What is Kadena (KDA)?
Kadena (KDA) is the native token for the blockchain of the same name. The Kadena ecosystem is a multi-chain platform that uses a unique approach to scalability, utilizing 20 blockchains. It’s also known for its layer 2 solution, Kuro, which provides support for up to 8000 transactions per second. The live Kadena price data can be observed in the chart above.
Who Founded Kadena?
In 2016, Kadena was co-founded by FinTech experts Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino. Popejoy was the executive director of the New Products Division at JP Morgan, working with blockchain technology. Martino worked with JP Morgan’s open-source Juno blockchain project and is now the President at Kadena LLC.
An important figure for Kadena’s advisory team is Dr. Stuart Haber. He’s known for being one of the co-inventors of blockchain technology and was frequently cited by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Haber has also been involved in the development of Kadena’s NFT platform Immutable Records.
Prior to the official launch, Kadena held several token sales. There were two types of sales – for non-accredited and accredited investors. Non-accredited investors were non-US-based and were able to purchase assets for the Kadena price of $1. The accredited sale was open to US-based and some foreign investors, with a discounted rate of $0.50.
The idea behind Kadena was to create a blockchain that would function similarly to Bitcoin but be more scalable and offer a faster transaction rate. Furthermore, the Kadena team was aiming to make their project multi-chain, allowing for more mass adoption opportunities.
The Kadena Mainnet officially launched in late 2019. A few months later, in January 2020, Kadena’s scalable hybrid blockchain platform was released. At the time, the KDA price varied between $0.20-0.50. For the most part, the asset experienced low to mild volatility and did not exceed the $1 threshold within the first year of its run.
In April 2021, Kadena exceeded the $1 mark for the first time, although it fell closer to its launch rate in the following months. In the second half of the year, the asset started seeing more prominent growth. In November, around the same time when Bitcoin soared to nearly $70,000, the Kadena price peaked at $28.25.
How Does Kadena Work?
Kadena has a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens. It’s estimated that all Kadena coins will be mined over 120 years from its launch. This means that the asset is deflationary and the Kadena price is expected to rise as the supply decreases.
One of the unique services that Kadena offers is crypto gas stations. They allow businesses to cover the transaction fees of their clients. High gas fees are a big point of contention for many skeptics as they often put people off using crypto. The use of gas stations aims to make blockchain transactions more accessible to prospective users.
The Kadena infrastructure has two core components – the layer 1 public blockchain protocol Chainweb and the layer 2 solution Kuro. Combined, Kadena consists of 20 chains. Prior to the network expansion in 2020, there were 10 chains in the network.
Chainweb is often described as the first sharded and scalable layer 1 network that uses the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. The braided chains that make up Chainweb maintain a structure that’s similar to Bitcoin. This network is responsible for reinforcing security and data integrity while keeping Kadena scalable.
Kuro is the network’s layer 2 private blockchain solution. It offers fast and efficient transactions, supporting high speeds across 500 network nodes. Kuro can act as a side-chain to optimize transaction or date management processes in healthcare and finance. Transactions are primarily completed using the KDA price value.
The Kadena blockchain provides purpose-built smart contract support. This is a technology that is unavailable on Bitcoin. Kadena’s smart contracts are Turing-Incomplete and programmed using the Pact language. It automatically detects code bugs and allows contracts to be readable by non-developers, easier to upgrade, and interoperable.
The platform states that it can provide support to both enterprises and smaller-scale customers, thanks to its unique blockchain structure that combines both permissionless and permissioned chains, as well as smart contracts. The Kadena price for the services depends on the project size and the technology required.
Unlike more traditional decentralized networks, Kadena uses a unique technology known as braided chains. The 20 chains in the Kadena ecosystem all run at the same time and asynchronously to validate new transactions and record them inside the blocks. This allows the network to validate up to 8000 transactions per second.
The multiple chains keep the network load lower and increase block confirmation time, making it harder for malicious parties to find a suitable time stamp to attack the network. It also allows for more blocks to be produced in a shorter time span. According to Kusama, the target block time is 1.5 seconds, or 20 blocks per 30 seconds.
The network has developed strategies to deal with transaction congestion. As such, to avoid too many transactions accumulating in a single chain, the Kadena price for the fees is automatically adjusted to redirect the traffic to emptier chains.
The Kadena crypto network is secured using a combination of two consensus mechanisms – Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This system is sometimes referred to as parallelized PoW. Using this consensus mechanism, the security of the Kadena network is reinforced while also ensuring a high throughput rate and scalability.
The DAG technology is responsible for offloading the network processing. Using this structure, each chain can communicate with three other peer chains. This means that all 20 chains are not required to directly interact with each other. Transactions can be validated faster without compromising data security and integrity.
The decision to use a parallel PoW system was done to make the network more sustainable and scalable. According to the developers, networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum that use traditional Proof-of-Work encounter issues with scalability and transaction speeds. They’re also more resource-efficient and require high mining costs.
Miners that contribute to the block validator process are eligible for network rewards. The rewards are collected from the Kadena price value of the transaction fees. Miners are incentivized to redirect transactions to different chains if some of them are congested. The block reward amount is adjusted every six months to account for deflation.
