Kaia, a layer-1 blockchain made by two of Asia’s top social messaging apps, has launched its mainnet, which will bring Telegram-like apps to the popular messaging platform Line.
The Ethereum Virtual Machine-based chain launched on Aug. 29 and will have “processing speeds of approximately one second” and “extremely low gas fees” to boot, the Kaia DLT Foundation claimed in a blog post.
Alongside the launch, the project unveiled Kaia Wave — a program for developers to create mini decentralized applications or “mini DApps,” that will work with the messaging app Line.
Kaia was formed after the February merger of the Finschia blockchain from Japan’s Line and the Klaytn blockchain from major South Korean social app maker Kakao.
The two apps are popular in Asia, with Kaia claiming they have a combined user base of over 250 million and users concentrated in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.
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No details were shared on what mini DApps will debut on Line, but it follows its messaging app rival Telegram, which launched similar blockchain-based Mini Apps in 2023, which can use The Open Network (TON) blockchain.
Telegram’s Mini Apps feature everything from to-do lists, language tutoring, job searching and dating apps that appear alongside crypto apps for trading, staking, launching tokens and a swath of play-to-earn games that have racked up millions of users.
The TON blockchain has recently been hit with outages and has twice been knocked offline for long stretches in the past 36 hours. The first lasted over seven hours between Aug. 27 and 28, and the second lasted for six hours into Aug. 29.
TON’s developers said the airdrop of a dog-themed memecoin called Dogs (DOGS) caused a “network overload,” knocking it offline as users strained the network in a bid to get a slice of the drop.
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