What is Kadena? KDA Tokenomics explained

Security, lightning-fast speeds and minimal fees. Have you ever wondered how a blockchain could combine all three elements?
Kadena is a blockchain that does exactly that, setting a new standard in the world of decentralized technology.

Kadena, also known by the market ticker KDA, is an enterprise-grade blockchain that looks to help bring businesses to the blockchain.

Kadena can be described as a highly scalable and developer-friendly Proof-of-Work based blockchain that offers a level of security similar to Bitcoin while offering increased scalability, smart contracts, and the ability to process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.

As if Kadena’s speed wasn’t impressive enough, it is also incredibly cheap to use. On average, you’d need to make around 20 transactions before you’ve spent $0.01 in transaction costs.

But how exactly does Kadena achieve all of this? Today we find out!

What is Kadena?

Kadena is a layer-1 blockchain that aims to offer Bitcoin-level security mixed with infinite scaling and low fees.

Kadena was founded by Will and Stuart back in 2016, both of whom have worked previously for JP Morgan’s Blockchain division.

Before starting Kadena, Will first served as the technical leader of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s, or SEC’s, Cryptocurrency Steering Committee before becoming the lead engineer of Juno, which is JPMorgan’s pioneer blockchain project.

Stuart, on the other hand, led JPMorgan’s Emerging Blockchain group and recruited Will from his role at the SEC to JP Morgan, before the two joined forces and founded Kadena.

Although not a co-founder, a prominent advisor at Kadena is Dr. Stuart Haber, who is a co-creator of blockchain technology and is the most cited person in Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper.

Haber’s blockchain first went live in 1995, 13 years before Bitcoin, and is still online today.

Though, instead of financial transactions Haber’s blockchain was designed to authenticate documents.

But how does Kadena work exactly?

How does Kadena work?

Kadena uses three things to separate itself from the crowd. Chainweb, Kuro, and Pact.

While Kadena is a Proof-of-Work blockchain, the way it confirms consensus is different to Bitcoin, which itself is also a Proof-of-Work blockchain.

To explain, Chainweb is Kadena’s Layer 1 public Proof-of-Work blockchain that improves on Bitcoin’s design and allows for almost limitless scalability without compromising on its security.

It achieves this by sharding and braiding, which are techniques for splitting the network data and spreading the computational load and storage requirements across parallel chains, and the combining of these parallel chains to support the main chain’s transactions, respectively.

Initially, Chainweb had only 10 independent blockchains, but after successfully forking to 20, the team at Kadena now believe up to 50 independent Proof-of-Work blockchains may be able to run in parallel, which could lead it to be the first blockchain to break 1 million transactions per second.

Which would be no small achievement, should they achieve it.

Next, we have Kuro, which is Kadena’s private blockchain that runs equal to Chainweb and is designed for enterprise-grade applications.

For clarity, enterprise-grade refers to businesses, as Kadena hopes to entice businesses to the blockchain by offering automatic bug detection, human-readable code, the ability to amend smart contracts to accommodate changing business needs, easy integration with traditional databases and APIs, and a bunch of neat security features all through Kuro.

Moving on, we have Pact. The programming language of the Kadena network.

Pact aims to solve a major flaw in Ethereum’s Solidity programming language, in particular a vulnerability regarding unrestrained loops and lack of Formal Verification.

To break that down, loops are used in Solidity when we want to perform an action repetitively. However that has led to hacks and costly bugs on the Ethereum Network in the past.

On the other hand, Formal Verification is the process of proving that the algorithms running a system are all functioning within its set parameters.

What makes Kadena unique?

What makes Kadena unique is that Pact isn’t just the native smart contract language, it is also built with a bug detection feature and stands out as the first human-readable programming language, which is Turing-incomplete.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, a Turing machine is an abstract mathematical model of computation created by Alan Turing in the 1930s.

It consists of an infinite tape, a read/write head, and a set of rules printed onto the tape.

The machine then reads a symbol from the tape, follows the rule related to the symbol to determine the next action, and repeats this until it reaches a halting state.

The difference between Turing-complete and Turing-incomplete lies in the computational power of a system or language.

A Turing-complete system can simulate a universal Turing machine, meaning it can perform any computation that can be algorithmically described.

In contrast, a Turing-incomplete system lacks this universality and has limitations on expressiveness and computational power, often intentionally for specific use cases to enhance security or simplicity, as is the case with Kadena.

This Turing-incompleteness removes a specific vulnerability known as recursion, or a “dead weight attack”.

In the context of blockchains and smart contracts, recursion is the ability for a smart contract to repeat an action until a given condition is met.

Turning-incomplete systems simply fail the smart contract rather than trying to repeat them, which removes the vulnerability caused by recursion and unrestrained loops.

But what about the tokenomics?

KDA Tokenomics

In total, there will only ever be 1 billion KDA tokens, with about 25% of this amount currently making up the circulating supply. The rest will mined over the next 120 years.

The primary use case of KDA is to pay for computation, such as deploying smart contracts or paying transactions, on the Kadena network.

Of the total Kadena Token Allocation, which has a vested emission schedule of 10 years, 70% of the allocated supply will be given to the miners, with 20% going to the platform, 7% to investors, and 3% to contributors.

Unfortunately, although a wallet explorer exists for Kadena, it does not rank wallets by holdings to allow us to watch for any potential whales.

Kadena offers something familiar but also a little different.

Not only do they adapt Bitcoin’s original model, they do it with the advice of someone who may know blockchains better than anyone else.

In short, Kadena aims to be the secure, fast, cheap, and reliable gateway for users, developers, and businesses to enter the blockchain.

And while nothing is ever guaranteed in crypto, providing there is no major mismanagement at the top, I believe the future still looks promising for Kadena.

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