Komodo history begins as one developer’s subprojects’ of the NXT blockchain. This included pegged assets, a non-custodial bitcoin gateway, atomic swap protocol development & a Declaration of Independence.
With a new found independence and skilled in bitcoin protocol development, the lead developer of Komodo (jl777) began to look for a way to solve his own blockchain problems. Included in this master plan was to provide a platform for entrepreneurs to jumpstart their own project ambitions.
The need for privacy led jl777 to find the zcash project as the chosen code base amongst other candidates to begin this ambitious quest.
ZEC is a fork of bitcoin version 0.11 with the addition of zk-SNARK privacy. In the master plan, voting was one of the applications that could use this as we’ll read about in the future. Another was a coin tumbling protocol to offer an on-chain service to obfuscate the distribution of coins for the users and projects that prioritized privacy.
What is a UTXO?
The UTXO is a packet of value. This is the primary data structure of the bitcoin protocol that represents value. Each UTXO has a history of where it originated and a state of being already spent or unspent. The history is represented as a maths puzzle proving ownership in the chain of time. The puzzle includes the packaging and unpackaging of value according to the needs of the owner of the UTXO at the time. UTXOs are combined and split depending on the value that is sent or received when the owner requires to make a payment.
This data structure is also present in Komodo, with the same representation. In Komodo’s multichain architecture, an independent project can choose to represent other things beyond value to create new protocols in the peer to peer application world.
This website shows how new representations of the UTXO have been created by developers beyond Komodo.