Hello Hivers, as many of you probably know, Hive was created in response to a hostile takeover and exchange attack. When my Koinos Group co-founders (the core developers of Steem) and I saw that the community fork of Steem (Hive) would succeed, we decided to focus our attention not on building a social blockchain that would compete with Hive, but on building a free-to-use general purpose blockchain that applications like Hive could take advantage of to improve their user experience, scalability, and decentralization.
It wasn't easy building a brand new general purpose blockchain that could compete at both a feature and performance level with the top L1s in the world like Ethereum, Solana, and Polkadot while also delivering the unrivaled user experience that Hivers take for granted. But we've done just that and tomorrow you can watch via livestream as @Vandeberg (the largest contributor to the Hive codebase) spins up the latest version of the Koinos testnet (Harbinger)! This version includes all the features that make Koinos the world’s first truly free-to-use, truly decentralized, and truly evolving general purpose blockchain (“L1”).!
Watch the launch of v0.4.0 (V4) of the Koinos testnet on discord at 1:00 PM EST.
Feature Complete?
Harbinger V4 will be the first, fully functional blockchain ever to use proof-of-burn as a consensus algorithm. It will be the first ever free-to-use blockchain thanks to the Mana system (which is based on the same RC system in Hive) and Mana delegations. And it will be the first ever blockchain capable of evolution because it will have an on-chain decentralized governance system that can add new business logic to the blockchain as smart contracts through in-band upgrades (no “Eth 2.0” hard forks). Any one of these features would be a “killer feature” in any other blockchain, but Koinos combines them to create what we think is the ultimate general purpose blockchain.
To learn more about how Koinos works, check out the new unified whitepaper.