Reef was founded by Denko Mancheski. His motivation was to build the most advanced blockchain for retail investors who want to get involved with DeFi, NFTs and Gaming.

Mancheski wanted to help cryptocurrency newcomers overcome the complexities associated with interacting with a blockchain and understanding new concepts such as DeFi and NFTs. Additionally, the ability to give access many bridges to other blockchains so that funds and liquidity can easily be ported to Reef Chain, allowing retail investors to take advantage of high scalability and low fees.

Born in Macedonia, Mancheski said that his passion for FinTech led to him being introduced to blockchain technology. He has described forming a competent team as the biggest challenge associated with bringing Reef to life.

When asked about the personal attributes that will help him become a successful entrepreneur, he added: “I have a very addictive personality — I just can’t stop doing something until I get to the goal that I set for myself.”

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It has also been listed on Gate.io and Bitfinex. Bitfinex also supports Reef Chain.

REEF can also be acquired through decentralized exchanges such as 1inch and Uniswap.

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Reef is geared towards cryptocurrency newcomers, alongside existing DeFi users who find it difficult to keep up with maintaining funds and wallets across multiple blockchains. The team has tackled the high gas fees seen on the Ethereum blockchain by building on Substrate, which enable almost instant transactions and low costs, where some claim Ethereum’s fees renders DeFi protocols “unusable.”

What makes the Reef chain unique is that any DeFi protocol that has already deployed on Ethereum or an EVM-compatible network can run on Reef with just a few changes to the code. Since Reef Chain straddles this intersection between Ethereum and Polkadot, along with bridges to other blockchains, the Reef ecosystem can be accessed by anyone with a Web3 wallet that is interested in accessing dApps on Reef.

Because of how it has been built on Substrate, Reef is extensible and can have support for multiple VMs (Virtual Machines) as well as extension for existing popular VMs such as EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). It has on-chain upgrades functionality so any new features are easily pushed through the networking layer, but also on-chain governance.

Reef uses a Nominated Proof of Stake system to bond to potential validators, nominate potential validators, and to secure the Reef network. This allows for low cost, almost instant transactions with finality achieved in 10 seconds on average.

For those without the technical skills to run a Validator node, they can be a Nominator. Nominators secure the Reef Relay Chain by selecting good validators and staking REEF.

Being a Validator requires technical expertise, staking REEF, and running a node 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with high availability. Validators that cannot maintain performance or up time have their stakes slashed, as do their Nominators.

While REEF are staked by nominating a Validator, they are ‘locked’ (bonded). Nominators can receive new REEF in their wallet, but cannot stake as a Validator or transfer REEF away from their wallet. Nominators can un-nominate at any time to stop staking their funds, which becomes effective in the next era. Un-nominating does not automatically unbond funds. There is an unbonding period of 28 days on Reef before bonded funds can be transferred after issuing an unbond transaction.