Continuing with the series of information about the various cryptocurrency projects that stand out in this new world that we are so passionate about. This time we will analyze an interesting project called Kadena (KDA), which is presented as a public blockchain platform that seeks to optimize scalability and has a new smart contract language, called Pact, which comes equipped with formal verification and upgradeable smart contracts.
Kadena uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism called Chainweb, which consists of several individually mined chains that work in parallel to trigger network transactions. This design thus theoretically supports high transaction throughput at the base layer without the need for scalability or functionality solutions at the second layer.
Its mission is to optimize its base layer for transaction performance and developer adoption without the need for scalability solutions or second-layer functionality. Second-layer solutions tend to complicate application development, so offering a complete toolkit in a single platform is intended to be easier for developers. Also the team behind Kadena claims that this way there are no upper limits on the number of transactions it can process per second, according to internal testing.
Kadena's native smart contract language, Pact, is designed to improve on common flaws observed in Ethereum's Solidity, in particular its susceptibility to infinite loops and lack of formal verification. Pact's smart contracts can also be upgraded at any time without the need for a hard fork. In addition, Pact was designed to be human-readable and computer-verifiable. Instead of requiring the storage and invocation of large, low-level bytecode streams like EVM, the code stored on the Blockchain is exactly what the application developers wrote and is readable in its original form.
Kadena also built a private blockchain that predates its public smart contract platform. The private blockchain called Kadena Kuro, uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism and is optimized for enterprise-level use cases. Since 2018, Kadena Kuro has been used by a healthcare consortium to help reduce the effort required to collect and maintain information from insurance providers. This private blockchain can be used similarly to a sidechain with a public blockchain network (such as Kadena's public platform) to speed up transaction processes and create new data marketplaces.
In Kadena, the SPV smart contract enables automated interchain token transfers while managing the supply of a single coin across the network. An inter-chain transfer moves a token (or tokens) by deleting it on one chain and issuing a new token on a counterpart chain. SPV tests are used to verify that the initial erasure process is complete before another chain can create a new token. The transaction ID of an erasure can only be consumed once, so each SPV test of an erasure can only allow the execution of a single creation function.
Kadena was founded by former members of JPMorgan's blockchain development team for Juno. To date, Kadena has raised over $15 million, most of which has been raised in the form of SAFT (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.
Kadena conducted two private token sales in early 2018 in the form of a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT). The first round closed in January 2018, raising a total of $2.25 million by offloading 4.5 million KDA tokens ($0.50 per KDA). The second was secured in April 2018 and brought in another $12.9 million through the sale of 17.2 million coins ($0.75 per KDA).
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The Kadena chain architecture, called Chainweb, combines multiple individually mined parallel chains working simultaneously on a single network. Each Proof-of-Work (PoW) chain mines the same coin and contains references (subsets of the Merkle root) to the previous block of its counterpart chains, so they can validate each other's blocks and share liquidity. This approach differs from sidechains, as each individual chain has the same capabilities as the main chain.
Chainweb is designed to increase transaction throughput linearly as new chains are added in parallel to the network. Miners are directed to each chain individually, which reduces Kadena's bottleneck relative to Bitcoin.
Kadena's native token is the KDA is used to pay for computing power on the blockchain (i.e., executing smart contracts and transactions), equivalent to the gas function in Ethereum. It is also used to reward miners for discovering the next valid block. As for ongoing inflation, the per-block reward started at about 2.3 KDA per block at genesis. This amount will decrease by about 0.3% every 87,600 blocks until block height 95,308,800, when the mining reward will plateau at 0.1 KDA per block. The reward per block will eventually be reduced to zero at block height 125,538,057.
It should be emphasized that the information developed here should not be considered as a form of advice or recommendation to invest in this project, please be aware that as a potential investor you should investigate by your own means to confirm what is expressed here before investing your money.
