Kadena Enters The Enterprise-Level Blockchain Ring Road With Top Speed
JP Morgan had lost not one, but two of its top blockchain officers who went on to develop Kadena, a next-generation blockchain platform that is cross-platform, cross-chain, and cross-industry.
What comes in mind when you hear ‘enterprise-level blockchain’? Well, for me it’d be IBM, R3, Oracle, and even Ethereum in some cases, while 2020 is set to broaden the packed list with new additions since blockchain focus is shifting from alternative monetary systems to more sophisticated industry-tailored solutions.
One of the most promising startups launched earlier this month, would be Kadena, ‘a JP Morgan spinoff’, run by Stewart Popejoy and Will Martino, previously heads at the JPM blockchain task force.
Not only did they managed to raise an astonishing $15mn in order to create the first industry-focused hybrid blockchain over the last three and a half years, that by the way makes Ethereum look as old as Bitcoin looks in comparison, but it is also the first blockchain that is set to connect private and public DLTs under an easy-to-use UI.
Now, we know that the IBM-backed Hyperledger is also offering similar cross-industry perks, but the difference here is that Kadena is not excluding anyone from their platform, in opposition to Hyperledger and R3’s Corda which are tailored for businesses and not individual users.
How is Kadena different from traditional blockchain platforms
Every time a new blockchain provider enters the DLT scene, especially when we’re talking about the enterprise shelf, there are quite a few things expected from the respective company such as better scalability, faster and more secure transactions, and of course lower fees.
A lot of projects managed to get into the top 10 of public blockchain providers solving just one of the above issues. In Kadena’s case, not only all of the above are addressed and solved with unique approaches, but the key addition here would be a home-bred smart-contract language called Pact, that makes smart contracts accessible and easy to program even for my grandma.
In order to better understand how all this is gonna work, we had an interview with one of Kadena’s co-founders, Will Martino who covered our curiosity with detailed elaboration on the subject:
*Questions by Ross Peili (RP) from Cryptos.com, Answers by Will Martino (WM) from Kadena.
Pact is smart-contracts re-invented
- RP: Smart contracts are a critical component to wider blockchain adoption on the enterprise level. Unfortunately, many processes for creating and working with smart contracts are not always easy, even with clean-cut DLTs such as the Ethereum blockchain. Would you suggest that ‘Pact’ is your ‘secret weapon’? And how easy would it be for someone unfamiliar with coding to create their own smart contract with Pact?
WM: Our hybrid blockchain supports interoperability using Pact, Kadena’s open-source, Turing-incomplete smart contract language with Formal Verification. We designed Pact to be the smart contract language that people can easily learn and use to support sophisticated projects. The simple smart contract language is powerful enough to code complex contracts and execute multi-party transactions.
At Kadena, we designed Pact to tackle security and usability on a blockchain in a different way. Enterprises and developers alike will find that applications once considered too difficult to build are now achievable with Kadena. By removing the complexity and vulnerability of other smart contract languages, Pact advances secure and legible transactions. With its superior usability and security, Pact sets the standard for modern smart contract languages.
Kadena’s recent partnerships demonstrate how Pact is playing a key role in blockchain adoption. Next-generation blockchain networks such as Cosmos and Polkadot have announced their interest in implementing Kadena’s smart contract language. With the Kadenament implementation on the Cosmos ecosystem, a developer can create a single application that is compatible with multiple networks, all inside of the same piece of software.
Kadena is a better blockchain that learned from past DLT architectures
- RP: Many DLTs, such as IOTA Foundation’s Tangle, have chosen a different architecture (directed acyclic graph) to tackle the bottleneck issue. Why does Kadena persist on blockchain, and how did you manage to outperform Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two leading public blockchains combined, when it comes to TPS?
WM: The architecture of Kadena’s public blockchain was designed to avoid congestion—congestion is essentially what almost brought Ethereum to a sudden halt during CryptoKitties’ rapid growth. The Ethereum network was simply not built to scale as fast as it needed to in order to support incoming transaction requests.
Kadena has built upon the foundation of a Bitcoin mining chain and parallelized this work across multiple chains—each referencing their peers’ headers—in specific configurations that allow for efficiency and better throughput. Mining a single new block in Bitcoin today is expensive in terms of hash power. In comparison, Kadena uses a parallel chain architecture to mine multiple blocks for the same hash rate that other blockchains require to mine just a single block.
Kadena aims to the future of blockchain and not on short-term monetary value management
- RP: As time passes, and regulatory watchdogs become more aware of the technology, we start to see government-backed blockchains, not only as baselines for an alternative monetary system but also as a fast, secure, and immutable intel exchange protocol used on a state-level. What is your vision of the DLT sector for the next decade?
WM: Blockchain is on track to experience widespread adoption. Kadena sees itself contributing to blockchain’s future through the features offered on our hybrid platform that enable the interoperability of a public chain with a private network. Advancements in hybrid technology and production-ready smart contracts will ease in the onboarding of a wide range of participants to blockchain.
An example of this is demonstrated in our partnership with Rymedi’s CBD oil tracking. In this use case, customers scan a simple barcode with their cell phones to receive data about a product’s origin and journey. The validation of purchasing and authenticity is especially useful in geographies where fraud and quality concerns remain potentially life-threatening issues.
Geolocation and cross-chain architecture is the key to scalable PoW networks
- RP: One of the most important aspects associated with PoW consensus mechanisms would be the extreme energy consumption required in order to maintain network integrity. How can Kadena manage both lowering the environmental footprint, as well as upscaling the security at the same time?
WM: Independent experts have analyzed Kadena’s technology to assess the incentives and behaviors of miners for our public blockchain. We’ve released a scalable global transacting system that consumes less energy relative to other existing blockchains. Basic economics drive miners to where electricity is cheap, plentiful, and most importantly, would otherwise be going to waste. Operating with a scalable Proof of Work consensus mechanism, Kadena’s public blockchain reduces the energy footprint of mining operations.
Kadena’s public blockchain scales by asynchronously producing many blocks on different peer chains all at the same height, with each block requiring a fraction of the hash power of the total network. This configuration drastically increases the number of transactions per second over the total network. The increase in attack-resistance offered by the multiple chain architecture significantly lowers the required per-chain hash rate. The use of hash rate to support additional chains serves to increase throughput, utilization, and security. Basically, Kadena’s braided and parallelized public blockchain more efficiently applies hash rate than a traditional single-chain PoW design.
Verdict
Overall, Kadena seems like a well-thought and organized project by industry experts, able to solve some of the problems blockchains of the past struggle with, as well as prioritize solutions for issues we haven’t yet encountered, making it a project with a clear vision of the DLT future.
Kadena was recognized as one of the most promising blockchain companies to watch in 2020 by Forester, while it is already spreading on the news among top-shelf media outlets, and for a good reason, when you consider that Kadena managed to establish solid partnerships with the likes of Cosmos, Amazon, Microsoft, and Polkadot among others.
I am really looking forward to using the Pact language and come up with some insights for you guys. At the same time, I think that offering enterprise-level solutions on a public scale is what was missing from the monopolistic industry design that was tailored either for the big players or for the small investing crowd.
Hit me with your thoughts in the comments below, or tag me on Twitter to discuss further on how Kadena could shapeshift the future of DLTs.
