Update (September 2026): in August 2024 Klaytn merged with the Finschia blockchain to form Kaia, and the KLAY token now trades as KAIA. This article describes Klaytn before the merger. Cryptocurrency prices are highly volatile.
A large number of factors contributed to the 2020-2021 crypto bull run. It all started with the Bitcoin halving that bled into a DeFi revolution. This pushed prices much higher than expected, despite the COVID-19 crisis.
However, two other narratives greatly contributed to the price rally — meme coins and the metaverse. Ever since Meta announced its involvement in the metaverse, projects that had any relation to this niche skyrocketed in value and popularity.
Klaytn is a blockchain created with the metaverse, NFTs, and gaming in mind. Thanks to this, it caught a major hype wave and was propelled into the top 100 projects by market cap in a record amount of time. The KLAY to BNB pair was extremely popular for a while on many exchanges.
Toolset for Metaverse Projects
As we stated in our short intro, the Klaytn project was created with a metaverse and gaming mindset. It attempts to solve the shortcomings of other networks, like Ethereum, that make it nearly impossible to run a viable metaverse.
Metaverses and games need thousands of transactions per second, which Klaytn aims to provide with near-instant block finality.
Imagine a massively multiplayer role-playing game played by millions of people simultaneously. Now let’s imagine that the items in this game are all NFTs. They need a set of transactions to change hands or be dropped into the player’s inventories. This would require a highly scalable blockchain, which Klaytn tries to achieve.
Ethereum Equivalence
Although Klaytn runs its own blockchain, it adopts EVM compatibility to allow developers to build apps on a familiar platform. Klaytn base code is compatible with the EVM that permits the streamlined posting of existing applications on the chain.
Moreover, this allows it to benefit from a huge pool of battle-tested dApps, metaverses, and games that have been running on Ethereum and proven their robustness. What’s more, it supports Solidity, allowing Ethereum devs to feel at home when deploying apps.
IBFT Consensus
Klaytn utilizes IBFT consensus to reach block finality and create new blocks. It ensures that transactions remain 100% irreversible, which comes into play when users need to instantly mint NFTs or drop items in a game.
Klaytn’s IBFT consensus is optimized for games and metaverses, which ensures that it provides 100% reliable data for microtransactions and mass-scale applications. Additionally, it offers nested service chains, which act as dApp-specific sidechains, ensuring the exponential scalability of the platform.
Klaytn Improvement Reserve
The Klaytn foundation continuously works toward growing its ecosystem of dApps and builders. To this end, they have created the Klaytn Improvement reserve (KIR), which represents $1 billion to be distributed among the ecosystem builders.
To achieve this, the foundation has reserved a portion of the pre-minted KLAY tokens, as well as some of the new tokens from block confirms. The KIR aims to fund various projects ranging from infrastructure, metaverses, dApps, NFT creators and collections, games, and much more.
Conclusion
Even though metaverse blockchains are struggling during this bear market, Klaytn sets itself as a future-proof solution in this niche. With a robust framework, fast and cost-effective transactions, and a huge ecosystem of games and developers, it presents serious upside potential once the market picks up again.
While metaverses seem to have lost the appeal to the mainstream consumer, this doesn’t mean that they will be forgotten. Web3 is an inevitable paradigm, and Klaytn is probably one of the best chains focusing on gaming at the moment. While some are tempted to swap AVAX to ETH, others might jump on the KLAY opportunity and grab a bag while its price is on the lower side.
