New kUSD are minted automatically by the blockchain to satisfy market demand. The total number of kUSD coins is not pre-set, but is constantly and automatically adjusted by the blockchain. The number of kUSD can grow into the millions, billions, and beyond to satisfy market demand for kUSD. All newly minted kUSD are distributed to miners.

Miners run the computer nodes that do the work of the Kowala blockchain. For this work, miners can earn block rewards in the form of newly minted kUSD stablecoins.

In order to mine kUSD, a miner will need to own and control a minimum number of mUSD mining tokens (currently set at 30,000 mUSD). These mUSD mining tokens must be installed into an operating mining client before mining rewards can be generated.

The consensus protocol of Kowala, Konsensus, is a formal set of rules that allows a decentralized group of participants to agree on the advancement of the blockchain, including the handling of transactions and the distribution of incentivizing rewards.

Konsensus is derived from Tendermint, a mostly asynchronous consensus protocol which is itself based on Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). We chose to base our work on Tendermint because it has achieved block transaction performance that is far superior to other widely used blockchain consensus protocols and because it has a well-understood security profile.