Kadena (KDA)

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in: 2018
• Mainnet release: 1-2020
• Is building Pact, a formally verifiable smart-contracting language for financial applications, and Chainweb, a PoW blockchain that uses multiple chains in parallel to increase throughput.
• From Proof of Work #79 (19-11-2019):

"Mining of Kadena's public blockchain is now live! At the time of this update, there have been over 150,000 blocks mined. For context, it took Ethereum 28 days to cross the same milestone. We see this as validation of our approach to scaling Proof of Work using parallel chains. Given that we are currently only available for CPU mining (we anticipate GPU mining to open in about a week), we're working hard to encourage and support adoption. We look forward to the full launch of our hybrid blockchain platform in December! Since we've opened up mining, we've quickly seen the hash rate go from 20 MH/second to between 4-5 GH/second. We're already seeing over 5000 CPUs solving blocks on mainnet. "

Governance

• From their website (27-8-2024):

"Kadena Cabinet is at its core a Community Advisory Board (CAB), where KDA token holders come together to influence strategic decisions that drive the Kadena ecosystem forward via an on-chain polling mechanism.

By locking their tokens, KDA token holders become Cabinet Members, earning a seat at the table and a voice in shaping the ecosystem's direction. Cabinet Members are rewarded for their commitment to Kadena by earning a return on their locked KDA. Cabinet Members who participate in the polling are rewarded for their contributions to the future of the Kadena ecosystem. The accrued rewards are determined by a tier system based on the KDA lockup time and the participation of polls. After the lockup period, only Cabinet Members who have participated in polling can claim an accrued reward when they unlock their tokens."

• From Paradigm (28-7-2021):

"Kadena has built the framework for the first DAO on its public blockchain called dao.init. As Kadena’s ecosystem continues to grow, the creation of a DAO will allow for the broader community to provide their input in a decentralized manner. The DAO will serve two purposes, 1) allow for the Kadena community to submit and decide on proposals that aim to advance the Kadena ecosystem and 2) establish a decentralized process that can govern the addition of new features to the Kadena platform itself."

Token

Stablecoin

• From CoinDesk (10-11-2020):

"Will add Terra's luna stablecoin to its decentralized exchange (DEX) Kadenaswap, which was announced earlier in September and is expected to roll out at the end of the year."

Tech

• Whitepapers can be found here.
• Code can be viewed here.
• Programming language used: Pact, it's own smart contract language.
• Proof of Work.

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS): 480,000
• Latency:

How it works

• The hash function for their mainnet will be Blake2S PR 431.
• From their docs (27-8-2024):

"Kadena’s public blockchain scales by providing a mechanism to asynchronously produce many blocks on different peer chains all at the same height, with each block requiring a fraction of the hash power of the total network. This configuration drastically increases the number of transactions per second over the total network. Every chain of the 20 braided chains has a new block on average 30 seconds in between. Total is 20 blocks every 30 seconds. Which translates to 1.5 seconds theoretical block time.

Braiding chains together was first proposed for security purposes. In effect, chains are “braided” as each chain’s newly mined block incorporates the Merkle roots of its peer chains. By having multiple mined blocks at the same height each referencing each other’s past, the protocol decreases the duration of time where an attacker could get “lucky” against an honest network. Think of an attacker needing to flip 6 coins and get all heads (mine 6 blocks) vs. needing to flip 12 coins and get all heads (mine 6 blocks from two related chains). The latter is harder. This same intuition applies to Kadena’s multi-chain configuration.

Tokens are moved across chains using a Simple Payment Verification (SPV) smart contract."

• From Our Network (20-11-2020):

"Daily transactions on Kadena's 20-chain sharded network. The Kadena public blockchain was successfully scaled in production from 10 to 20 chains. In August, the graph shows the 10 new chains going live. While chain 0 continues to have the most activity because of the applications running on it, transactions have been evenly distributed across the other 19 chains working in parallel.

Chain 9 processing more transactions from and to miners. Since last month, chain 9 has seen an increase in usage as mining pools have been distributing rewards on it. We anticipate seeing similar behavior as other participants on Kadena’s public blockchain migrate to various chains."

Fees

• From its docs (27-8-2024):

"While we offer marginal transaction fees for consumers, we’ve gone a step further in introducing the first Crypto Gas Stations to allow businesses to eliminate all transaction fees for their customers, thus removing a key barrier to mass adoption of dApps."

Nodes

• From Our Network #8 (13-2-2020):

"Kadena nodes are decentralized across the world. While the United States has the largest share of nodes (39.4%), the majority of nodes are running in a range of countries including China (18.2%), Japan (15.2%), and the European Union (15.2%).

Block time for KDA has been stable at ~3 seconds."

Oracle Method

• Has integrated (19-5-2020) Chainlink for streamlined pricing feeds.
• Has announced a partnership and integration with API3 (21-5-2021).

Their Other Projects

Kadenaswap

• From Decrypt (29-9-2020):

"Kadenaswap supports multiple protocols. This means that it uses a smart contract language called Pact to support coins from lots of different blockchain protocols, including Bitcoin, Polkadot, Cosmos and Ethereum."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].
• The network is currently (19-5-2020) working on interoperability projects with both Polkadot and Cosmos.

Audits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Usage 

• From Our Network #8 (13-2-2020):

"There have been over 60,000 successful token transfers on the Kadena network. That is a 20% increase in the number of transactions taking place over the past month."

• From Our Network #29 (7-7-2020):

"Since fully launching with smart contract transactions at the start of 2020, the Kadena public blockchain has been experiencing increased usage."

Team, investors, Partnerships, etc. 

Team

• Team can be found here.
• Helmed by former JPMorgan blockchain leads
• Stuart Popejoy; Co-founder and CEO (8-2024)
• Tony Pham; Head of Marketing at Kadena.

Investors

• Raised $15 million in a 2018 funding round joined by Multicoin Capital and the venture arm of the owners of Fidelity Investments.

Partners

• From Our Network #29 (7-7-2020):

"In partnership with Cosmos and the Interchain Foundation, Kadenamint (the integration of Kadena’s wallet+IDE Chainweaver and the Pact smart language on Tendermint) was implemented (link)."

• Partnered with Terra and (10-11-2020).