What is Kima?

Kima is the world’s first infrastructure-agnostic money transfer protocol. The Kima platform is comprised of a blockchain and a toolkit that allows the seamless transfer of assets between different protocols and platforms.

Challenges in Blockchain Interoperability

Blockchains are siloed. Web3 apps built within those ecosystems are constrained by their on-chain liquidity. Many solutions developed for these challenges, known as bridges, suffer from flaws and vulnerabilities: security, user experience, complexity, and poor capital efficiency.

How Kima Solves These Challenges

Kima addresses these challenges in a unique way, by creating a Web3 settlement layer which enables interchain transactions. This approach allows liquidity to be transferred between chains in a safe, secure, and cost-effective manner, enabling a reliable omnichain solution.

Key Concepts of Kima

Security: Kima achieves unique security by eliminating all known attack vectors (no smart contracts, no oracles, no external relayers) and adding multiple layers of security (e.g., using a Trusted Execution Environment with Intel SGX and decoupled validation). The protocol uses game theory and financial incentives to maintain liquidity equilibrium and maximize capital efficiency.

Infrastructure: Kima simplifies and accelerates the creation of secure Omnichain applications, tackling interoperability problems without causing additional liquidity fragmentation. It provides a mechanism for users to perform cross-chain atomic swaps without token-wrapping.

Kima's Blockchain Architecture

The Kima blockchain, built using the Cosmos SDK, employs a committee-based consensus. "Wardens" in a rotating committee ensure asset pool synchronization and authorize withdrawals based on corresponding deposits. This structure uses Threshold Signature Schemes (TSS) and operates within a Trusted Execution Environment for enhanced security.

Liquidity Management

Kima maintains liquidity pools on each integrated layer-1 blockchain (e.g., Ethereum, Polygon, Solana) and synchronizes assets across these platforms without creating synthetic ("wrapped") tokens.

Permission Layers

Permissioned Layer: Includes validators known for reliability (e.g., funds, banks, organizations). Permissionless Layer: Allows anyone with sufficient stake to become a block producer and warden, facilitating regular changes in the warden set.

Consensus and Goals

The two-layer consensus mechanism ensures stability, security, and decentralization, with four main goals:

• Manage and update the warden set.

• Execute platform governance (e.g., selecting blockchains and tokens, setting fees).

• Create an auditable record for accountability. -Enable cross-chain messaging for interacting with contracts across blockchains.

Cross-Chain Transfers

When users request cross-chain transfers, the warden committee is responsible for:

• Recording the request and monitoring the deposit on the source chain.

• Completing a threshold signature to release funds on the destination chain.

• Recording the finalized process, providing an auditable record of validator actions.

This architecture, proven in other Cosmos SDK-built systems, ensures a secure, decentralized, and efficient cross-chain transfer system.

To read a more detailed account of Kima's architecture and approach, read the White Paper.

How can you participate?

This documentation shows how to:

• Use the Kima Finance platform as an end user

• Become a validator for the Kima blockchain

• Leverage the Kima Finance SDK to effortlessly integrate all Kima's functionality into your application