What is the Kadena cryptocurrency (KDA)?

Kadena is one of the most exciting third-generation blockchains currently in development, based on a PoW-powered blockchain and a programming language known as Pact.

Kadena is based on a proprietary blockchain technology using a Proof of Work (PoW) system and a new programming language known as Pact for the generation of an ecosystem of fast and secure dApps that aims for mass adoption and rapid expansion in the business world.

Kadena Story (KDA)

The development of this project began in 2016 when Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino began to design the bases for this project. Both had experience with blockchain projects, as Popejoy had been a head of JPMorgan's Emerging Blockchain and Martino worked as a technology lead for the SEC's Cryptocurrency Steering Committee. His first iteration of work was what gave rise to JPM Coin, which came to light in 2020, thus creating the first JPMorgan stablecoin and blockchain.

After this first experience, Popejoy and Martino wanted to go a step further and take a risk with the creation of a completely new technology. From here the development of Kadena begins.

In order to have top-level advice for the construction of their project, Popejoy and Martino sought the collaboration of Dr. Stuart Haber, one of the most mentioned authors within the Bitcoin whitepaper, who worked with W. Scott Stornetta, In the chained timestamping systems, a forerunner of blockchain technology designed by Satoshi Nakamoto.

In order to make its development possible, the team began fundraising using a SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) private sale scheme, launching an ICO and various types of aid from companies and organizations. In total, the project raised a total of $17,3 million by mid-2019. The tokens acquired from those sales were distributed following the scheme below.

Finally, the launch of the Kadena mainnet took place on November 4, 2019 and since then the Kadena ecosystem has not stopped growing, demonstrating the potential of this new blockchain.

How does Kadena (KDA) work?

Kadena is a project very focused on two points: offer high scalability and a powerful smart contract language to make extremely efficient dApps. Both things go hand in hand because the purpose of Kadena is to offer companies and interested parties the opportunity to build dApps with a global reach and massive use.

Achieving this requires two basic technologies: the Tendermint consensus protocol and the Pact programming language. Tendermint is known in the blockchain world for being a high-speed consensus protocol. This protocol was developed by Jae Kwon, president of the Interchain Foundation, the same one behind the development of Cosmos (ATOM). Tendermint works thanks to a distributed computing technique known as State Machine Replication, which allows nodes to deterministically replicate the state of a computation in each of its parts.

In other words, a node takes the input data from the network, performs its calculation and obtains a final state that is then shared with the rest of the nodes, being able to verify said state quickly. As a result, Tendermint is able to quickly reach consensus, even if the network consists of hundreds of thousands of connected nodes.

Together with Tendermint, Kadena has developed Pact, a programming language with formal verification and that allows the development of smart contracts that can be updated on-chain. Thanks to these features, Pact allows secure smart contracts to be developed, not only at the instruction level, but also due to the fact that any error detected can be quickly fixed. These solutions are achieved with an update of the smart contract, reducing the complexity of security deployments.

Tendermint and Chainweb, managing the Kadena consensus

Kadena maintains its consensus to an architecture called Chainweb, which relies on Tendermint.  Chainweb is actually a set of multiple blockchains working in parallel and combined to result in the Kadena blockchain. This allows Kadena to offer a unique level of scalability without compromising network security.

In the Chainweb, each of the Proof of Work (PoW) chains is responsible for mining the same coin (KDA) and contains references to the previous blocks of their “homologous” chains. Due to this, they have the capacity and power to validate transactions of others and share liquidity. In this operation, each individual chain has the same capacities as the main chain. Thus, Chainweb achieves the unique goal of streamlining transactions linearly as new parallel chains are added to the mainnet.

As for the miners, they address each chain individually, reducing the typical "bottleneck" that we usually find in currencies such as Bitcoin. In this way they can dedicate themselves to mining in each of the subchains, making sure that all of them can be attended to at all times.

Security mechanism between subchains

However, the subchain system has a huge challenge: maintaining security. This security is sustained on the basis of a merkle tree which is able to join the states of each of the individual strings and add it to the final string. In this way, Chainweb becomes a blockchain of blockchains.

To understand it more easily you can imagine the strings A, B and C, which are substrings of the main string P1. The miners mine each of the subchains (A, B and C) and work as if they were individual chains. That is, transactions are made, transactions are taken, blocks are mined, sent to the rest of the network, verified, and consensus is reached for each of the subchains. With each of those blocks added, chains A, B and C have a different Merkle tree hash. Likewise, that merkle hash is then linked to the main chain P1 by means of a Merkle tree sum that is called a Merkle Cone. This process is interesting because it guarantees two things:

1. That the histories of A, B and C stay close to each other.
2. It maintains the integrity, verifiability and protects the data of the substrings by preventing them from being tampered with. That is, the transactions in the subchains can be verified from any other subchains. This is possible thanks to the Merkle tree sum link between them, which allows that verification.

Currently, Kadena has a total of 19 sub-chains in operation, which we can see live from this link.