What Is Kadena (KDA)?

With the 14th anniversary of the Bitcoin network occurring only days ago, it is remarkable how far the crypto sector has come. But even with all the progress, the blockchain and crypto industries still suffer from growing pains. The sector struggles with extreme price volatility, scams and usability, which are less than ideal. 

Mass adoption is arguably the holy grail of the blockchain and crypto industry, but several hurdles have hindered progress. One of the most significant problems has been scalability. After all, if you want millions of people to use your cryptocurrency, the network has to be able to handle the traffic. 

The speed of a blockchain is measured in transactions per second (TPS). Another critical metric is transaction finality time (how long it takes to confirm a transaction). Together these parameters determine a blockchain's scalability. 

Many blockchains suffer from a low TPS and long transaction finality time, which can minimize the user's experience. Bitcoin and Ethereum — the most widely adopted currencies — struggle with scalability. During periods of heavy usage, transaction times and fees dramatically increase. 

A difficult problem to overcome is having network speed without sacrificing decentralization or security. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin termed this problem the blockchain trilemma — the quest for security, scalability and decentralization. Solana has struggled with this over the past year, suffering three outages, one in April and two in May.

Some recent projects are working to conquer the blockchain trilemma, and Kadena is one of them. The following sections will dig deeper into the history of Kadena, what Kadena is hoping to achieve and what differentiates Kadena from other projects.

Overview of Kadena

Kadena is a Layer 1 proof-of-work (POW) protocol that uses dual-layer technology. It is designed to assist builders of all expertise levels to develop applications from concept to launch. Kadena is highly scalable with its multi-chain, braided structure. 

The first layer is a public blockchain named Chainweb, and the second layer is a private blockchain called Kuro. Together, these layers support processing up to 480,000 transactions per second through multiple braided chains. To achieve scalability, Chainweb shards transactions.

Kadena’s architecture combines 20 individually mined parallel chains that simultaneously form a single network. The design of Chainweb linearly increases transaction throughput as new chains are added in parallel. Kadena’s multi-chain network provides security without sacrificing transaction speed and scalability. 

Kadena developed Pact, an open-source Turing-incomplete smart contract language. To promote the functionality of the Kadena blockchain, Pact was created for developers and non-developers to read and employ. 

Pact code is executed as an immutable transaction directly on the ledger in a human-readable format, which means anyone can openly verify Pact smart contracts. Developers can also upgrade Pact smart contracts anytime without needing a hard fork.

Why Do People Use Kadena (KDA)?

One of the main benefits of Kadena is its ability to offer low-cost transactions while still providing fast transaction speeds and low transaction finality times. Kadena has also introduced a crypto gas station feature that gives businesses the ability to eliminate transaction fees for their customers. 

With well over 20,000 cryptocurrencies in existence today, many have little or no use cases and others are outright scams. The worth of a crypto project can be measured by its usefulness and whether it solves a real-world problem. Let’s see how Kadena measures up.

Pharmaceutical Track And Trace

• Rymedi is a workflow management software for disease testing and vaccine administration. 
• Kadena integrated its hybrid blockchain into Rymedi’s healthcare platform, allowing the provenance of controlled substances to be tracked. The Kadena blockchain also provides a solution for managing data in the healthcare sector.

Fund Management/Fintech

• United States Commodity Funds LLC (USCF) is a U.S.-based company managing exchange-traded commodity funds. 
• Kadena’s hybrid blockchain provides the scalability needed in the fund management industry and the ability to manage public and confidential data.

Latin American Fintech and Government Infrastructure

• Alteum is a Latin American technology organization specializing in developing blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) for businesses and governments that chose to work with Kadena because of its speed, scalability and security.
• The Kadena blockchain is an integral part of Alteum’s goal to address challenges within Mexico.

1. A debt tokenization platform: Allows small- to medium-sized businesses to crowdsource debt at a lower interest rate. It gives individuals the opportunity to make investments that are usually only available to venture capitalists. 
2. A sovereign voting platform: Lets citizens have their voices heard across various municipal and governmental matters.
3. Land and commodities tokenization: Provides the ability for individuals to buy land, property and rare metals in a fractionalized form. Small investors can pool their funds for purchasing assets that are usually financially out of their reach.

Other use cases for KDA tokens include:

• Direct peer-to-peer transfers (payments)
• Creating new smart contracts
• Paying the gas cost of executing smart contracts

Kadena (KDA) History

Kadena was co-founded in 2016 by Will Martino and Stuart Popejoy. Both have experience building blockchains and built JP Morgan’s first JPM coin blockchain. The Kadena advisory committee also includes Stuart Haber, the co-inventor of blockchain technology. He is the most referenced author in the 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper.

KDA is the native token of the Kadena blockchain and was first released via two private token sales in the form of Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) in early 2018.

Following the private sales, a public sale was held, divided between accredited ($0.5 per KDA) and non-accredited investors ($1 per KDA).

The distribution of KDA is as follows:

• Mining: 700 million to be emitted over 100+ years
• Platform share: 200 million to be emitted over nine years
• Investors, strategic reserve and contributors: 90 million
• Burned at launch: 10 million

KDA has a maximum supply of 1 billion and a current circulating supply of 216,066,617. 

KDA token inflation is as follows. 

• Genesis Block provides a 23 KDA reward per block.
• This amount will decrease by 0.3% every 87,600 blocks (approximately every 30 days) based on a 30-second block time.
• From block 95,308,800 to 125,538,055, the block reward will freeze at 1 KDA per block and go to zero at block 125538057.

Where to Buy Kadena (KDA)

KDA can be purchased at 24 crypto exchanges, including Binance, Binance.US, Kucoin and Gate.io. CoinMarketCap publishes a complete list of exchanges that support KDA. Below are the trading pairs for the four listed exchanges.

• OKX: KDA/USDT
• Binance: KDA/BTC, KDA/USDT, KDA/BUSD
• Binance.US: KDA/USD, KDA/USDT
• Kucoin: KDA/BTC, KDA/USDT, KDA/USDC
• Gate.io: KDA/BTC, KDA/USDT

Kadena Blockchain vs. Other Blockchains

So how does the Kadena blockchain stack up against its competition? This section will highlight some of the main differences.

Chart Credit: Education Ecosystem

Looking at the first criteria row in the table above, you can see that Kadena is lightyears faster than other blockchains. Moving to the second row, you can see that Kadena is the only POW blockchain; the PoW consensus makes Kadena much more secure. Kadena also has a considerable advantage in transaction fees and scalability.

How to Store Kadena (KDA) Safely

No cold storage wallet is available for KDA. Ledger is working with the Kadena team to bring a Kadena app to Ledger Live. Three hot storage wallets are available.

Chainweaver is the official Kadena wallet and is available for desktop or web. It is more than just a crypto wallet; it can be used for advanced blockchain and smart contract development. It is more complicated to use than other wallets. 

X-Wallet is an extension for Chrome and Brave browsers and is also compatible with iOS and Android. It integrates with most NFT and DeFi Kadena dApps, as well as the Kaddex DEX that allows you to swap, stake and provide liquidity with your tokens.

The Zelcore wallet, unlike the first two, is a multi-asset wallet. Zelcore is built on one multi-asset/protocol platform that allows consumers to access and view the entire blockchain universe from one place. With the Zelcore wallet, it is easy to buy, store, trade and swap assets across any protocol and exchange. Zelcore supports over 450 coins with the ability to import over 50,000 tokens, and it supports over 60 blockchain protocols.

Whether you choose one of these wallets or another wallet, don’t store your crypto on exchanges.

Is Now a Good Time to Buy Kadena (KDA)?

So after reading this article, are you ready to invest in KDA? If so, is now a good time to buy KDA? 

KDA strongly correlates with Bitcoin, which drives crypto market cycles. Knowing this, where Bitcoin is in the market cycle helps determine if now is a good time to buy KDA.

The chart above shows the price history of Bitcoin. It measures the time intervals from one bull market peak to the next and from one bear market bottom to the next.

Looking at the timing of the market cycles, they are relatively consistent, especially the last two. It’s no secret that the best time to buy crypto is near a bear market bottom but that trying to time the market and buy at the exact bottom is difficult. A safer strategy is to start dollar-cost-averaging near the bottom. Studying the chart above shows that the moment could be now. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are highly speculative, so you want to invest money that you can afford to lose.