The team behind the project created the chain in 2016 but only launched it in 2020. The founders, Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, were already involved in cryptography and project management in the digital division of JPMorgan bank before the development of the blockchain. To launch the KDA cryptocurrency, the project team attracted investments in the amount of more than $15 million in 2017 and 2018. The startup was supported by well-known funds CoinFund and MultiCoin Capital and other venture capital companies.
The blockchain uses the Proof-Of-Work consensus system (like Bitcoin and Ethereum). The project team believes that this method of confirming transactions provides the highest level of security, but cannot scale. Kadena has found an innovative way to do more transactions per second than PoW protocols. The chain uses the concept of a web.
If we take, for example, Bitcoin, there is only one blockchain. In Kaden, several chains run in parallel. Each network interacts with neighboring blockchains, forming a plexus where a global consensus is reached. To increase the throughput, it is enough to add additional chains. Thus, the network can potentially grow to an unlimited number of transactions per second without the need for a Layer 2.
Another feature of Kaden is transaction fees, which are one of the biggest problems with PoW blockchain: they are too high. Blockchain developers have created a system with a minimum commission for transfers.
Also, you do not need to have native tokens in stock in order to pay a commission when making transactions on the network. The creators took care of this in advance. They created “gas stations,” which are special accounts on the blockchain that allow dapp developers to pay transaction fees in advance instead of users. And finally, Kadena uses a new smart contract programming language called PACT, which aims to fix the shortcomings often found in the Solidity language used by Ethereum.
Kadena is a cryptocurrency that is quite easy to use compared to other blockchain technologies. It is used to pay for calculations in the public network of the same name. Just like ETH in Ethereum, the KDA coin is a token in its network. There, miners receive compensation for mining blocks – in the form of commissions for user transactions included in the block.
Applications that process transactions in Kadena have high throughput and execute their code using their own token. The more applications join the network and begin to interact with it, the more the number of executed smart contracts will grow, and the usefulness of the coin will also grow. Most of the coins here are a reward for decentralized mining, due to which the network grows and functions.
Miners produce and validate blocks, for which they are rewarded in the KDA. They are also used as a unit of account in transaction fees. The minimum fractional unit is the so-called "hop". Coins are just as functionally simple as Ethereum: they can be directly transferred between users, you can create new smart contracts with their help, and also pay for the cost of gas when executing these contracts.
