Kima Network

Kima Network is a decentralized settlement protocol designed to eliminate the barriers separating public blockchains, private ledgers, and traditional bank accounts. Rather than building another bridge between two chains, Kima approaches fragmentation at the infrastructure level: any asset, any chain, any financial rail, routed through a single settlement layer that requires no smart contracts, no oracles, and no synthetic tokens.

The Problem

Moving value across ecosystems has historically required choosing between custodial exchanges, trust-minimized bridges that rely on smart contracts, or complex multi-step swaps through wrapped token intermediaries. Each approach carries trade-offs—counterparty risk, contract exploits, or accumulated fees and slippage from multiple hops. None extend naturally to traditional finance, leaving TradFi and DeFi as separate worlds despite growing demand for products that span both.

Kima targets this structural gap. Its protocol unifies crypto rails and fiat rails under a single settlement primitive, enabling a developer building a DeFi application on Solana to accept payments from a user whose funds sit in a European bank account, or a fintech company to route cross-border stablecoin transfers without running a crypto exchange desk.

How It Works

Kima is built on the Cosmos SDK and operates as its own sovereign chain. The core actors are Wardens—a rotating committee of validators who manage cross-chain transfer authorization. When a user initiates a transfer:

1. The warden committee records the request and monitors the deposit on the source chain.
2. Once confirmed, wardens complete a Threshold Signature Scheme (TSS) to authorize the release of equivalent funds from Kima's liquidity pool on the destination chain.
3. The finalized transaction is recorded on the Kima chain, creating an auditable trail of all validator actions.

Crucially, this process never creates a synthetic or wrapped version of the asset. Kima maintains native liquidity pools directly on each supported blockchain. A USDC transfer from Ethereum to Solana, for instance, involves depositing into Kima's Ethereum pool and withdrawing from its Solana pool—actual USDC on both sides, not a bridged proxy.

The warden set operates under a two-layer consensus: a permissioned tier of established institutional validators and a permissionless tier for participants with sufficient KIMA stake. TSS is run inside Trusted Execution Environments (Intel SGX), so even if individual warden machines are compromised, the underlying key material cannot be extracted. This architecture eliminates the three most common bridge attack vectors: smart contract exploits, oracle manipulation, and compromised external relayers.

Key Features

Smart Transaction SDK: Developers integrate Kima's SDK or API to add cross-chain and cross-rail payment capability to existing Web2 or Web3 applications. The SDK abstracts the warden protocol, liquidity pool mechanics, and compliance checks behind a straightforward call.

TradFi interoperability: Kima connects not only blockchains but also conventional financial infrastructure. The protocol has been integrated into Mastercard's stablecoin sandbox for card top-up flows, and conducted a pilot with the European Central Bank in July 2025 testing Digital Euro disbursements over the Kima settlement layer.

Built-in compliance: The protocol includes compliance mechanisms that can be configured for regulated use cases without requiring a separate KYC/AML layer from the integrating application.

Asset agnosticism: While stablecoins (USDC, USDT) are the primary transferred assets, the protocol is designed to support any fungible asset whose issuer maintains or authorizes a pool.

Supported Networks

Kima operates pools across ten-plus blockchains at mainnet: Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, Optimism, TRON, Base, and Berachain. Bitcoin is referenced in early documentation. Governance controls the addition of new chains and supported token types.

Solana Integration

Solana is one of Kima's ten mainnet-supported chains. Kima holds a native USDC/USDT pool on Solana, enabling direct inflows and outflows without wrapping. Solana developers can embed the Kima SDK to let their users bring liquidity from any supported chain into a Solana dApp in a single step. The protocol also functions as a cross-chain payment gateway for Solana-based merchants and donation platforms, allowing payers on Ethereum, Arbitrum, or other networks to settle in Solana-native assets. Kima's low-fee architecture aligns well with Solana's own throughput and cost profile, making it a natural settlement rail for applications that already prioritize transaction efficiency.

Security and Audits

The protocol has been independently audited three times—by CertiK, Cyberscope, and Halborn—with no critical vulnerabilities identified across any review. CertiK and Cyberscope noted certain admin-accessible contract functions as centralization considerations, though neither classified them as malicious. CertiK's Skynet service provides ongoing on-chain monitoring of Kima's deployed contracts.

Token: KIMA

The KIMA token is an ERC-20 issued on Arbitrum and functions as the protocol's economic backbone. Token holders can:

• Stake to become permissionless Wardens or delegate stake to existing validators
• Earn rewards for securing the network and providing cross-chain liquidity
• Pay settlement fees for cross-chain transactions
• Participate in governance over chain additions, fee structures, and protocol upgrades

KIMA is listed on KuCoin, Gate.io, MEXC, BitMart, HTX, and Bitpanda, and is available on PancakeSwap and KyberSwap. Its IDO on Polkastarter in November 2024 priced the token at $0.214. A second airdrop phase ran into 2025, distributing tokens to early participants and stakers.

Team and Funding

Kima Network was founded in 2021 and is incorporated in Singapore. Co-Founder and CEO Eitan Katz has a background in Israel's IDF elite intelligence units and leadership roles at HP, HPE, and BMC. He previously founded Aegis, an early MPC-based Bitcoin wallet, giving the team direct experience with threshold cryptography in production environments. Co-Founders Guy Vider (CTO) and Tzahi Kanza (COO) lead the technical and operational sides respectively.

The project raised a $1 million seed round in 2022, followed by a $5 million round in June 2024 from Blockchange Ventures and Mastercard's FinSec Lab. The Mastercard participation reflects the company's core bet on regulated TradFi-DeFi convergence rather than speculative DeFi activity.

Ecosystem Position

Kima occupies a distinct position in cross-chain infrastructure by targeting the TradFi-DeFi seam rather than competing for routing volume between established L1s. Its Mastercard and ECB engagements indicate traction in institutional pilots that most blockchain projects never reach. For Solana specifically, Kima extends the ecosystem's reach into traditional payment rails, offering application developers a route to users and capital that lives entirely outside the on-chain economy.