Why is KILT building on Polkadot?
When BOTLabs started to look at building KILT they wanted to build something useful. They could see the huge need in industry to have verifiable credentials on the internet. Because at the moment the only digital identity mechanism available is the OAuth2, which is basically what the big corporations like Google and Amazon use to centralize the data. And that works, but it means that people’s credentials are being stored with these giant companies, not with the person who actually owns the data.
And even for smaller companies, if they build a product and this product owns a credential, then the credential becomes part of the value of the product. So a fully decentralized machine is needed to avoid our data being owned by companies; where there’s no trust needed, where the truth is built into the system. And that’s what blockchain can provide.
The next step for BOTLabs was to talk to people in industry and tell them they were building a fully decentralized blockchain that has the truth in it and holds credentials. And people in industry liked the idea but then they asked how much it cost.
And that was a problem, because at the time if BOTLabs wanted to use a permissionless blockchain, they were looking at unpredictable production costs. Because sometimes the gas (transaction fee) was €0.05 and sometimes the gas was €15 and sometimes €24. And industry can’t produce things that way. Because they don’t know how expensive the product is going to be in production, so they have no idea what price to set.
Then BOTLabs thought about using a permissioned blockchain. That would give a predictable price, but unfortunately then you don’t have the truth in the system, because there’s an authority there you have to trust. This is the truth versus cost dilemma. You want the truth of the system but you need to know beforehand what your transactions will cost.
This is why BOTLabs moved to Polkadot in 2018, because Polkadot is solving this problem. Polkadot is the only technology that combines fixed definable network costs with aspects of the decentralized controlled truth of a permissionless blockchain. The mathematical truth of the system is combined with price stability. So by taking a parachain lease in the Polkadot system, BOTLabs were able to build the KILT blockchain, and have predictable gas prices, which any entrepreneur or industry can base their production costs on. The KILT blockchain was decentralized in November 2021.
Now that KILT is decentralized, the future of KILT is in the hands of the community of KILT Coin holders. And that’s good news for everybody, because now users have a way to take control of their own data again!