individual in terms of the native/governance token. No one can steal, hoard, borrow the coins or collude with just a few individuals to circumvent the consensus and everyone can transparently measure if the value at stake is sufficient for their own deposit to be safe. In KIRA there is no limit in terms of how many validators can be part of the network. However, each one of them must be an individual (non-Sybil) as the voting power is split equally between each one of them. The social consensus of validators is used to ensure that each of the individuals operating the chain is indeed an individual. It's a totally different approach to consensus. We're not utilizing artificial token to secure our network and plutocratic government principles which makes the issue of security even more prominent.

KIRA uses real-world and any type of digital assets to secure itself, allowing stakeholders to benefit from the transaction fees and block rewards. All the accumulated value vouches for the honest operation of the chain and deployed their dApps.

Who are the key users of your solution?

The key users of our solution are those who are interested in generating passive income from staking and operating nodes on the network. The idea of staking is pretty big and it's not just staking, farming, but also staking any assets that you wish to use. There is a lot of hype around NFTs.

What can you do with NFTs rather than buying them for speculative purposes and hoping that they will increase in value?

If you have any NFT collection you can stake them on KIRA and earn rewards on top of the floor price increase. Of course under the condition that the network governance whitelists the NFT collection on KIRA because it adds a lot of community (fee revenue) or security benefits to the chain.

So basically it’s retail and anyone who is interested in staking or running validator nodes. As soon as KIRA L1 is live our focus will be on enabling L2 dApp hosting to attract retail users, that is existing DeFi  & CeFi consumers. When our native crowdfunding system is launched it's going to be not just retail who want to earn benefits and rewards from staking, but also investors who are interested in investing in other projects through staking and the projects themselves which are interested in using our crowdfunding platform to raise capital.

What’s the current situation with DApps market? Any pitfalls?

Yeah, there are a lot of pitfalls. I think the main problem with DApps is the lack of trust and quality. DApps running on the Proof of Stake are often secured by a small validator set or one single governance token and that creates a huge security threat. Anyone can launch their code and very rarely any of it is vetted by any third parties. All this creates potential issues not only for the end-users but also for the network operators themselves that might find themselves in the jurisdiction that might suddenly prohibit the operation of certain applications such as DEX’es without KYC in the USA.

KIRA tackled all the mentioned pitfalls and is designed with the future-proofing of the Web3 ecosystem in mind.

The main problem with DApps is the lack of trust and qualit

From the social point of view, I see a huge hype around NFTs. Eventually, projects like Ethereum utilized the usage of NFTs as a speculative value. I think a lot of projects become redundant as well.

What trends will we see in the near future?

In terms of the trends people who will go towards projects that are:

• first of all, quantitatively trustable and secure which involves securing the network and decentralization of the governance
• allow you to have custody over your assets and decisions, you don't have to go through million different steps and risk your capital in order to generate passive income
• and are legally compliant, but not in the way that is disinter changed to the user.

What’s the next stage of DApps development?

The Layer 2 scaling solutions will definitely bring the breath of the fresh air, responsiveness, low fees, accessibility, and user-friendliness to the crypto ecosystem. All that while eliminating a centralized middle-man and the gatekeepers deciding who can access which financial products and who can not.

I also see the tighter global regulations coming for the network operators and even the developers themselves as the world slowly becomes to normalize crypto as an intangible part of our daily lives.