In a comment to my previous article @kenny-crane raised a topic that often comes up when we talk about Koinos on Hive and that is what a future with these two blockchains looks like. Can they coexist or must one chain rule them all? That's why I'll be talking about today!

Let me start off by saying that I believe this will happen one way or another. At the very least, I imagine there will be user interfaces like peakd.com that simply give users the choice to sign in with Hive or sign in with Koinos. They might also have the choice to post to the Hive blockchain or post to Koinos, or post to some Koinos L2. I think social content on Koinos is more likely to reside in an L2, though from what I understand this is now the future envisioned for Hive as well.

Different Mental Models

I think one of the sources of confusion when people are comparing Hive and Koinos is that the systems are so fundamentally different that you can't really think about them in the same way. Hive is a complete solution. It aims, in my opinion, to be all of the social features one could want from a blockchain. To put it in the words of Luke Willis, the developer of the first burn pool EVER, BurnKoin, Koinos is much less opinionated. In fact, it aims to have no opinions at all. Opinions about what? Well, about what a blockchain should be used for. Should a blockchain be used for a social network? Koinos has no opinion. DeFi? No opinion.

Modular and Evolving

Instead Koinos favors a more modular and evolving development process that always retains the option to pivot and upgrade on a short time scale. One example of this is accounts. One of the common pieces of feedback we received when we were developing Steem was that developers wanted the option to create free accounts. So when architecting Koinos, we opted for Ethereum-style addresses instead of human-readable account names. These account types don't take up any space on the blockchain and therefore have no cost. We also reasoned that if people really wanted to create a human-readable account name system, like ENS, they could.

Koinos Address Protocol

Even before the launch of main net, Luke and Kui (the creators of BurnKoin) had already begun work on that kind of solution, called the Koinos Address Protocol (KAP), though with some interesting innovations. My point is that KAP will deliver one of the features of Hive to Koinos, but in a totally modular fashion. Any Dapp will be able to leverage KAP to integrate human-readable account names while delivering the same free-to-use experience people want from Koinos. One can even envision applications like Peakd (what I'm using to post this article FWIW) giving the users to sign in with their KAP account or their Hive account.

I imagine that every Hive feature will eventually be replicated on Koinos, along with every DeFi feature, NFTs, Uniswap-style market makers, and any other valuable behavior currently being used on a blockchain, and applications will be able to choose which of these features they want to integrate. Bear in mind, these will all just be smart contracts that can be copied and modified by Dapp developers too. Most importantly, none of these features are built into the Koinos system logic which means they can be upgraded and iterated on independently of the system.

No Hard Forks

That being said, one of the things that distinguishes Koinos from other blockchains is that all the system features can be upgraded without a hard fork, but that doesn't mean the Koinos system will look anything like Hive. It should always remain as simple as possible with a focus on expanding the creative opportunities for smart contract (Dapp) developers.

One of the key reasons, if not THE key reason we see so many different blockchains (LBRY, DeSo/BitClout, etc.) is because blockchain developers are trying to get around fees. They have features they want to offer for free, but can't because general purpose blockchains require that gas fees be paid to run smart contracts. To get around this requirement, they build those features into the system itself. This, however, does not get rid of the costs, it socializes them and obscures them while also making these features far more difficult to modify because a hard fork is generally required to do so.

Granted, on the Koinos blockchain framework such features can be implemented as "system smart contracts" which can be upgraded in-band (without a hard fork) by decentralized governance (currently live on main net), but would be the point? Since Koinos is not just fee-less, but free-to-use, application developers can get everything they need from their own smart contract which they can either retain the right to upgrade at will, or layer on a decentralized governance system of their own design. The point is that once people see that they do not have to bake a feature into the system in order to deliver a free user experience, the idea quickly disappears into the ether.

Bridging Koinos and Hive

Another fantastic example of the power of our design is that we already have cross chain atomic swaps between Ethereum and Koinos thanks to the awesome work of @fbslo (in beta)! Communication between two general purpose blockchains is largely a solved problem, but Hive isn't a general purpose blockchain. Hive-Engine is a general purpose L2, and I have no doubt that there will one day be communication between Hive-Engine and Koinos. Is that the same as communication between Hive and Koinos? It is not, but perhaps it is good enough.

I hope this article helps explain how the future will unfold and why it doesn't make sense to think of Koinos and Hive as competitors. Koinos is a very different thing, trying to solve very different problems. It will evolve in unimagineable ways and gradually infect an increasing variety of applications over time. It is not a matter of getting developers to abandon their existing platforms in favor of Koinos, it is about giving developers (and their users) an infinite variety of OPTIONS.

If you want to get a better sense of how Koinos works and the value that it offers, head on over to docs.koinos.io and spin up a node for yourself! We think Koinos is BY FAR the easiest blockchain node to spin up, taking about 5 minutes start to finish (after you install docker).

To learn more about Koinos, go to koinos.io, and if you have any questions join our fantastic community in telegram or discord.