Thoughts on Komodo Coin (KMD)

Komodo (KMD) is a cryptocurrency and blockchain platform that started in 2017. It is a proof-of-work coin that uses the Equihash algorithm and has a maximum supply of 200 million coins.

It trades around $1 USD and hasn’t moved very far from that in either direction in the past 3 months. Just over 120 million of the coins are in circulation, with a market cap of $128 million at time of writing.

Komodo has built-in staking at 5.1% interest and it requires at least 10 KMD to do so.

It also has some real-world use cases. The SmartFI DeFi platform is built on Komodo, for example.

The Reddit has a sizeable membership, and though post activity isn’t high, it isn’t dead either. It also has a fairly active Discord.

I became interested in KMD in October and purchased a few at Bittrex just before a required update was rolled out. Bittrex disabled KMD deposits and withdrawals, and didn’t re-enable them for about two weeks after the update, which was a bit unnerving. This spooked me a bit, and I sold the coins I had bought at a breakeven price.

Komodo is pretty difficult to mine directly (for me) since it uses the Equihash algorithm and I don’t have hardware that handles that very well. Instead, I mined some at an auto-exchange mining pool.

Prohashing, one of the auto-exchange mining pools I use, added KMD withdrawals around the time I became interested in it, but they had a warning saying that spreads were very high. I’m not sure what exchange it came from, but it must have been somewhere with low liquidity. I exchange-mined about 1 KMD worth before it was disabled as a broken coin.

Komodo Error on Prohashing

Komodo disabled on Prohashing

I also tried their wallet with built-in exchange, AtomicDEX. The interface is beautiful, but I couldn’t do much other than send and receive coins becuse trading features are blocked for US users. Being an American is very annoying in the cryptocurrency world.

AtomicDex DEX features not allowed in US

AtomicDEX exchange features are not available in US.

Overall I was impressed with how professional their website and applications look, but Komodo is not great if you’re an American. It’s also far more centralized than most cryptocurrency projects, but that isn’t always a bad thing. It’s certainly better than having nobody at the helm, like many of the zombie currencies I’ve been seeing lately. The Komodo team seems to be pretty talented and innovative.

Although KMD is probably a good long-term investment, I’m not personally interested in holding or trading any until AtomicDEX is available globally.