A Letter to KCC Community-2022 Summary and Looking Forward to 2023

Dear KCC Community, 

2022 is coming to an end, and the KCC GoDAO foundation was reviewing the development of KCC a few days ago. Many great thoughts have been discussed, and we want to share them here with you all as well. 

While looking back at 2022, we want to conclude it as a year of “uncertainty”. The COVID-19 pandemic was still going on in some regions, and the Russia-Ukraine war impacted the rest of the world. Economic-wise, the global economic downturn was gradually emerging; the negative influence of raising interest rates spread in financial markets; and the market’s preference for safe-haven assets continued tightening the liquidity. When it comes to the crypto space, the situation was not any better. Luna Crash triggered a series of industry crises; the collapse of FTX made the fragile industry even worse; the endless FUD made the fear continue to spread. As the result, the market has fallen by more than 70% since the all-time high. The endless black swan events had discouraged many investors, and people seem to have lost their faith in crypto. 

However, 2022 is not as disappointing as it seems. Externally, most parts of the world have gradually stepped out of the impact of COVID-19. The World Cup is the best example. In terms of the crypto space, we have also seen many great innovations such as the adoption of NFT, the wide discussion of Web 3.0, the emergence of layer 2 blockchains, and the transformation of Ethereum from PoW to PoS. Innovation has always occurred in this industry. Even when the crisis seems impacted the entire market, many builders are still persistently and constantly building the crypto world into a better place. 

Therefore, we also believe that 2022 is the year of Builders and the year of the turning point. 

KCC in 2022 

2022 is in the hard mode, but we still achieved some progress 

Onchain Data 

As a new EVM-compatible chain, the development of KCC has been proceeding in an orderly manner since the official launch of the KCC mainnet in 2021. We have encountered various difficult challenges, but as far as the current situation is concerned, KCC has maintained a continuous growth pace despite the overall down-treading market environment. The number of independent addresses on the chain increased from 100,000 in mid-2022 to nearly 600,000 at year-end, with an increase of more than 500%. 

Security  

Even there were no major security incidents occurred at the KCC, we have continuously strengthened the security measurements. At the beginning of the year, we added the support of multi-signature wallets; also, we strengthened cooperation with a number of industry security organizations represented by PeckShield, CertiK, and GoPlus-Secrity, and reached strategic partnerships with many of them. The security of user assets from all aspects has been improved strongly. 

Building of KCC Ecosystem  

In March 2022, the latest Whitepaper released by KCS Management Foundation explained the plan for the future development stage of KCS. The Whitepaper clearly stated that KCC would play an important role on strengthen the integration with KCS and KuCoin ecosystem. It became the guide of KCC’s future development. 

After the release of the Whitepaper, KCC immediately announced an ecosystem incentive plan of up to $50 million, and successfully held the project incentive event, “KCC Unicorn Contest”, which attracted more than 100 projects to participate; 40+ projects successfully deployed on KCC. So far, the number of projects integrated or deployed on KCC has increased to around 90, including DeFi, NFT, GameFi, Web3.0 Infrastructure, etc. Many great protocols popped out such as MojitoSwap, OpenLeverage, KuSwap, sKCS, and Torches… 

In the second half of 2022, KCC improved the on-chain governance measurements and launched the “Node Staking” function. Users or institutions can apply to become on-chain validators to participate in the governance while enjoying stable annualized rewards. Up to now, there are more than 13 active validators on KCC. 

At the same time, we collaborated with as many reliable wallets and analytic platforms as possible to provide community users with a safer environment; and users could interact with on-chain protocols more easily. For now, there are dozens of wallets supporting the KCC, including MetaMask, TrustWallet, TokenPocket, Coin98, KuWallet, etc. We are also exploring cooperation with new concept wallets such as Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Account Abstraction (AA) wallets; in addition, many well-known data & analytic platforms in the industry such as Debank and Defillama have also supported KCC network. 

Looking forward to 2023 

As the impact of COVID-19 continues to weaken and the world economic situation improves, we believe that the development momentum of the crypto space will begin to warm up in 2023. After experiencing the hype of DeFi Summer, NFT, and Web 3.0, the decentralized world has gradually accumulated many protocols with practical application value in 2022, which will be the cornerstone of the recovery in 2023.  

In 2023, KCC will keep focusing on building a more secure, richer and more convenient decentralized ecosystem. 

Security 

We will continue to strengthen the investigation of internal risk review, prevent problems before happening, and constantly optimize our own security strategies. We will also seek more collaborations with security institutions to conduct more multi-dimensional security assessments of KCC externally. Creating a more sustainable and safer developing environment for builders is our goal. And improving the safety factor of KCC has always been and will always be our top priority. 

Ecosystem 

We will speed up the process of introducing protocols to the ecosystem. According to the $10 million ecosystem incentive plan, measures such as internal incubation and external project attraction will be applied to expand the prosperity of KCC ecosystem from multiple aspects. To this end, we will release more and clearer operating methods in the future to provide projects with better services such as complete support of funding, listing, and marketing. 

Convenience 

After the successful launch of node staking, we will keep releasing more governance methods to KCC community. All KCS holders can participate in the governance of KCC and have the power to initiate proposals or votes. Even though KCC is already one of the public chains with the lowest gas fees and the greatest experience, we will still keep improving the performance of KCC as an important task. Infrastructural products including cross-chain bridges will also be upgraded more often. 

Keep building the developer community  

Increasing performance and scalability of the blockchain  

…… 

2023 might be a brand new start for the crypto space. We can expect many historical moments to happen in 2023. 

It is our honor and pleasure to start this new journey with all KCC community members. 

Let’s explore the future together. 

Leandre 

2022.12.29