Ground X, the blockchain subsidiary of South Korean’s Internet firm Kakao, has announced the launch of the testnet version of Klaytn, a platform that intends to “improve the inconvenient UX of existing blockchain platforms by allowing end-users to experience blockchain technology in the most seamless way.”
Ground X said on Monday that the Klaytn testnet was currently open to approximately ten partners consisting of firms from various industries including entertainment, gaming, social media, video streaming, and finance. The company plans to extend the Klaytn testnet operation exclusively to partners and selected providers at the time. It will share its source code to the public at a later date, and the Klaytn mainnet will launch in Q1 of 2019.
“The popularization of blockchain means that it’s imperative to provide a practical blockchain service for mass adoption that validates the value and utility of blockchain technology,” said Jason Han, CEO of Ground X. “In order to achieve this, Ground X has designed Klaytn so that it can provide an easy and friendly ecosystem for users, service providers, and developers all at the same time.”
Aimed at supporting large scale decentralized applications (dApps), Klaytn promises higher performance, solid reliability, stability, low costs, and a security model similar in complexity to that of private blockchains, according to its position paper released on Monday.
The testnet block interval has been shortened to less than one second with up to 1,500 transactions per second. The same interval that would take an hour for Bitcoin and several minutes for Ethereum.
Klaytn separates “consensus nodes” and “ranger nodes” to divide roles so that consensus and block replication are performed efficiently. Consensus nodes, which are comprised of services providers, are accountable for works requiring high responsibility and consensus, while ranger nodes download newly created blocks that do not require consensus.
The platform also provides an application development environment that is similar to that of traditional application development and a user interface that seeks to enable users to use blockchain-based applications seamlessly.
It features tutorials and toolkits for blockchain-based service development. The toolkits include Klaytn Wallet, which allows users to safely guard and transfer their tokens created on Klaytn, KlaytnScope, which lets users monitor all activities on Klaytn, including block creation and transaction, and BLASQ, the incentivized blockchain co-working community where users’ blockchain-related questions and answers are rewarded with tokens.
South Korea’s Internet giant Kakao, which operates the country’s leading chat app KakaoTalk, has been aggressively making inroads into the blockchain business.
It is an investor in Dunamu, the company behind South Korea’s cryptocurrency exchange platform Upbit, and launched in March 2018 its blockchain subsidiary Ground X in Tokyo.