On Tuesday (September 29), Kadena, “the first blockchain technology company to come out of J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Center for Excellence,” introduced a high-speed multi-protocol decentralized exchange (DEX) named Kadenaswap.
Kadena calls itself “the world’s first & fastest hybrid blockchain platform.” Kadena’s platform has three components: a public blockchain, a permissioned network, and the Pact smart contract language.
Kadena says that its public blockchain, Chainweb, is “the only sharded and scalable layer-1 PoW network in production today.” Chainweb uses a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism. It achieves greater throughput and scalability than Bitcoin by braiding together “multiple Bitcoin-like chains.”
Kuro, Kadena’s permissioned network, was “designed to meet the strict requirements and business workflows that secure $100B order books.”
The Pact smart contract language, which is “the bridge that ties the Kadena ecosystem together” was “designed to be readable by non-developers and has been battle tested in production applications.”
In a blog post published yesterday, Kadena said that Kadenaswap will “utilize Kadena’s 20-chain sharded and scalable layer-1 public blockchain with 480,000 transactions per second capability.” It also talked about “community onboarding initiatives such as partnering with ZelCore on full-node incentivization for miners, offering a free month of gas during October 2020, and launching a developer engagement program.”
Kadena says that it is entering the DeFi space because as DeFi grows in popularity, “the fundamental problems of Ethereum are breaking platforms and sending developers scrambling” (since Ethereum is the platform powering most of the popular DeFi platforms).
Kadena goes on to say that to deal with the problems of cost and speed of transactions on Ethereum, as well as the security issues of Ethereum’s smart contract language Solidity “major DeFi projects are looking at alternative blockchain platforms, including ‘CeFi,’ which leverages centralized exchanges’ scalability.” As for Layer 2 solutions, Kadena believes that these “can raise the centralization concerns seen in the Lightning Network.”
Kadena’s DEX, Kadenaswap, “leverages Kadena’s multi-chain scalability to keep the ‘De’ in DeFi by scaling on the base layer, using decentralized bridge technology in Pact for access to major protocols, no matter what chain they originate on.”
Kadena Co-founder and President Stuart Popejoy had this to say:
“Ethereum made DeFi possible, but congestion and high gas prices threaten the sustainability of the DeFi experiment just as it is poised to skyrocket.
“Kadenaswap’s support for multiple protocols and the ability to scale across the Kadena public multi-chain network will provide a much-needed, fully decentralized alternative to ‘CeFi’ on centralized exchanges and off-chain layer-2 solutions.
“Combined with community efforts like our developer program launch and free gas campaign, Kadenaswap shows a way forward to mass adoption of DeFi protocols.”
Kadenaswap will use smart contract language Pact “to interoperate with major DeFi protocols and coins such as BTC, CELO, DAI, DOT, LINK, and ETH.”
Kadena will have a multi-stage launch, with the first stage, which includes “major components such as bridges, ERC-20 wrapped tokens,” due to go live in Q4 2020. To encourage adoption by developers, Kadena is offering one month of free gas during October 2020.
