Kadena(KDA)

Kadena is a hybrid Layer-1 network that seeks to create a developer-friendly and scalable blockchain and employ it for real-world blockchain use cases. KDA is Kadena’s native coin or cryptocurrency, which serves to pay for transaction fees and to reward miners. 

Kadena’s public network architecture, called Chainweb, is designed as a set of parallel chains, each handling a fraction of the network’s transaction flows. This novel Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism enables high transaction throughput and a level of security similar to Bitcoin’s. Kadena also offers smart contract functionality with its native smart contract language called Pact. Kadena’s private blockchain, Kuro, is built for enterprises and works as a layer-2 blockchain. 

Kadena was founded in 2016 by Stuart Popejoy, who led JPMorgan’s Emerging Blockchain group prior to building Kadena, and Will Martino, who worked as the tech lead at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

KDA price

Ассording to our KDA USD live price chart, Kadena’s native KDA crypto didn’t witness any major price action until its parabolic rise in Q3 2021, with KDA price range-bound in $0.06 to $0.334 prior to that.

Throughout 2020 KDA was trading sideways, plunging to its all-time low of $0.0658 on March 13, 2020. The price of KDA also saw a minor bull run in the summer of 2020, rising by 313% from $0.2518 on Aug. 5, 2020, to $0.7899 on Aug. 9, 2020, when KDA reached its highest price for the year. The surge was short-lived, however, with Kadena losing all of the summer gains by early October and closing 2020 with a 35% loss. Despite a moderate start to 2021, KDA reached a new peak of $1.7 on March 11, 2021. However, optimistic sentiment faded soon with a severe crash hitting the broader crypto market in May. 

Kadena returned to the growth phase in Q3 2022 and extended the gains with news on project developments, including new partnerships in the NFT space. The rally in Bitcoin provided more fuel for further upside momentum, pushing the price of Kadena to a new all-time high of over $28 on Nov. 11, 2021. Kadena’s parabolic rise brought its fully diluted valuation to over $28 billion, putting it in the top 30 coins by market capitalization, according to Coin360 data. Although KDA lost 70%+ since its all-time high, it turned out to be one of the biggest winners in 2021, ending the year with an 8,000% gain. 

In terms of Kadena price predictions, KDA’s epic boom may not be repeated in the near term, but ecosystem growth combined with another crypto-wide rally could see the price of KDA surging again.

How KDA works

Kadena’s KDA coin is used to pay for computations on the network, including peer-to-peer transfers on the network, new smart contracts deployment and execution of existing smart contracts. Miners producing new blocks also earn KDA, with rewards composed of transaction fees and network inflation. The total supply of KDA is capped at 1 billion tokens, with 70% of the supply allocated to KDA miners, 20% to the Kadena platform, and 6% to the strategic fund and investors. 

Kadena combines a novel Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism and a new language for smart contract capabilities in one network. Kadena’s public chain features a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism called Chainweb that enables high network scalability and fast transaction execution on the network. Chainweb is designed as a combination of multiple individually mined chains that work in parallel and transfer liquidity between each other, with KDA serving as the single currency across all chains. Having 20 active chains, Kadena claims to have a theoretical throughput of 480,000 transactions per second and ‘virtually free’ transactions. 

Kadena introduced Pact, a human-readable and computer-verifiable smart contract language for application development. Pact aims to improve upon Ethereum’s Solidity with full formal verification, which makes the code less prone to bugs, and contract upgradability without requiring a hard fork, among the features. Kadena’s coding language allows builders to create DeFi protocols and enterprise blockchain use cases. 

Kadena also offers Kuro (formerly ScalableBFT), a side chain solution tailored for enterprise needs. Unlike its public network Chainweb, Kuro is a permissioned blockchain so the data on the network is only available to verified participants. Kuro also has different technical characteristics from Kadena, processing up to 8,000 transactions per second. 

KDA news, updates and highlights

Kadena occupies a niche of its own, being a scalable Proof-of-Work blockchain with smart contract functionality. Unlike other PoW blockchain networks, Kadena aims to offer high transaction throughput without sacrificing security. Unlike multiple Layer-1 networks, Kadena seeks to tap into the enterprise-grade blockchain solutions and NFT issuance standards alongside building DeFi protocols. 

However, Kadena hasn’t seen much traction on its platform yet. Its private blockchain Kuro is used by a few enterprises, but the details are not revealed due to legal and commercial reasons. 

Kadena is competing with multiple smart contract platforms in the DeFi space, such as Solana and Avalanche. Kadena’s DeFi ecosystem is currently limited to several protocols, including Kadenaswap, the blueprint from Kadena for a DEX, and Kaddex, a multi-chain DEX, which was launched in beta in December 2021. 

Kadena made progress in the NFT space so far, delivering Marmalade, a new NFT standard, launching several NFT collections and securing multiple partnerships with the players in the space. UFO Gaming entered into a strategic partnership with Kadena in October 2021, choosing Kadena network to facilitate its upcoming ecosystem. 

In order to attract more developers to build on the network and incentivize activity, Kadena launched a $100 million grant program in April 2022. Kadena Eco, the initiative that will be administering the grants program, aims to support builders in areas such as gaming, metaverse, NFTs and DeFi among others.

With fierce competition between smart contract platforms, the efficiency of the capital allocation in this grant program will probably define the future of the Kadena ecosystem. Meanwhile, Kadena is in its infancy and is yet to catch up with more robust ecosystems. 

Kadena also aims to build a Kadena-Cosmos bridge alongside releasing wrapped indigenous tokens such as kUSD, kBTC, and kETH to drive more liquidity into the ecosystem. 

Frequently asked questions about KDA

• Can you mine or stake KDA?

Kadena is a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain, which means the network rewards miners with KDA for discovering new blocks. Kadena can be mined with ASIC miners, and miners will receive 70% of the total KDA supply, which will be emitted over 120 years. 

• What are some of the best KDA wallets?

Kadena offers Chainweaver, its native Kadena desktop wallet for KDA storage. Other popular KDA wallets include X-Wallet and Zelcore. 

• What can you do with KDA?

You can use KDA to pay for transactions on the Kadena network and trade it with other cryptocurrencies on exchange platforms. Alternatively, you can mine KDA with ASIC miners. 

• How to buy KDA?

You can buy KDA by exchanging your BTC, USDT or BUSD holdings on an exchange such as Binance, Kucoin and gate.io.