Kadena (KDA)

Overview & History

Kadena is a public blockchain that aims to optimize for scalability and features a new smart contract language, dubbed Pact, which comes equipped with formal verification and upgradeable smart contracts. Kadena also uses a new Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism called Chainweb that consists of multiple individually mined chains working in parallel to execute network transactions. This design theoretically supports a high-transaction throughput at the base-layer without the need for any second-layer scalability or functionality solutions.

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History

Kadena aims to build a scalable and developer-friendly public blockchain that provides a level of security similar to Bitcoin. To support this vision, Kadena features a novel consensus method, a proof-of-work model dubbed Chainweb, and a new smart contract language, called Pact. Its mission is to optimize its base-layer for transaction throughput and developer adoption without the need for any second layer scalability or functionality solutions. Second layer solutions tend to complicate application development, so providing a full tool kit on a single platform is intended to be more developer-friendly. The team also claims Kadena has no upper bounds on the number of transactions it can process per second based on internal tests.

Kadena's native smart contract language, Pact, is designed to improve upon common flaws observed in Ethereum's Solidity, particularly its susceptibility to unbounded loops and lack of Formal Verification. Pact smart contracts can also be upgraded at any time without requiring a hard fork.

Kadena also built a private blockchain that predates its public smart contract platform. The private blockchain, now called Kadena Kuro (formerly ScalableBFT), uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism and is optimized for enterprise-grade use cases. Since 2018, Kadena Kuro has been used by a healthcare consortium to help reduce the effort required to collect and maintain insurance provider information. This private blockchain can be used similar to a side-chain with a public blockchain network (such as Kadena's public platform) to speed up transaction processes and create new marketplaces for data.

The project was founded by former members of the JPMorgan blockchain development team for Juno. Kadena has raised $15 million to date, with the majority of those funds secured in the form of SAFTs (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens). Not included in this total is the $150,000 grant Kadena received from the Interchain Foundation (the development team behind the Cosmos network) to build a version of Pact that is compatible with the Tendermint protocol.