A circle is a space where several people swap things directly with each other — no middleman, no order book, and no one setting a price for you. Here's the whole idea, the areas you'll see on screen, and what we don't know yet.
People traded long before anyone invented a price. You brought what you had, someone else brought what they had, and you worked out between you whether the swap felt fair. The accounting was messy and human.
Money fixed the messiness by flattening it: every kind of value collapsed into a single number on one dimension. That was an enormous simplification, and we gave up something real for it. Deals where who gets what matters as much as how much became hard to express.
The problem money actually solved is coordination — the classic coincidence of wants problem in bartering. You have apples and want a chair; the person with a chair doesn't want apples. Money breaks that deadlock by giving everyone a thing they'll all accept.
It works, but the deadlock has another solution: find the chain. Someone wants your apples, you want the chair, and a third person closes the loop. That needs everybody to see the whole picture at once and commit together — which is exactly the hard part.
A deal between more than two parties normally needs intermediaries, trust in those intermediaries, several sequential steps, and it can still fall over halfway and leave someone exposed. And because most systems reduce everything to price, the interesting agreements — multi-sided, conditional, "only if everyone else does too" — are difficult to even write down, let alone execute.
Traditional trading — order books, automated market makers, liquidity pools — works by price. You trade against a pair or a pool, and the mechanism finds you a counterparty and a number.
Here you build a graph instead: who is giving what to whom, directly, possibly several people deep. It's executed all at once, so the chain either completes or it doesn't exist. No pairs, no pools, no spread.
Katomia is not a marketplace — it's infrastructure for new kinds of markets.
Peer-to-peer here means the participants deal with each other directly. There is no exchange in the middle taking custody, no market maker quoting you a spread, and no matching engine deciding who trades with whom. You put things where you want them to go, other people do the same, and when everyone involved agrees, it happens.
What Katomia adds is the coordination: a real-time, shared space where a multi-party agreement can be assembled piece by piece, seen by everyone as it forms, and then executed atomically — all of it, or none of it.
Nothing takes custody of your assets along the way. They stay in your own Hedera account until the moment the whole agreement executes.
A circle is a coordination space. People join it with their own accounts, bring whatever they hold, and propose swaps to each other in real time until a set of transfers everyone is happy with has taken shape.
That's the whole concept. Everything else — the round table, the market square, a plain grid of rows — is just how it's drawn. The same space can be presented as a circle, a boardroom, a market or a game board without any of the underlying ideas changing. The areas described below exist in every one of those views; only their shapes and names on screen differ.
So if you're looking at a grid rather than a ring, don't worry — your store is still your store and your basket is still your basket.
Nerd note: internally a
circle is a proposal-mode game, and
the display word comes from site-config.json → terms.space. The name is a
parameter precisely so it can be re-pitched per audience.
Every participant has their own space, and the space is divided into zones that mean different things. Where an item sits is what says what you intend to do with it — that's the core of the interface.
Your own holdings, visible to the others so they know what there is to ask for. Things sitting in your store are yours and uncommitted — nothing about having them here promises them to anybody.
The band at the edge of your store, nearest the middle. Think of it as the cashier's counter: it's where things gather when they're part of a deal that's coming together, rather than just sitting on your shelves.
An item that you've promised into a pending deal is reserved. It stays where it is but goes ghosted — faded and dashed — so everyone can see it's spoken for and shouldn't be counted on twice.
The area that holds what other people have put forward for you. You propose a transfer by placing one of your things into someone else's basket; when they do the same to yours, the two halves of a swap exist and you can both see it.
Baskets are colour-coded by who put the item there, so a basket with three different givers in it reads at a glance as a three-way deal forming.
The common centre of the space. It carries the state of the deal as a whole rather than any one person's things: who has locked, how close the group is to agreement, and the progress ring for the cluster that's about to settle.
The flow is a loop, and it's the same loop in every view:
Agreement and fulfilment are two separate steps, and it's worth keeping them apart in your head: locking is everyone saying yes, signing is everyone actually doing it. Nothing leaves your account until that last step, and if any part fails, none of it happens.
Everyone starts in swap mode — free to make and take proposals. Locking says "I agree with the board as it stands right now".
Because it's agreement with a specific arrangement, it can't survive that arrangement changing: if anyone moves an asset after a lock, the locks come off and everybody returns to swap mode. You can also reject something in your basket, or recall something you put in someone else's, at any time before execution.
Katomia composes the transaction; it does not sign it for you and never holds your keys. Signing and submitting happen with your own wallet or signing tool outside the circle — our demos use Kpool and Kpay, and other Hedera ecosystem tools exist.
How much of the room has to agree before a deal can go through is set per circle:
A cluster is just a group of people whose proposed transfers connect to each other. Two clusters that don't touch don't have to wait for one another.
The strike time is when the signed transaction actually goes to Hedera — it's the transaction's start time on the network. A circle can strike immediately once agreement is reached, or after a set delay, leaving a window in which the deal is agreed and signed but has not yet fired.
What can still be done during that window, and by whom, is not fully pinned down yet. TBC
We're building in the open, so a fair few of these are honestly unfinished. Anything marked TBC is a real open question, not a dodge — and the 💬 button is the fastest way to push us on one.
No. You can walk into a circle and watch without connecting anything. You need a connected account when you want to actually put something into a deal.
No. Assets stay in your own Hedera account the entire time. Reserving something marks it as promised so it can't be double-spent inside the space — it doesn't move it anywhere.
Then nothing happens. Execution is atomic: either the whole agreed set of transfers goes through as one transaction, or none of it does. Nobody ends up half-swapped.
Before execution, backing out is simply part of negotiating — moving an asset after people have locked just takes the locks off and returns everyone to swap mode. If a transaction fails at Hedera, basket items go back to their original owners and proposing carries on.
The transaction won't submit, or it will fail. Either way it's on each participant to make sure what they've promised is actually there when the deal strikes.
That kind of event can affect how others see you: depending on how the circle was set up, events can be broadcast for reputation tooling to pick up, which is what lets organisers and participants build up a picture of who is reliable. The details of that reputation layer are still developing. TBC
Not on its own. It's infrastructure for a new kind of market — real-time, multi-dimensional proposals between humans and agents. Marketplaces can be built on top of it; this isn't one.
Not on its own, though games could certainly be built with it. The code and some of the interface use words like "game" and "player" to encourage play and experimentation — the ideas being explored are serious, but we'd rather people felt free to poke at them.
That tension is exactly why the name of the space is a setting rather than a fixed word.
Correct — and we don't try to. What gets swapped is a tokenised commitment: a promise, represented as a token. "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twelve coconuts", or "I will pay X by date Y provided Z has happened".
The promise moves atomically. Honouring it happens in the world, as it always did — but now there's a precise, timestamped record of who promised what to whom.
Not by default. You can put legal contracts on top where you need them, and the events and transactions recorded on Hedera make a good anchor for that — an agreed, timestamped account of what was exchanged and when.
The first focus is frictionless flow, not legal machinery.
Then it sits there — that's mostly a question of politics and conversation rather than software. What the organiser can do is shape the space: who's in it, which lock rule applies, what's visible to whom, and use what happened last time to try something different.
More tools for unsticking a stalled circle are a likely future addition. TBC
Which Hedera network the accounts and assets live on. Testnet assets have no real value, so it's the comfortable place to learn the interface. Mainnet is live value.
We deliberately don't frame this as "practice versus real" — there are play tokens on mainnet too, and people do serious things on testnet. Pick the network you want to be on.
Whatever the circle has been set up to allow — each one carries its own list of permitted pairs. HBAR, fungible tokens and NFTs are all in scope on Hedera.
The exact rules for how a creator configures allowed assets are still settling. TBC
Depends how it was made. It can be open to anyone, limited to a named list of accounts, or gated on a rule — belonging to a group, or holding something in particular. Public ones appear in listings; unlisted ones are reachable by link; private ones need permission.
There's no hard cap in the engine, but the current board views get crowded past roughly four participants on a phone. Handling genuinely large rooms — starting wide and narrowing to the cluster that matters — is an open design problem we're actively working on. TBC
Hedera network fees for the transaction itself, which are famously small. Whether anything sits on top of that is not decided. TBC
Connection is over WalletConnect, so Hedera wallets supporting it should work. We're not yet publishing a tested-and-supported list. TBC
Not separately — it runs in the browser and is built to work on a phone. A packaged app isn't ruled out. TBC
Because it's a group of people meeting as equals, and the word carries none of the hierarchy or combativeness of the alternatives. It's also genuinely provisional — the name is a setting, and we may well call it something else for a different audience. If you have a better word, the 💬 button below is right there.
Not yet — a short one taking you through the layouts is planned, and this page is the written version in the meantime. TBC