Skip to main content

BlogChain

The place where the blog meets the chain

4 minutes read

4 Ways Kadena Is Taking Blockchain Mainstream

Kadena founder Stuart Popejoy recently joined Okcoin for a Twitter Spaces chat in which he discussed numerous topics, including Kadena’s big plans to appeal to the masses.

1: Kadena Eco

Early this year, Kadena launched Kadena Eco, an initiative designed to supercharge blockchain’s biggest thinkers, top-tier tech talent, and unparalleled strategic capital to fuel the hypergrowth of Kadena’s ecosystem with the technological and strategic help they need. “Simplifying crypto is what we are targeting at Kadena, and Kadena Eco will help us realize this important goal,” said Popejoy, who joined Okcoin on Twitter Spaces recently to celebrate the listing of Kadena’s native coin, KDA.

“Kadena Eco will be core to the Kadena ecosystem,” said Popejoy. “Its primary purpose will be to allocate funds to builders from DeFi to NFTs to gaming and beyond. Some projects Kadena Eco has already funded include Marmalade, which can guarantee the uniqueness of NFTs by allowing developers and users to store more data on the chain than Ethereum, which forces developers to store information off chain.”

2: Pact

Kadena has created a native smart contract programming language more intuitive and more powerful than Ethereum’s Solidity. “While creating our smart contract language, Pact, we studied not only Solidity and the Ethereum Virtual Machine, but also Bitcoin’s script,” noted Popejoy. “Something that Bitcoin script reached for and didn’t quite achieve is a language that is as powerful but is fundamentally safe and protects you, as a dapp developer, from bugs that really should never be allowed in the first place. While Satoshi fell short, we believe we have achieved that goal.”

On SavedByKadena.com, developers can explore historical crypto hacks and see how, if the dapp had been coded in Pact, the bug would not have been possible to even write into code. “Pact is fundamentally safe and protects you as a dapp developer from certain bugs found in other blockchains,” said Stuart.

3: Kadena Is A Layer 1 With The Power Of Layer 2

During the Twitter Spaces, Popejoy noted how Layer 2 technologies introduce complexity. “Lightning Network on Bitcoin is a good example of some of the complexity that results when you start putting another system on top of a Layer 1 blockchain; it just changes the trust model and the threat model,” he said. “…One of the things we’re shooting for is to make Kadena’s Layer 1 as usable as possible for the average dapp developer and crypto user. One important way to help users is to ensure low fees.”

Layer 2 solutions don’t guarantee low fees. “Stacks doesn’t help you with Bitcoin fees,” said Popejoy. “There’s no solution to high Ethereum fees presently. Our system has low fees, because it’s scalable. Gas can return to its true function in a system like Ethereum, which is to make people play fairly with each other in terms of how much they use the resources of the system, and not to enrich miners or validators at the users expense.”

4: Proof Of Work Is Scalable, Proof Of Stake Is Not

Popejoy told the Okcoin team that there is a major misconception in the blockchain industry. Many believe Proof of Stake is scalable while Proof of Work is not. Proof of Work’s functionality can be distributed over numerous chains without sacrificing security. Proof of Stake, on the other hand, always requires a validator set which, if split up between multiple chains, loses security.

Every Proof of Stake system that is trying to scale has some hard limit they’re going to hit eventually. When you take Kadena’s design approach to distribute over numerous chains, Proof of Work proves more scalable than Proof of Stake. The fact is, Proof Of Work-based Layer 1 technology can handle industrial use cases along the lines of clearing the entire US stock market on Kadena. “We could do it today,” said Stuart. “That’s the scale we’re talking about.”

Be sure to check out the whole discussion below.