The partnership will allow Celo’s cUSD stablecoin and Kadena’s KDA token to interoperate across both networks via a trustless bridge relay

New York, N.Y. — December 15, 2020 — Kadena, the first blockchain technology company to come out of J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Center for Excellence, and Celo, an open platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone, are announcing a partnership. As part of the collaboration, Kadena is joining the Alliance for Prosperity. The partnership will see both Celo’s cUSD stablecoin and Kadena’s KDA token interoperate on both platforms via a trustless bridge relay, increasing utilization for both tokens. And, later this month, Kadena is launching a bounty program on mainnet for its upcoming DEX called Kadenaswap.

The Celo Foundation and Kadena are teaming up to provide better market access to token holders. This development with Celo builds upon Kadena’s recent partnership with Terra to add the LUNA stablecoin to Kadenswap, as well as Kadena’s integrations with Cosmos and Polkadot. In addition to bringing more markets to holders of cUSD, the bridge also paves the way for KDA to participate in collateralization of the Celo stablecoin, which would benefit KDA token holders.

“We’re excited to be working with Celo and the Alliance for Prosperity,” said Kadena Co-founder Stuart Popejoy. “Our affinity with Celo comes from sharing a forward-looking approach towards cryptocurrency economies. Both projects support tokens that solve for current deficiencies in the Ethereum-based market while preserving security and decentralization. The Celo-Kadena bridge brings more value to the DeFi market while, building upon the addition of LUNA to Kadenaswap, also providing more ways for token holders to transact.”

“The Celo Foundation is very excited by the long term potential of the Celo-Kadena bridge and the increased collaboration between the two communities,” said Celo Co-founder Marek Olszewski. “The cUSD stablecoin represents one of just a few algorithmic and permissionless stablecoins available today and we’re excited to see the asset bridged to Kadena and other networks where it can be composed with a greater number of DeFi applications. As one of the few networks with programmable Blake2s support (arriving in the Donut hardfork), we’re thrilled that Celo will be able to natively verify the Kadena light client protocol on chain, allowing the bridge to operate in a fully trustless manner.”

As progress gets underway with the Celo partnership, the Kadenaswap multi-protocol DEX moves forward. Kadenaswap will reach a major milestone later this month with the “Bountyswap” release. With Bountyswap, participants are incentivized to find bugs in Kadenaswap by fully-funded test pairs on mainnet, with Kadena funding up to 100,000 KDA in each pair. If participants can hack the network to “steal” KDA, they keep the proceeds. In contrast to a standard bug bounty program, the honeypot structure allows for potentially larger rewards to “white hat” hackers. Successful completion of the bounty program on mainnet is an important step towards the full launch of cryptocurrency market pairs on Kadenaswap on January 29, 2021.

About Kadena

Kadena provides the world’s fastest hybrid blockchain platform, consisting of the only sharded and scalable layer-1 PoW public network, the Kuro permissioned blockchain, and the Pact smart contract language. Kadena solves the scaling challenges of Bitcoin and the security issues of Ethereum. Kadena’s founders created J.P. Morgan’s first blockchain and worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Kadena is live with partners including USCF (a $3 billion fund) and leading DeFi projects. For more information, visit www.kadena.io or follow @kadena_io on Twitter.

About Celo

Celo is an open blockchain platform that makes financial tools accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. The novel proof of stake network enables mobile-first access to DeFi and dapps. Celo’s ultralight client is over 700,000x lighter than other networks and enables any smartphone, even with limited internet connectivity, to quickly and easily sync with the network. Its open source technology can be leveraged to build an ecosystem of powerful mobile applications, ranging from easier cash transfer programs to peer-to-peer lending, international remittances to digital assets and wallets. Visit celo.org for more information and receive updates about Celo in your inbox news.celo.org.