What is Kadena?

Kadena is a public blockchain that optimises scalability and features a new smart contract language called Pact, which includes formal verification and upgradeable smart contracts. Kadena also employs a novel proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanism known as Chainweb, which consists of numerous independently mined chains operating in parallel to process network transactions. This approach potentially allows for large transaction throughput at the base layer without requiring second-layer scalability or feature solutions.

KDA is the native utility token of the project. It is used to pay for computation power on the Kadena public chain.

A brief history of Kadena

Members of JPMorgan’s blockchain development team for Juno took the initiative and founded Kadena in 2016. They include Stuart Popejoy, who was the blockchain lead at JPMorgan, and Will Martino, who served as the Tech Lead for the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Cryptocurrency Steering Committee and the lead engineer for JPMorgan’s blockchain prototype Juno.

Kadena has raised about US$15 million so far, with the bulk of the money coming through two private token sales in the form of a simple agreement for future tokens (SAFTs). The first round, which collected US$2.25 million in exchange for 4.5 million KDA, was completed in January 2018. The second round, which concluded in April 2018, raised US$12 million and distributed 17.2 million KDA.

In August 2019, Kadena received US$150,000 from the Interchain Foundation, the team behind the Cosmos network. In November 2019, Kadena carried out its third token sale, which raised US$20 million and preceded Kadena’s mainnet launch in December 2019.

In January 2021, Kadena revised its token economic model, through which the project introduced a new mining model that sets a new schedule for the decrease of mining rewards. The update also changed Kadena’s schedule for platform emission, which is set to release a total of 200 million KDA by 2030, extending the original emission plan by five years.

Kadena maintains a token allocation model that designates 70% of its total supply for mining, as well as 20% for the platform, and the rest for investors, contributors, external offerings, strategic initiatives, and token burns. The total supply is fixed at 1 billion tokens to be mined over 120 years.

How Kadena works

Kadena has a braided design to deliver speed and scalability, believing that this construction allows for one blockchain to handle a certain number of transactions, with two chains handling twice as many. What distinguishes Kadena is that its developers devised how to connect the blocks and hashes between the chains to form a single multi-chained network.

Amid Kadena’s emphasis on speed, the blockchain uses the proof of work (PoW) consensus algorithm. The project claims that PoW is the “only battle-tested consensus protocol,” due to its economic incentive alignment and regulation-friendly characteristics.

Kadena includes an easy-to-use dashboard and programming language to aid in constructing and integrating decentralised apps (dapps). The system simplifies the most typical user operations as part of this approach. Users don’t need any prior technical knowledge to use Kadena’s basic services.

Pact, Kadena’s native smart contract language, is intended to address challenges in Ethereum’s Solidity, including its vulnerability to unbounded loops and lack of formal verification. Pact smart contracts can also update without necessitating a hard fork at any moment.

Kadena has already scaled its network from 10 to 20 blockchains and can do so again in the future, if necessary. This final addition to Kadena was its private Kuro Layer-2 blockchain, which supports up to 8,000 transactions per second across 500 nodes.

What is Kadena used for?

KDA is a digital currency that is used to pay for transactions on the Kadena public chain. Similar to ETH on Ethereum, KDA on Kadena is the manner by which miners are compensated for mining blocks on the network and is the transaction fee that users pay in order to have their transactions included in a block.

Kadena also facilitates the issuance and trade of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), one-of-a-kind digital assets representing almost anything. As a result, the NFT market has experienced widespread acceptance, and Kadena’s technological structure allows it to deliver several functions that are lacking so far in other blockchains. Kadena separates account names from keys, allowing companies to manage their crypto use better.