Kroma

DJ from Kroma - I am Dongjoo (DJ) Lee. My role is CTO in Lightscale. I am managing all Product/Tech people.

I usually talk about technical issues with engineers and researchers. In addition, I talk about what is the best UX that we can provide through Kroma official site (kroma.network) or marketing channels.

I majored in CS and got my PhD degree at Seoul National University. My research topics at that time were Recommended systems, opinion mining, natural language processing, and so on, including general data mining and machine learning techniques.

Then I worked about four years at Samsung Electronics as a software engineer, making several recommendation algorithms for services in Samsung devices (2011 ~ 2015).

Feeling that the company and my team were too big to move more swiftly, I moved out and joined as a founding member of a startup, Yello Exchange, a joint venture of Yello Mobile and Yello Financial group. Both companies were promising new types of big startups at that time. I met Jinwoo and Ryan, founding members of Hashed at that time (2015 ~ 2017).

After working two years in a startup, I learned a lot. I finally decided to found a company, Voost, funded by Hashed. I made a meta crypto trading platform aiming to integrate all major crypto exchanges. I started early 2018, bull market, and launched the beta early 2019, crypto winter. The product was good, but the market wasn't. So, I decided to stop developing the service (2018 ~ 2019).

Voost was acquired by Bungaejangter, the second-largest second-hand item marketplace in Korea. I worked as a CTO, growing the tech team from ten to about a hundred. I upgraded working culture, processes, as well as apps and infra (2019 ~ 2021).

Finally, I met TK and started a new career in Lightscale since 2022.

I think Web 3 provides more open opportunities than web 2. I like web 3 cultures like decentralized, transparent, open-sourced, and so on. I think blockchain opened the new world, and there is a future.

As you may be aware, in early 2022, the crypto landscape appeared very promising until the Terra collapse occurred. Our team had come together in late 2021 and began designing solutions that integrated aspects of both web 2 and web 3 technologies. Our goal was to provide the best user experience on web 3 focusing on financial services, which substantially required a new type of mainnet that connects multiple mainnets.

However, following the Terra collapse, the circumstances underwent significant changes, including our funding situation. Wemade continued to believe in the team's potential and provided funding. As a result, we made the decision to concentrate on our core capabilities by constructing a rollup that connects the WEMIX ecosystem with the Ethereum ecosystem.

We tried to catch up with the best parts of existing rollup solutions and concluded that optimistic rollup was the current practical solution but zk rollup will be the ultimate solution in the future. So we made Kroma that integrates zkEVM onto an optimistic rollup based on OP Stack. There was no OP stack based rollup that has an active fault proof system. At present, Kroma is the first OP stack based rollup that has an active fault proof system. In addition, to the best of my knowledge, Kroma is the first and only rollup that has a permissionless validator network for now.

We are pushing much effort to enhance existing technologies, and one of such efforts is Tachyon, which is an open-source, easy to use, GPU interoperable, and lightning-fast ZKP library.

Yes, right.

Recently they launched a new AAA MMORPG game Nightcrows, which is available in the Korean market for now and made huge success, usually top 1 or 2 in Google and Apple app stores.

Maybe early next year.

Sure

Absolutely there are so many ideas and deals that we are currently talking about, but we didn't make a specific roadmap yet.

Wemix ecosystem will expand to Kroma, and we expect it will be much bigger than that of Wemix 3.0 mainnet. We expect that we will bring ETH holders to the Wemix ecosystem running on Kroma. I can tell that if you hold Wemix, then you will be enjoying our roadmap in the future.

We are dynamically adjusting our roadmap according to various contexts.

We had planned to launch Kroma as a zk rollup but noticed that the current performance of zkp does not meet our requirement and hence would make users spend more fees. So we launched Kroma as an optimistic rollup. Our roadmap includes several milestones that bring several overcomes against such limitations.

You can find our general roadmap on kroma.network, but milestones may change.

These are some additional details.
2023.Q4 - WEMIX Ecosystem Expansion on Kroma
2024.Q1 - Protodank sharding, zk fault-proof system upgrade
2024.Q2 - $KRO token generation event, zk rollup testnet
2024.Q4 - zk rollup mainnet

To answer your question, we are currently syncing with Wemade about projections for Kroma Ecosystem and yet to release the details.

We are super focused on bringing new dApps to the Kroma chain. Grants are available, and we have something called transaction incentives where dApps and users receive rewards depending on the amounts of tx they incur within each block.

We are game-centric in a way where our parent company is a game company in Korea. We are utilizing their network to gain more traction among users and developers.

You are welcome