| COVID-19 Takes Its Toll On Global Markets 
The March monthly report would be lacking if it didn't cover the one major event happening in the world: the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past month, COVID-19 has spread like wildfire, infecting over 1 Million people around the world and causing more than 50,000 deaths. The pandemic has prompted a number of nations to close their borders and mandate "shelter in place" policies that require people to stay in their homes unless it's absolutely necessary to leave. Virtually every aspect of life has been impacted. With travel restricted, public gatherings forbidden, businesses forced to close, and many workers unable to earn their wages, economists are expecting the consumption-driven global economy to take a hard hit. According to Reuters, "Goldman Sachs is predicting that the global economy will shrink 1.0 percent this year, with gross domestic product in China estimated to contract at a 42 percent annualised rate in the first quarter and GDP in the United States dropping at a record 24 percent rate in the April-June period." "The corona-crisis has pushed the world economy into a deep recession," said Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius. "The response to that crisis represents a physical constraint on economic activity that is unprecedented in postwar history." Unemployment benefits claims in the US reached 3.3 Million in the week ending on March 20, shattering the previous weekly record of 695,000 set in 1982. They then doubled the following week, hitting 6.6 Million new claims for the week ending on March 27. As the bad news continues to pour in, experts have predicted that US GDP will contract by as much as 24 percent in Q2 2020, which would also set a new record for decline in quarterly growth in history. In Europe, after unemployment rates across the EU hit a 12-year low in February, the COVID-19 outbreak caused a rapid shift in the opposite direction. Spain reported that 900,000 people have already lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Virtually all EU member-states have closed borders, even within the free-trade zone, and enforced shelter in place policies. In response to these dire circumstances, markets of all varieties— stocks, bonds, commodities, digital assets— went into a freefall. In the month from February 20 to March 20, most major market indexes fell by roughly one-third. The S&P 500 fell by 31 percent, the Nasdaq composite fell by 29 percent, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 34 percent, and the NYSE composite fell by 35 percent. A recent report from McKinsey warned that markets may not return to their pre-pandemic levels until 2023.  Cryptocurrency markets were not exempt from the global selloff. Bitcoin recorded one of its worst days of all time, falling a dizzying 43 percent in a single 24-hour period (March 12-13). The price of BTC has since rebounded slightly but remains on par with the losses other markets experienced. In the month from February 20 to March 20, BTC fell 34 percent, from $9,613 to $6,433. As most cryptocurrencies remain tethered to BTC, the entire market followed BTC in its sharp drop. Many altcoins fell further than BTC itself, bringing some assets close to their all-time lows. The optimism felt so recently throughout the blockchain space in lead up to the Bitcoin halving in May seems to have vanished. However, despite drastic drops in markets and a great deal of uncertainty, Komodo is continuing to make progress. The team's primary focus is on AtomicDEX— integrating new protocols, building out products for desktop operating systems as well as a browser-based web version, and constantly improving the UX/UI of the products. Just this week, Komodo began the early alpha stage of AtomicDEX PRO. Keep reading for more details.
Tough Times for the Ethereum DeFi Space 
A second piece of industry news worth mentioning is the numerous issues that the Ethereum DeFi space has seen in the last month or so. Recall that, at the beginning of February 2020, the ETH DeFi space was making big waves when the total value of digital currencies locked in DeFi products reached $1 Billion USD. Everyone was bullish on DeFi. Then, throughout the rest of February and March, the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem experienced one calamity after another. In mid-February, things started to go south when news of the so-called Flash Loan Attacks broke. Nearly $1 Million in ETH was siphoned off in two distinct attacks, prompting major crypto media outlets to ask whether these attacks were "signaling the end of DeFi?" In March, after the severity of the global COVID-19 pandemic became abundantly clear, cryptocurrency markets had one of the largest single-day drops ever recorded. While the meltdown spared no asset, the Ethereum network, specifically, got so congested that DeFi apps became unusable, on-chain oracles had almost an hour lag in reporting correct market data, and MakerDAO's DAI liquidation logic completely failed. Over $4 Million Dollars' worth of ETH sitting in Maker Vaults (Collateralized Debt Positions) was auctioned at zero cost to a single actor, who kept buying underwater CDPs by sending zero Dai bids with very high gas limits to the auction smart contract. Reasonable bids sent with normal gas limits never had the chance to reach the smart contract because of the network congestion. Maker Vaults are overcollateralized, so users were assuming that even in case of liquidation they will get their original ETH back, minus a 13 percent penalty. Yet, these Vaults got liquidated at zero cost, not because of a vulnerability in the Maker contract, but a design flaw discounting the impact of a network congestion. Owners of these Vaults will never get their money back, and Nexus Mutual, the leading DeFi decentralized insurance platform, denied coverage for these losses. All these events led to an emergency MKR auction and the addition of USDC as a collateral in MakerDAO. While this might make the platform less vulnerable in turbulent situations, it introduces a centralized element to Maker (USDC is issued by a single company, Circle, and it is backed by USD reserves held at US banks). Many argue this defeats the whole purpose of Dai being a permissionless stablecoin. This market crash was a live-drill stress test for DeFi, and it exposed structural weaknesses in the underlying single-chain architecture of Ethereum. If a chain cannot serve a few tens of thousands of traders, how can it possibly serve enterprise applications? Scaling can help to push the boundaries, but the real solution is using application-specific interoperable blockchains, like Komodo's Smart Chains.
AtomicDEX Desktop Enters Alpha Testing 
The Komodo team is excited to announce that the desktop version of AtomicDEX, known as AtomicDEX PRO, entered an internal alpha program on Monday, March 30. The team is busy testing and making improvements to the UX/UI. In the coming weeks, the AtomicDEX PRO alpha will be opened up to the Komodo community. Stay tuned for more details. The AtomicDEX PRO is built on a state of the art technology stack— a modern C++ standard on the backend part and QT (QML, C++), which is used in aviation, energy, medical and other highly critical industries, for the frontend. It also uses some C and Nim here and there. AtomicDEX PRO was developed from scratch in about 4 months. The Komodo Dev Team kickstarted the project in December 2019 and the public alpha program began this week. Over the coming weeks, Komodo will track all test feedback and improve the application for a planned public beta-release in Q2. Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann sends a special thanks to the AtomicDEX Dev Team for reaching this major milestone: - Naezith and Slyris, the AtomicDEX PRO Desktop devs
- Artemii235, the AtomicDEX core lead developer & DEX architecture expert
- Artemciy, the AtomicDEX mobile lead and AtomicDEX core developer / DEX engineer
- Tlysakov for all DEX related QA
- and all contributors and new devs— thank you!
Postponed Notary Node Elections Set To Begin In April 
Komodo's Fourth Annual Notary Node Election was originally scheduled to begin in March but was postponed by 4 weeks on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, voting for the Notary Node Election is scheduled to begin on April 13, 2020. If you'd like to run for a seat as a Notary Node Operator, you still have time to join the election! All candidates must submit a proposal to this GitHub repo to announce their candidacy by 12pm UTC on Friday, April 13. At a minimum, candidates must state in which region they are running and publish a KMD address to which voters may send their VOTE tokens. Candidates are encouraged to add more information, including details about their technical capabilities and commitments regarding how they intend to promote the Komodo ecosystem. At 12pm UTC on April 12, the Komodo Dev Team will take a snapshot of all KMD addresses with a non-zero balance. The top 30 best performing Notary Node Operators will be automatically re-elected. Then, on April 13, the Komodo team will airdrop VOTE2020 tokens to all KMD holders at a 1:1 ratio to the KMD coins they hold. Voting begins as soon as their airdrop is complete and lasts until 12pm UTC on May 4, 2020. For more information about the Notary Node Election, please see this blog post or check out the Notary Node Bible. You can also learn more about the Komodo Notary Node Network here and find out how to become a Notary Node Operator here.
AtomicDEX Captures Interest of Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin 
In late March, Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin caused a stir on crypto Twitter when he called for a decentralized way to trade between Bitcoin and Ether: "We should put resources toward a proper (trustless, serverless, maximally Uniswap-like UX) ETH <-> BTC decentralized exchange. It's embarrassing that we still can't easily move between the two largest crypto ecosystems trustlessly." Of course, Komodo made it possible to swap between Bitcoin-protocol coins and Ether and/or Ethereum-based assets like ERC-20 tokens years ago. This was possible with BarterDEX, the first GUI product of Komodo's atomic swap technology, as far back as 2017. Today, it's still possible and far easier with Komodo's AtomicDEX. Komodo pointed this fact out to Vitalik, who was immediately interested and asked for details on the technology. You can see the conversation on Twitter here.
Komodo Community Highlights Here's a rundown of what happened in the Komodo community over the past month. If you'd like to get more involved with the Komodo community, come check out the Komodo community portal for the latest news and discussions. Here's are a few examples of what you can do on the portal: - Read weekly updates. Every Friday, we write a quick summary of what happened that week. These updates are only published on the portal.
- Read all our official updates. Use this feed to find all major news & updates Komodo team posts. As always, feel free to engage with us in the comment section by asking a follow up question.
- Find Komodo's Media Mentions. This board will help you find all Komodo media coverage, from the press to YouTube vlogs.
- Check featured discussions. We highlight the most active and interesting posts on Komodo's community portal. The featured content slowly rotates from week to week.
- Read community generated articles. We have begun to highlight various blogs and websites that regularly talk about our technology. Komodo content is now easier to find. If you would like to get your blog post featured please contact us.
- Read discussions with your native language. Komodo community members occasionally posts content in their native languages. We have created a page for you to easily locate those posts. Currently we have included Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian.
Come join the discussion!
Komodo Mentions in the Media Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann published an article as a guest contributor on the Nasdaq.com blog. Kadan argues that single-chain architecture is unsustainable and insupportable: "At present, 2,667 dapps run on the Ethereum network; all of them are, according to feudal logic, second-class "citizens" of the chain. The developers of a particular dapp depend on Ethereum's whim: If the individual application's code needs to be updated, the dapp developers must wait for de facto approval from their majesty, Ethereum. This situation is bad enough in principle, but in practice, with the developers of thousands 'of apps all clamoring for attention to specific needs, it becomes plainly insupportable." Read the full article here. CoinTelegraph published a long-form profile on Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann. It's a very personal story about finding meaning in mathematics and computing after a tragic loss, giving up a secure government job in cybersecurity for an uncertain career in blockchain, and his grand vision about Komodo. Read the full profile here. An article from The Daily Hodl about Vitalik's tweet cited Komodo's AtomicDEX as the existing solution for enabling peer-to-peer trades between the Bitcoin protocol and the Ethereum ecosystem. "Developers across the cryptosphere highlight just how many different platforms are being built in an effort to create basic infrastructure that solves this type of demand. The team at Komodo, for example, points to AtomicDEX, a mobile-friendly atomic swap powered DEX that it says can do the job, effectively swapping the two cryptocurrencies." Read the full article here. Komodo CTO Kadan Stadelmann joined a podcast with Justin O'Connell, a contributor at Forbes Magazine and the Founder of Cryptographic Asset. "First of all, I'd like to say that this module, this stablecoin module, is one of many other modules," says Kadan. "Komodo, in general, is a multi-chain platform, built on a so-called multi-chain architecture. And on top of the whole platform, first, third-parties can not just spin up a chain, but literally fully customize, configure this chain, and that's also why we call it a composable platform— a composable Smart Chain results out of this feature." Listen to the full podcast here.
That's it for Komodo's March 2020 report. It's been a rollercoaster of a month and the next few months are likely to be very similar. The Komodo team is sheltering in place and staying safe, and we hope all of you are, too. | 
