The usual disclaimer: Nothing posted in this blog, website or post is meant to be investment advice. Please seek a duly licensed investment professional for investment advice, not some guy on the internet who refers to himself as “The Dood”. In the spirit of full disclosure The Dood currently doesn’t hold any Krypton but may sometime in the future.
Hello, and thank you for taking the time to do this interview. Could you tell the readers who you are and what your relationship is to Krypton?
Hi, Bitcoin Dood. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk more about my fork of Ethereum, Krypton.
Many of your readers will probably know me best from Twitter where I’ve spent a lot of time in the crypto community since 2014. Until now, I’d been playing on Twitter as a crypto hostess, helping coins make a name for themselves and growing my Twitter following. (Now over 13 thousand! Thanks, Twitter!)
Then one day, several of my dev friends finally convinced me to dust off my project management skills and lead the development of a new digital currency, so I envisioned and they created Krypton (ticker: KR).
My real-life career has been as a business systems programmer and project lead. You can check me out on LinkedIn if you like by searching for covertress covertress. So, it was about time that I quit playing coin hostess and get back into project management. I’ve shifted my full attention now into creating and building a blockchain startup so, here I am, the founder and manager of Krypton.
So from reading the BitcoinTalk Ann on Krypton, Krypton is an Ethereum based cryptocurrency that develops smart contracts and decentralized applications for business systems and the IoT. I have to admit, The Dood’s showing up a little late to the party with all things Ethereum related. I really just started paying attention to everything these Ethereum based “platforms” have to offer. If you don’t mind, for those of us who were sitting in the back of the class and not paying attention, could you explain a little about how an Ethereum based platform like Krypton works? What do DAOs,DACs, and DAPPS have to offer us, and how do they benefit businesses and interact with the IoT?
Whoa! That is a tough question, so allow me to employ a back-of-the-class reply and keep this as simple as possible.
DAO is an acronym for a Distributed Autonomous Organization. In a nutshell, the management responsibilities of the organization do not fall upon the CEO and board of directors, management of the organization is handled entirely by the democratic voting of the organization’s coin owners or shareholders. An open ledger of votes is recorded on whatever blockchain this DAO is deployed on. DAO members spend the associated blockchain coin in order to cast votes. Voting issues can be for anything from funding projects to determining how the DAO will actually operate.
DAC is an acronym for a Distributed Autonomous Corporation. Here’s the best, simple explanation of a DAC that I’ve read so far:
Imagine a corporation that engages in economic activity without guidance or direction from humans. Programmed with a mission statement maximize profit for shareholders from the sale of widgets, for example the corporation could own capital, enter contracts, and employ robots. People could even be hired for more creative tasks. Such an entity would live on the Internet, distributed across thousands or millions of nodes (stakeholders who host the DAC on their computer). The Economist: DAC Attack.
A DAPP is a Decentralized Application. Because it works in the same way as a DAC, being distributed across a multitude of nodes, it is an application which does not suffer the fault of downtime.
A Smart Contract, which is really just a piece of code within a DAPP, can continue to run forever, provided it was not programmed with a suicide clause which will terminate it. This code, once initially provided with the proper data inputs, can autonomously draw conclusions and provide output without any further user input.
How’s that? Still need that dunce cap?
Great explanations thanks.
Is it safe to assume that both Ethereum and Krypton are the same underlying technology? Could you also explain a little bit about how the Krypton project differs from the Ethereum project?
Yes, both Ethereum and Krypton are the same technology. What differentiates Krypton’s coin, KR, are a few minor things: fewer initial coins at launch (~2.669 million), faster block time (15 seconds) and lower inflation (creating 1 coin per minute through proof-of-work mining.)
Since KR is a fork of ETH, Krypton will not be required to perform the same updates that Ethereum will do. As you may have read, Ethereum is planning to change their platform from proof-of-work (POW) to proof-of-stake (POS) with their planned release of the Casper protocol.
We at Krypton have decided to take a wait-and-see approach to all developments from Ethereum, especially one as large as this which would affect how KR’s blockchain functions. Besides, by remaining POW while ETH goes POS, KR will be well positioned to pick up ETH’s disenfranchised miners.
Krypton is fairly new, I believe it was released February 18th 2016. You’ve already put together a pretty impressive team to work on the project. Do you care to talk a little about team Krypton and what they bring to the Krypton community?
Haha. That’s a tricky question since many of my lead developers so value their privacy that I only represent them on Krypton’s website and our BitcoinTalk OP as anonymous avatars. Fortunately, rather than scaring angel investors off, this has endeared many to Krypton. After all, one of the main tenants of a good digital currency is anonymous peer-to-peer transactions. Why couldn’t this anonymity also apply to a development team?
Like I did at Consensus 2016 and in all my business dealings, I use my real name. However, for Twitter, LinkedIn’s main page and other internet forums, I too remain anonymous, as covertress (which means female spy.) I do this for personal security reasons.
Now, some members of Team Krypton are not such privacy snobs as I like to call us. Our web developer, Saugat Sigdel, who created Krypton’s faucet, is a talented young man from Nepal.
I’ve employed a host of translators to bring Krypton’s message in our BitcoinTalk OP to the world. Many of these people use their real names, others remain anon.
A longtime anonymous friend of mine, Aminerminer, does much of Krypton’s graphics.
Krypton’s core development team, RagingBull (blockchain administrator) and Krypton_Dev (lead developer, who is a JS guru with tons of smart contracts experience), as well as our current pool of Solidity developers (whom I like to call Spec_Apps) are all anonymous on the internet.
If you’re a talented dev who values your privacy, join Krypton. We won’t give you up for our press. Besides, I kind of enjoy the spotlight and won’t mind the fame if Krypton grows to be the size of Ethereum.
As a trader, I’m always interested in how a project is funded and supported. Was there any type of ICO? Was there a premine? Is the project completely funded by community support? How does the Krypton project support itself?
When the KR chain was initially created, it was premined to generate 10,000,000 (10 million) coins for use in Krypton’s Crowd Funding Campaign. This CFC lasted several weeks and distributed a final total of approximately 2.669 million KR coins. The remaining coins of the initial 10 million premine were burned. Krypton officially launched with this ~2.669 million in total KR supply.
Krypton’s CFC generated a total only ~3.94 BTC, which at the time was worth roughly $1,600. No surprise, this has already been spent. My business trip to Consensus 2016 and promo materials alone were far more costly than that. The remainder of this expense came from my own pocket.
Everything Krypton has built to-date has been through volunteer effort and through personal funding from our core dev team.
Looking forward, Krypton will remain a volunteer dev and community-supported project until we get those angel investors to open their wallets. I’m working hard to foment these relationships. I’m not the only one on Team Krypton who would enjoy working it full-time, with benefits.
At the time of this writing, coinmarketcap.com shows 2,804,787 KR available. What will be the maximum amount created?
I hope many many more millions since KR is a POW blockchain. One KR is generated every minute. That’s an additional 1,440 KR each day. Compared with Ethereum that generates 20 coins per minute, KR’s total coin supply will remain relatively low.
Until a time that KR moves to a POS protocol, the total number of KR will naturally remain unlimited. Of course, it will take much time to add to the total number of available KR coins since KR has such a low inflationary model.
According to the Krypton blog :
https://krypton.rocks/2016/03/25/covertress-is-bringing-krypton-to-the-consensus-2016-conference/
Krypton was represented at the Coindesk Consensus summit. There were a lot of big names and players in the fintech industry in attendance. Could you tell us a little about the conference and how Krypton was received?
I began by joking with the attendees of Consensus before I ever arrived. On Twitter I posted a picture of Angelina Jolie in Maleficent and said that everyone at Consensus will know my true identity. Haha. Many more than a few people actually recognized me from Twitter. Roger Ver, Purse’s CEO, Andrew Lee, and Emily from Shapeshift.io were among them. It was a pleasure for me to connect with these people in real life.
Oh! And speaking of faces… I took one of the personally worst photos ever when I snapped a selfie with Gavin Andresen. I’d show you but, I’d have to kill you. Lol.
I wished that I had not booked my travel arrangements so early because Consensus added two days to their agenda, before the conference, and devoted this to a hackathon. I missed it. One of my primary reasons for attending was to find more developers and try to hire them for Krypton. As luck would have it, one of the first people I met was Eric Piscini, a principal at Deloitte, who was one of the panelists at the hackathon. He caught me up on what I missed and introduced me to some amazingly talented devs. He was personally blown away by these kids at the hackathon as was I when I met them too.
Overall, I couldn’t be more pleased with the stack of business cards that I collected and new friends that I made. In my opinion, there is simply no substitute for conducting business face-to-face. I plan to attend many more conferences on behalf of Krypton.
Are you at liberty to tell us if any companies have already hopped on board with Krypton, or are you in negotiations with any companies that you can talk about?
Not at this time, but I’m so excited I can hardly keep my mouth shut.
So the more I learn about DAOs, DAPPs, and smart contracts the more I realize the future of business or at least running one may look significantly different in the future. For example, a boss or manager may be replaced by an employee simply meeting the requirements of a smart contract. In some way’s a DAO could even replace everyone in upper management, with DAO holders voting on how the company runs. So back to the technology of Krypton. How will technologies like Krypton reshape the landscape of the corporate structure? What type of changes do you see in the future of businesses utilizing these types of technologies?
I’d have to get out my crystal ball to see where The DAO (Slock.it) will end up. I’m not impressed by this democratic crowd management model. First of all, there is no incentive for DAO holders to vote no since coins are required to vote and all coins are held in limbo until the vote concludes. This promotes yes votes, which promotes spending, since that’s what the coin owners are voting on, what projects to fund. It’s quite possible that The DAO will spend itself into the grave. In addition, I’ve spoken with several attorneys who see a ton of legal issues with this model and also complain that it was too hastily put together, without proper legal precedents being set before launching. Suffice it to say, Krypton will not be employing this type of DAO technology. I’m the head of Krypton and I’m not giving up my job of directing it to the uninformed masses.
DAPPs and smart contracts are a different story. I see these coming to every business model imaginable and that’s a good thing. Businesses who employ these technologies will not only streamline their accounting and product delivery but they will also benefit from a shift to becoming more service-oriented and by providing more information to their customers. And, a customer who feels that he or she owns their own data and can manage that data easily is a happy customer.
In addition to business systems, the Internet of Things (IoT) is estimated to consist of almost 50 billion objects by the year 2020. That’s a lot of objects to code for!
Krypton’s focus will be on developing applications for business systems and the IoT. I know this is broad by definition but, why limit ourselves to just locks, for example, when these new technologies allow us to do it all?
Anything you want to add about Krypton or tell the readers about that wasn’t covered in the interview?
I am so proud of the greater Krypton Community. It has grown so fast and accomplished so much. Krypton’s slack now hosts over 220 members. All of our community members, including those who found us through Facebook and Twitter and irc worked together to overwhelm Bittrex with a ton of messages, towards the goal of adding KR. Sorry, Bill, but you chose that avenue of engagement! Lol.
As a company, Krypton may look like a mouse when compared to the elephant size of Ethereum but, just give us time. I’m a patient and determined woman who has been blessed with an excellent team. Watch us.
OK, I ask everyone the same last question. Where do you see cryptocurrency going in the future? Any thoughts, visions, or predictions you might want to share about the future of cryptocurrency in general?
The cryptocurrency market will continue to be refined through new, real-world uses and new technologies. No one could have predicted Ethereum’s creation and rise in 2010, just as we cannot predict where crypto will be in 2020. However, we now have the tools to produce the self-governing and distributed systems and organizations that I think we will see much more of and hopefully, with Krypton’s logo on them! It’s an exciting time for crypto and an exciting time in which to be alive.
Follow these links to find out more about Krypton KR :
https://twitter.com/covertress
Looking for smart contract and DAPPs developers.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1368118.msg15114757#msg15114757
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1368118.0
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/krypton/
This article was originally written by Bitcoin Dood and appeared in his blog, The Bitcoin Blog. permalink It was reprinted with the kind permission of the Dood. Thanks, Dood! 