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KuCoin Community Chain or KCC is a public blockchain built by KCS token holders and various contributors from KuCoin’s fan communities. The network was developed based on go-ethereum to provide its users with high-speed, convenient, low-cost blockchain user experience. Go-ethereum is an open-source tool developed by the Ethereum community that was built utilizing Google’s Go programming language, C++, and Python.
KCC is fully compatible with Ethereum smart contracts and ERC-20 tokens and is said to have low migration costs, denominated in its native KCS token, also used as means of payment for gas fees over the network. KCC produces a new block every 3 seconds, providing its users with fast transaction confirmations due to its Proof of Staked Authority (PoSA) consensus algorithm, among other features.
The project has set high goals including “connecting the centralized and decentralized” by building a basic toolchain for blockchains, a global developer platform, a decentralized autonomous community, cross-chain interoperability protocols, and expanding the capacity of the network to manage the added load.
KCC’s PoSA consensus mechanism features low transaction costs and delay, as well as high transaction concurrency, and can support up to 29 validators. To become a validator on the network, a user needs to submit a proposal first and wait for the active validator set to vote on it. As long as at least half the validators have voted in favor of the proposal, the user is eligible to become a validator. Any KCS token holder can stake on any address that has qualified to become a validator. However, to be part of the active validator set, users need to rank in the top 29 nodes by staked volume and have staked at least 5,000 KCS to themselves.
Validators on KCC are ordered based on predefined rules and take turns mining blocks. If a validator fails to mine a block on time, during their turn, active validators which haven’t been part of mining blocks for the past n/2 blocks, where n is the number of active validators, are to perform the block’s production. In order for the blockchain to work properly, it requires at least n/2+1 active validators to be operational.
Each block on KCC has a preset difficulty value of 2 unless it is being generated not in the predefined order, in which case the difficulty drops to 1. If a fork occurs on the network, the blockchain selects which version it prefers, automatically, based on the cumulative maximum difficulty of each fork.
KCC has three built-in smart contracts regarding its PoSA consensus mechanism, generated since the genesis file of the project. They have all been forked from Heco and are tasked with managing the current validators, among other functions. The system contracts manage the access to validators, as well as validators’ proposals and votes. These contracts are also responsible for the ranking management of validators, staking, and unstaking operations, distribution of block rewards, punishing dishonest validators, and many more.
Since its latest hard fork, called Ishikari Hardfork, the project introduced a ReservePool responsible for temporarily saving gas fees and bonus rewards. At the end of each block, the network automatically calls the Validators smart contract, and while the fees for all transactions in a block are first sent to the ReservePool, a fixed amount of KCS is taken out of it and distributed to all validators and their stakers.
Users wishing to run a node on KCC need to have a Linux or macOS and meet the minimum hardware requirements of having a 4-core CPU, with 8GB RAM memory, and a 200GB and scalable SDD hard drive. The software needed, along with a tutorial on how to deploy a node on KCC, is available on the project’s GitHub webpage. Users can also use Docker for faster deployments and tests.
To interact with KCC’s RPC node, developers can use the Ethereum JavaScript API, Web3j – a lightweight, modular, reactive, type-safe Java and Android library for working with smart contracts and integrating nodes, as well as PHP interface web3.php, the web3.py Python library, and Golang: go-Ethereum. The KCC developer docs include links to detailed documentation regarding the use of each of these SDKs.
KCC supports Solidity, and popular developer tools such as Remix, Truffle, and Hardhat. There is a Faucet for the testnet, providing developers with funds for tests on the network, which hold no economic value. The blockchain has integrated the AnySwap bridge, but also provides users with its own KCC-Bridge.
The project has integrated Graph Node – a protocol for indexing dApps quickly on Ethereum and IPFS using GraphQL, in order to use the service, developers are required to fill in an application form available on KCC’s documentation webpage.
Staking on KCC is available to any KCS token holder, and allows them to allocate whatever amount they prefer to a validator, as long as it is more than 1 KCS. When unstaking, users are required to call the “revokeVote” method from the “validators” smart contract, wait for 86400 blocks (roughly 3 days), and then call the “withdraw” method in the same contract, to make their funds available.
If a validator doesn’t mine blocks as predefined, the network automatically calls its “Punish” smart contract, at the end of each block and counts the validator’s mishap. Once the counter reaches “every multiple of 24”, nearly all the income of the validator is slashed. If the counter reaches 600, the validator is removed from the list of active validators and disqualified from taking part in the network’s security.
KCC utilizes the KCS token, developed by the hybrid exchange KuCoin in 2017 as a profit-sharing token allowing traders to obtain value out of the exchange. Nevertheless, since KCC was developed by the KuCoin community, it naturally grew to become the blockchain’s native token used to pay for gas fees, secure the network by being staked by validators and their delegators, and share profit between the network and its participants.
KCS’s initial supply was capped at 200 million, while its final supply is planned to stabilize at 100 million through regular buyback and burning events. From the first such event in Q1 2018, until May 2022, the project has burned a total of 9,661,322 KCS tokens. According to the KuCoin team, the amount of KCS burned in each event is based on KuCoin’s overall monthly revenue.
KCS holders are subject to numerous rewards incentives from the KuCoin exchange, such as being eligible for a daily reward, coming from half the revenue KuCoin gains daily from trading fees.
The KCS token is governed by the KCS Management Foundation, an organization composed of the core KuCoin team, KCC GoDAO Foundation members, investment institutions, representatives of the KCS holder community, as well as other stakeholders. The organization focuses on overseeing the KCS token development and investment and promotes the sustainable growth of the KCS ecosystem.
KuCoin Community Chain was developed by the KuCoin community and its development is governed by the KCC GoDAO Foundation, whose current members include pseudonymous developers from around the world. The organization lists two advisors among which is the KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu. All proposals submitted by the Foundation are visible on Snapshot.
While any individual, development team, or research and design lab, can propose upgrades to the project, token swaps, or partnerships, only KCS token holders can vote on whether to approve or reject these proposals.
KCC was audited by Peckshield in May 2022. The audit covered the latest update of the blockchain, as well as its built-in genesis smart contracts. There were no critical issues found, however, there was one potential issue found to be of high risk, two that were marked as medium, one as low, and one as informational. While four of these were resolved by the KCC team, one possible issue marked as being of medium risk was only mitigated.
The issue is referred to as PVE-005 in the audit and consists of the existence of a privileged “admin” account in the KCC Genesis smart contracts, that plays a critical role in governing and regulating system-wide operations such as parameter settings and pool adjustments. Moreover, the account in question has the privilege to control and govern the flow of assets managed by the system contracts. Peckshield states that the privileged status of such an account is necessary and consistent with the contracts’ design, however, the extra power it has may be used by a malicious party and endanger the funds of the contract’s users.
At the time of publishing the audit (May 6, 2022), the KuCoin team confirmed the issue and agreed that the privileged account should be managed by a trusted multi-sig account.
The KCC GoDAO Foundation held a contest named “The Unicorn Contest” that aimed to accelerate all DeFi projects in the network’s ecosystem by offering them a grand prize pool of $1 million KCS and up to $10 million in liquidity support. The categories that the contest focused on included DeFi projects, Infrastructure Projects, NFT, GameFi and Metaverse, as well as other crypto projects.
The winners of the contest are MojitoSwap who secured $300,000, OpenLeverage with $200,000, KuSwap – $100,000, BitKeep - $50,000, and Hashtag - $50,000.
On KCC’s medium page, the team publishes weekly reports on its ecosystem, and all members of it can be viewed through the project’s website.
The KuCoin Community Chain roadmap finishes at its Ishikari hardfork upgrade, which happened at the end of July 2022. The next steps in the development of the network are to be announced soon, and in the meantime, users can submit their feedback by leaving bits of advice or reporting issues, and view past user reports by visiting this link to the project’s GitHub page. Community members can also navigate to the “Discussions'' tab on the same webpage where they can participate in or start their own discussions.
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Last updated: Aug 22, 2023
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