Next, the fifth partner in the world of Sei Network is KYVE. A few years ago, Cosmos brought forward its own game-changing Standard Development Kit (SDK), providing Web3 builders with a new, modular framework allowing for quick and easy blockchain development.

Since then, hundreds of different blockchains have benefited from the SDK framework and quickly built projects with success and ease. Being one of the simplest, most secure, and most flexible app-building frameworks in the industry, Cosmos SDK was the natural choice for our team at KYVE.

As a result of facing limitations of scalability and flexibility with our previous EVM-based chain, our team evaluated multiple options to support the KYVE Web3 data lake solution and found that Cosmos provided all that we were looking for and more. More specifically, it provided us with a non-EVM, scalable solution that made it easier to handle high-frequency transactions, faster, more streamlined block times, and the KYVE Network’s very own block space.

With this in mind, KYVE is excited to announce that we recently joined the Cosmos Ecosystem and have migrated most of our blockchain protocol from an EVM-based chain to Cosmos SDK-based chain!

Before we dive into this new development, let’s take a step back and look at what exactly the KYVE Network does and why we needed this change.

A closer look at KYVE

KYVE is a Web3 data lake solution allowing projects to easily standardize, validate and permanently store data, such as raw block data, transactions, application-specific data, financial data, and more. Not only is the project important for RPC and node runners, but KYVE also allows anyone to have clearer insights about the on-chain data, aiding projects’ overall data scalability.

Our protocol does so thanks to its Layer 1 chain powered by decentralized archivers and validators taking blockchain data, validating and bringing it to a unified standard, then storing it permanently on Arweave for anyone to easily access, ensuring the scalability, immutability, and availability of data over time.

With the ever-growing amount of unorganized and unreliable data in today’s world, KYVE’s solution makes the process of storing and accessing important data more streamlined for growing projects.

Through the use of data pools and protocol nodes containing extendable logic, KYVE has already integrated its protocol into many established blockchains, including Bitcoin, Avalanche, Solana, and more, despite being on testnet. As our project grows more and more each day and is on track to launch mainnet later this year, we began to face major limitations with the original EVM solution, which required additional research into other infrastructure options.

The key issue being EVM is not scalable for applications with high transaction frequency like KYVE.

In times of high network usage, gas prices always increase. This is because all applications share the same block space on EVM. Only a certain number of transactions are allowed per block, so if one wants their transaction to be prioritized, they have to pay more gas for it.

In broad terms, users are willing to pay higher gas fees for transactions they consider “valuable.” For instance, a trade executed on Uniswap with a $10,000 USD profit is probably ok paying $100 in gas. For less “valuable” transactions such as Governance and Community votes on KYVE, however, fees this high are not economical.

Because of the volume of engagement, KYVE needed a solution that does not need to share block space with other applications. Many of the EVM solutions we were looking at were just not decentralized to the point we needed them to be. That is until we started looking into the Cosmos Ecosystem and the Cosmos SDK.

Venturing into the Cosmos

We made the decision to switch to a Cosmos SDK-based chain not only because it fits our scalability, transaction volume, and independent block space requirements, but also because the Cosmos application building toolkit makes it easy to scaffold chains, create blocks, carry out transactions and carry out governance. It enables KYVE to have faster, more streamlined block times and we no longer have to worry about sharing block space.

Typically, switching from one network to another is quite a Herculean task. However, switching to Cosmos was a smooth process! Taking our team less than a week to get the base chain up and running. How did we go about it?

We first initiated the process of switching to the Go programming language, which we found quite easy to implement. And with the aid of Ignite CLI, a platform used to build, launch and maintain crypto applications on a sovereign blockchain, we were able to scaffold a chain quickly, just needing to add our custom logic. Overall, the team was able to have a PoC chain up and running in just a few days, and it was quite simple to transfer the existing Solidity logic onto the chain.

We personally believe that transferring logic from Solidity to Cosmos SDK is the easiest way to get started in the ecosystem. This is because it involves very similar mentalities. Instead of having functions that your users interact with, they instead send transactions with different types and inputs. From our users’ perspectives, there isn’t a massive difference, other than faster speeds and lower costs.