Koinos.fun – a new app that allows users to mint an NFT and send it to a friend on Elon Musk’s social media platform X – has onboarded over 1,000 new blockchain users in less than four hours.
The web app promises a completely new way to transfer value over a blockchain, without any fees – or even a token.
Users simple visit the app, generate an NFT using a generative AI model, and then send it over X. In the background, the app generates a blockchain wallet and transfers the NFT directly to the new user’s account.
The app resides on the Koinos blockchain, a lesser-known L1 that launched in 2022. Built by veteran engineers from Steemit, Koinos has long-promised feeless transactions as an alternative to fee-based chains. The chain was donated to the community on launch, and has no venture backing or token lockups for founders or team members.
Koinos Group is a company building on the chain and CEO Steve Gerbino explained “The problem with Web3 is simple. It’s too complex to go mainstream. It requires users to do the exact opposite of what they do on the internet. When they access an app on the internet, they can use it without paying fees or going through a complicated onboarding process – it just works. That’s what we aim to do with Koinos – create apps that simply work, instead of requiring the user to jump through a series of hoops before they can even use that app.”
https://x.com/KoinosNetwork/status/1884255130725531903
Elon Musk has been promising X Money, a value transfer system over his social media network, since he acquired the platform. Today, X CEO Linda Yaccarino promised that money services platform would arrive in the next several months.
Koinos.fun is the first blockchain app to achieve this however, claims Ron Hamenahem, one of the app’s builders. “We’ve built this to showcase the notion that blockchain can be easy for the user – we just happened to think that making it fun and accessible would encourage people to want to use it.”
The app is also airdropping 50,000 KOIN to users who forward their NFTs on to other friends. “We want people using Koinos, and they can do that without any fees at all if they own just one KOIN,” said Michael Vandeberg, one of the architects of the Koinos blockchain. “So we track the NFTs that travel farthest, and the ones that gain the most cumulative followers, and then we will airdrop KOIN to everyone who has owned one of those NFTs at any time.”
The author is the former editor-in-chief at Crypto Briefing, now an unpaid volunteer who has worked on bringing the Koinos.fun app to market.