A number of small changes have been made across the board as Kava prepares for the launch of Kava 9 in January 2022. Some of these improvements included improvements to the user experience, various improvements to the frontend of the Kava App, and some fixes to outdated API endpoints.

Updates to the Kava App

The product and development teams have been hard at work making some incremental improvements to the Kava App. The first of these was a complete redesign and refactoring of the Mint frontend, making it more intuitive for users to monitor their CDPs and improving load time and performance.

Next up was a general clean-up of frontend classes on the app to allow for much easier app-wide visual changes and alternate themes. This was a critical component of the last major change to the app, which was the launch of Dark Mode on November 17th, making Kava officially degen-friendly!

Update of API Endpoints

The biggest recent change is the update to some of the API endpoints for the Kava network and protocols. The development team noticed that a few of the endpoints were causing the web app to encounter performance issues during periods of high traffic.

While optimizing the endpoints, they also discovered that the endpoint for the circulating supply of $KAVA had a legacy issue that meant that it was not including the $KAVA that is minted for liquidity mining rewards at a rate of 20% per year. This resulted in a discrepancy of ~40M $KAVA between the published circulating supply and the actual circulating supply.

The endpoint has now been corrected and the circulating supply accurately includes all circulating $KAVA. Naturally, the correction of the endpoint resulted in a significant increase in market cap for $KAVA. This is not connected to any unlock of tokens though and is just a correction of visibility for the actual circulating supply.

In fact, the final unlock of investor tokens happened on November 5th, which means that the circulating supply is now fully representative of all circulating $KAVA. The only tokens that remain out of circulation are the ~10M $KAVA that is minted each year for staking rewards and the team and treasury tokens, both of which will not be sold.

Ledger Improvements

A minor update was made to the functionality of Ledger on Kava. Previously, users could only access a single Kava address on their devices. The development team added the ability to use a custom HD path which allows Ledger users to access multiple addresses on a single device.

UX Research With Users

In preparation for a more significant user experience (UX) overhaul of the Kava App, the product team has begun conducting in-depth UX research with a variety of users. The goal of the research is to identify pain points and find new ways to make the Kava App more intuitive for new users and even easier to use for existing ones.

The research has included surveys to the Kava community, the creation of a Kava user group, and hands-on user interface research. Be sure to respond to the product surveys if you want to have your say in how to improve the Kava App. The team will be sharing more information on the planned changes soon, so watch this space for updates!

Devlopment Progress of Kava 9

Finally, the main focus of the development team is, of course, the Kava 9 mainnet upgrade. Bringing IBC integration and much more, Kava 9 will be a huge step for the Kava ecosystem. The upgrade will unlock free movement of IBC assets onto Kava, prepare for the launch of new assets and protocols on the network, and lay the groundwork for the ETH bridge, which will follow shortly after in Q1.

The development team is moving mountains to ensure that Kava 9 is 100% ready and meets the stringent Kava security standards on time for the planned launch in January. As of writing, the upgrade is 50% complete and on-target to launch as planned.

The Loan Wars

You can do your part to help with the launch by taking part in The Loan Wars, Kava’s incentivized testnet competition. From Dec 15th to Dec 26th, Kava users will duke it out on the Kava testnet to stress test the new IBC functionality and compete for a share of $150K in rewards. Registration is open, so go ahead and sign up here!