Kava EVM Road Ahead
The Last Year
The Kava EVM is celebrating its 1-year anniversary and has seen tremendous growth in adoption and usage since inception. Builders have come to Kava and usage on-chain is increasing significantly. At time of publication Kava has 110+ protocols officially onboarded with TVL ranging from $300M to $250M according to DeFillama. Along with explosive ecosystem adoption there have been sizable developments in infrastructure scaling from a software and node performance standpoint and additional developer resources to make it as easy as possible to build and flourish on the Kava EVM.
Kava 12 Successfully Launched
Kava 12 mainnet successfully launched, bringing more flexibility and control to Cosmos DAOs.
Kava 13 Set to Launch
The Kava ecosystem has seen considerable growth across the Cosmos and EVM dapps deployed onto the network in the first quarter of 2023. With the spike in demand, comes a greater need for speed, security, and performance. To meet this need, the Kava 13 upgrade will deploy architecture enhancements to help developers scale and accelerate their protocols, and optimize the user experience across the Kava ecosystem while significantly enhancing EVM software transaction processing through parallelizing request handling and laying the groundwork for sharding of node databases to handling the growing state produced by this ongoing growth in transactions and usage.
Kava Strategic Vault
Creation of the Kava Strategic Vault funding growth and security initiatives across the Kava ecosystem.
Akash Partnership
Akash distributes 2.5M AKT to Kava Strategic Vault funding decentralized infrastructure.
Uniswap Deployment Incoming
Uniswap v3 deployment on Kava passes phase 2 of 3 unanimously.
110+ Protocols on Kava
A thriving ecosystem is a key success factor for any blockchain. Kava will continue to optimize for ecosystem growth and look to on-board innovative projects. In the next year, we plan to focus on several key technical improvements, including implementing sharding and sidechain technology to improve scalability, enhancing our interoperability with other blockchains, and optimizing our security protocols to provide even greater protection for user assets.
The Road Ahead
The road ahead has three main pillars; Adoption, Security, and Governance. These three main pillars along with crucial tier one partnerships will set the stage for exponential adoption of the Kava ecosystem.
Adoption
Kava’s unique EVM and Cosmos design allows native stablecoin issuers to integrate onto Kava. In addition all major bridges and exchanges can integrate with Kava in order to make onboarding and offboarding easier than any other layer 1.
Kava can leverage this to then distribute these native stablecoins to every cosmos app chain including Osmosis, DYDX, Injective, Cosmos hub, Juno, etc.
- Integration of major stablecoin(s) and having Kava become the hub for those native stablecoins to all Cosmos app-chains
- Integration of EVM into all major bridges (LayerZero, Wormhole, Multichain, Axelar).
- Selection of preferred wrapped assets (e.g. BTC and ETH).
The integration of Kava EVM on exchange will also allow native projects that launch on Kava to not only get more DEX liquidity, but also more ecosystem investment and CEX liquidity. Focusing on project success is a major initiative for growing Kava adoption.
Security
Security will have two major focuses, amongst others, which is node availability and software scalability.
Currently the Kava EVM software can have a number of significant optimizations made to it in order to handle the high volume of transactions and requests that it receives. There is already, and will continue to be, significant resources put into research and development to optimize processing of requests in this new field.
Node performance and availability, the services that actually receive requests, process them, interact with validators and ultimately decentralize the network, has a large room for optimization and improvement. Currently Kava handles transaction processing on the scale of hundreds of millions of requests per month and it's not feasible for a non-global set of organizations to process all these requests. Optimizations in both the software and horizontal scaling of access gateways and nodes spread out across organizations throughout the globe to service requests will be a major ongoing item of research and development.
Governance
Kava launched day one with fully functional governance inline with the Cosmos software and Cosmos ethos and has continued to pioneer autonomous software governance innovations and will continue to do so with a number of updates extending these primitives to the Kava EVM include extension of governance modules to EVM, EVM transaction emulation to keep parity with Cosmos and EVM (governance) messages amongst other things, and pre-compiled smart contracts enabling seamless interactions between EVM and Cosmos messages and governance.
In addition, as previously outlined in other community announcements, articles, and governance proposals and votes, Kava Horizon is being implemented with two independent Foundations created to steward the continued development and maintenance of the public and permissionless Kava blockchain with emissions through the end of the year flowing to these two foundations, less staking rewards. Pursuant to community vote, all emissions will then permanently end December 31, 2023 and a software upgrade will have been released modifying the flows of all rewards (e.g. POS staking, Kava Rise incentives, Grants, etc) to flow programmatically or via governance from these two foundation bodies.
Kava governance will remain at the forefront of innovation striving to maximize the surface area of governable parameters in code enabling users from across the world to be able to participate in shaping the Kava permissionless network and continue expanding its decentralized footprint globally.
Summary
In summation, both the Kava community, ecosystem, and software is on an exciting path towards mass adoption and full scale network interoperability. This is a unique technology within the blockchain ecosystem and while there are many technical challenges ahead the Kava community looks forward to working through and solving them as Kava continues its goal of combining the speed and interoperability of Cosmos with the developer power of Ethereum.