Kima uses native pools on the blockchains it supports. These native pools are essentially wallets controlled by Kima’s logic, with no direct control of funds by people at Kima.

This allows Kima to maintain a high level of security while still remaining decentralized. When a transaction is initiated, funds are first sent to the relevant pool.

Kima employs Light Clients on the blockchains it supports, allowing validators to query on-chain information without the need to hold resource-intensive full nodes on these blockchains.
This increases decentralization and minimizes trust.

The Light Clients are used to validate the initial transaction on the source blockchain. Once the source transaction has been validated, the cross-chain transaction moves to the next step.

To make sure that no single party has direct control of funds or access to keys, Kima’s validators all make use of specific hardware that can implement Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs).

This allows them to run Kima’s software without having access to the signing keys. This feature, combined with Kima’s Threshold Signature Schemes (TSSs), further solidifies the transaction’s security. The transaction then continues from the source chain to the Kima appchain.

After the transaction is written to the Kima appchain, Kima’s liquidity managment engine, LiMa, kicks into gear. this allows Kima to balance out the pools, providing the end-user with liquidity in their target chain.

since the pools only contain native assets, LiMa is there to make sure that there’s always enough liquidity to settle pending transactions. This is very useful for liquidity providers, as LiMa offers liquidity bounties for pools that need replenishing.

The last step is where Kima debits the source chain and credits the target chain. This means that funds are never taken out before being sufficiently validated in Kima’s pools, providing high capital security, efficiency and near-constant reversibility. Until this step, the end-user is aware of every step and can revert the transaction.

After this step, Kima sends the funds from the target chain’s pool to wherever they need to go: Either the end-user’s target wallet or to the host dApp directly, depending on the specific use case Kima was implemented for.