Klaytn (Klay) Things You Need To Know Before Investing

Riya KapoorMay 27, 2022

3 minutes read

Table of Contents

What is Klaytn?

Klaytn (Klay) is a public blockchain focused on the metaverse, games, and the creator economy. Officially launched in June 2019, it is the dominant blockchain platform in South Korea and is now undergoing global business expansion from its international base in Singapore.

These business expansion activities are supported by the Klay Growth Fund, which aims to grow the ecosystem built on Klay. Klaytn Foundation manages and disburses the fund, a Singapore-based non-profit organization established in August 2021.

What makes Klaytn unique?

An end-to-end metaverse developer package:

To simplify building for the metaverse, Klaytn offers an end-to-end metaverse package that includes customized L2 solutions, SDKs and smart contract libraries, IPFS solutions, wallets, chain explorers, oracles and bridges, as well as an ecosystem of supporting services such as stablecoin integration, NFT marketplaces, trading interfaces, and more.

1-second deterministic finality:

Klaytn utilizes an optimized version of Istanbul BFT that enables transactions to achieve absolute finality within a second, allowing for responsive user experiences and enabling use cases where near-instant and irreversible finality is necessary—such as the real-time minting of in-game item drops.

Klaytn’s data guarantee:

Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake blockchains exhibit probabilistic finality, which means a tiny chance that a transaction recorded on the chain can get reversed. This makes these blockchains unsuitable for mission-critical applications, especially if used at scale. Klaytn’s IBFT consensus algorithm guarantees that data recorded on the blockchain is correct and will never be reversed to deliver the reliability and data consistency needed for large-scale applications.

Support for Ethereum equivalence

Klaytn supports EVM as one of the emerging standards for the metaverse and Web3 and will be adopting the EVM specification by * Making Klay’s technical stack equivalent to the Ethereum stack from an interfacing and execution perspective * Building on top of existing Ethereum clients and interfacing libraries to inherit any improvements made to their open-source codebases * Enabling Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) and Klay Improvement Proposals (KIPs) to contribute to both ecosystems.

A unique governance structure

Klaytn’s unique take on decentralization at the core is their Governance Council (GC). Comprising leading global enterprises and DAOs across geographies and industries, these GC members form a compact validator network that can deliver the benefits of a decentralized public blockchain while maintaining the performance of a permissioned blockchain. Klay aims to further increase decentralization by onboarding more DAOs to their GC to create a “DAO of DAOs”.

Built-in scalability via service chains

Klaytn utilizes the hub-and-spoke model, widely acknowledged as one of the leading scalability solutions. Klay’s spokes, or service chains, can be customized for specific DApp requirements such as high throughput, special node configurations, or custom security levels. In addition, support for nested service chains will provide the exponential scalability needed for metaverse-scale adoption.

$1 billion protocol-level ecosystem fund

Through a combination of the initially issued reserve KLAY and on-chain tokenomics that re-invest 66% of newly-minted KLAY, Klaytn has set aside $1 billion to support ecosystem growth. The funds are distributed across a range of grant and reward programs such as * The Klay Improvement Reserve (KIR) for infrastructure, tools and services that improve the quality of the Klay network * The Klay Growth Fund (KGF) for early-stage projects with high potential for creating a positive impact on Klay * The Proof of Contribution (PoC) program to reward builders of smart contracts that contribute to the growth on on-chain activities on Klay.

The preferred enterprise-level blockchain:

Klaytn is the preferred blockchain for enterprises and enterprise-level use cases, counting industry titans such as Japan’s GMO Internet Group, Indonesia’s Salim Group, and mobile gaming giants Netmarble and WeMade amongst our partners. Klay is also the official blockchain partner for Bank of Korea’s CBDC project, running off a private, modified version of Klay.

Who are the founders of Klaytn?

The Klaytn blockchain was developed and launched in June 2019 by GroundX, the blockchain subsidiary of Korea’s largest mobile platform, Kakao. After two years of success in Korea, the Klay Foundation—a non-profit entity devoted to the Klay network and its ecosystem—was established to begin Klaytn’s global expansion.

Klaytn Foundation is a non-profit organization established to accelerate global adoption and ecosystem maturity on Klay. The foundation manages the Klay Growth Fund and operates alongside Krust, a subsidiary of internet giant Kakao Corp that invests in projects built on Klaytn.