Blog mania BTC: KARMA : World's First Decentralized Smart Community Network

What is Karma ?

Karma is a bold initiative which leverages the power of decentralization and blockchain technology to empower membership-based organizations around the world.

Our slogan perfectly sets forth Karma’s vision: World’s First Decentralized Smart Community Network. This is considerably more than just a slogan for us, but rather the basis for all our combined efforts. Our mission is to become the core provider of such tools — empowering communities of all shapes and sizes and allowing them to scale new heights. All this while providing them with support and incentives along the way. The blockchain capabilities of the Karma Protocol and, more specifically, the Karma International Token (KIT), lay the foundation of all of these efforts: allowing organizations to launch, manage, build and operate on Karma and ensuring a thriving, sustainable and

diverse module and support ecosystem. Karma also seamlessly integrates best of breed offchain technologies to provide a completely optimized and modularized solution. This white paper describes what Karma is under the hood, how it will be brought to life by our team, and our vision and approach for bringing Karma into the world.

Every action we take generates a force of energy that returns to us in kind. When we consciously choose actions that bring happiness and success to others, the fruit of our karma is happiness and success. (Deepak Chopra)

Terminology and Acronyms

The Challenge

Spinning up a new Community Network is a considerable challenge. Organizations across the world seeking to do so face numerous difficulties selecting the right technologies and solutions, and after that selecting the right development partners in order to implement those choices. Even if these initial selections are appropriate, actually implementing, operating and maintaining the resulting Community Network can be fraught with complications.

Established organizations, with their Legacy Community Networks (i.e., networks and systems based on older, non-blockchain technologies), face similar and additional difficult challenges. These organizations’ Legacy Community Networks are often a diverse mix of incompatible technologies (different vendors, versions, protocols, ages, interfaces, etc.). Grafting on newer components, even if those components, considered in isolation, are the right choice, can be combinatorially difficult. Bottom line — as growing organizations scale their operations, their Legacy Community Networks

simply cannot keep up.

Karma International faced this issue itself. Established in 2005, Karma International had the original mission of connecting exceptional and inspirational individuals both socially and professionally through a variety of high profile experiential events, business networking summits, social gatherings, and international excursions. Karma International was very successful with this tightly focused business model. Over the next several years Karma International built and evolved its own Community Network, often in response to pressing and immediate requirements. Karma International’s ever increasing growth and the vast expansion of its model to that of a true membership organization eventually rendered this approach unsustainable.

The Karma Solution

In 2014 Karma International took the initiative and resolved to develop a new internal platform, what ultimately became the Karma Member Lounge (KML). The KML was designed from the ground up to have the capacity to power and manage all aspects of Karma International’s expanded and anticipated business models. The KML has become a powerful and multi-faceted platform which has benefited from many years of industry experience, significant investment, R&D, and focused and organized software development efforts. The KML has been a true labor of love for Karma International and fulfills its mandate of providing its members with the best possible experience.

Karma International has been and will always be focused on providing value back to the community, towards those organizations most in need. It has contributed to hundreds of nonprofit efforts over the years and is directly involved in charitable and community efforts. Our new offering, Karma, continues and massively scales this vision, representing the distributed, blockchain technology based, tokenized, secured and scalable reimagining of the original KML — made available to any membership-based organization.

Karma will also enable organization-to-organization (and organization to Community Developer) communications, financial management, donating and voting. This will create opportunities and create value on an unprecedented scale. As more and more organizations and Community Developers adopt Karma, the value proposition of the platform (and the related KIT token) will itself increase due to the network effect. Karma will be adaptable and extensible, meaning that it can be tailored to the diverse and evolving needs of membership organizations worldwide. In order to achieve success at velocity, we will leverage:

The knowledge we have gained from building, operating and managing a highly successful community network (KML).
The expertise and skills of our blockchain development team.
The guidance of our advisors, and
The valued input of the growing Karma Community.

Technology Stack

DApp Design

By using Ethereum as the abstract foundational layer, Karma is able to implement all the features and rules of the KIT Protocol directly into smart contracts, which are deployed and processed by the entire network. By using the entire Ethereum infrastructure with the purpose of validating transactions and adding new blocks to the blockchain, we minimize any possible attack on the protocol.

On top of Ethereum, we have built the services using Geth. Geth is a multipurpose command line tool that runs a full Ethereum node implemented in Go. In this case, it is running on a proprietary Linux server with no RPC/HTTP open ports. The communication, which involves the Geth, is managed through the Python intermediary application and the Ethereum network.

The applications connect to the Ethereum blockchain are built on Truffle. Truffle is a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for Ethereum. We use Ethereum Truffle for:

Built-in smart contract compilation, linking, deployment and binary management
Configurable build pipeline with support for custom build processes
Network management for deploying to many public and private networks

Communication with the Ethereum node is done through the JSON RPC API. JSONRPC is a stateless, light-weight Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol. Primarily this specification defines several data structures and the rules around their processing. It is transport agnostic in that the objects can be used within the same process, over sockets, over HTTP, or in many various message passing environments. It uses the JSON (RFC 4627) as its data format.

The frontend application is implemented using the ReactJS framework. This

application is located on a different server and communicates with the Intermediate Layer using Web Sockets and a REST API.

OffChain Stack

The Request Processor represents the main centralized system in Karma to which all incoming requests are routed. It is written in GO, which gives it high-scalability and similar capabilities to those of CloudFlare. The Request Processor will be responsible for loading the correct public and private encryption keys.

The Object Storage Services are built on top of existing object-storage systems

(S3, CloudFiles, etc.) and represent the data storage mechanism for managing

the information about the Karma Instances. Content delivery is done through this system and will also incorporate security features, such as encryption based upon a combination of private master and local keys.

Data storage will be done by using both relational and non-relational database management systems, which are:

Key-value (NoSQL) storage for object elements and caches (using MongoDB)
Managed Relational Database storage for any ACID compliant requirements (using
PostgreSQL)

The core modules will be developed using: GO and PYTHON 3.x and gRPC

communication channels. They will be cryptographically signed by Karma.

The Modules delivered by the Developer Community will support any virtualized technology (via Docker) and must be able to utilize gRPC to communicate with the rest of the infrastructure. They must be cryptographically signed by the developer. The application front-end will be a React-based Interface which uses Material Design and TypeScript for external JS modules.

Business Model

Revenue Streams

The current revenue streams are based on the adoption of Karma by membership organizations, using KIT to power the capabilities provided by Karma. KIT will be used for all system capabilities, including:

On-going Karma Infrastructure usage fees (Operational Costs);
Fees for intra-organizational payments (membership payments, purchases, Karma Exchange, Module acquisition, etc.);
Service fees for Karma Business, Technology or Outreach services;
Tiered usage fees for bandwidth, storage and processing power.

Karma Operational Costs

The right to operate a Karma Instance will be available to all KIT holders. This is subject to using KIT for any type of payment, exchange and consensus reaching.

The revenue streams outlined above will cover Karma’s Operational Costs and

the maintenance of its underlying infrastructure. The fees will be apportioned in accordance with each Karma Instance’s size and infrastructure requirements and will also decrease with widespread adoption.

Out of the $25 million raised in the Token Generation Event (TGE), $10 million will be allocated towards the development of the Core Modules and the Marketplace. Each Karma Instance will have two options with respect to Module selection:

Previously Developed Modules

Core Modules — will be delivered upon the creation of each Karma

Instance and can be enabled and disabled by each such Instance;
Marketplace — the virtual location where Custom Modules developed by

the Community Developers may be acquired by Karma Instances.

2. Request Custom Module Development