Kadena makes its play for Ethereum’s devs
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Kadena introduced at EthCC in Cannes that its long-planned Chainweb EVM testnet is reside. Not like Ethereum L2s that promise scaling by way of rollups, Chainweb EVM runs on Kadena’s braided proof-of-work structure, designed to scale horizontally with out fragmentation from discrete sequencers or bridges.
The consequence, based on Stuart Popejoy, Kadena co-founder and CEO, is “seamless EVM compatibility with out compromising decentralization or throughput.”
“That is vanilla EVM with Pectra, so you may deploy right this moment proper now onto our chains,” Popejoy informed the viewers in Cannes at EthCC right this moment.
Chainweb EVM initially runs 5 parallel EVM chains on testnet, with Kadena’s structure permitting this quantity to develop with demand, whereas nonetheless sustaining sub-cent transaction charges. As Popejoy defined:
“Each time we add chains, the throughput goes up linearly for that quantity,” Popejoy mentioned. “So for example, once we went from 10 to twenty chains, our throughput doubled.”
Kadena’s present chains run Pact, the community’s native good contract language, designed to prioritize safety, auditability, and formal verification. Not like Solidity (which is Turing-complete and may categorical something at the price of complexity), Pact is deliberately Turing-incomplete.
However like so many L1s and former L1s which have adopted the EVM, the community results of Ethereum’s digital machine — particularly for issues like tooling and wallets — are arduous to disrupt. Simply right this moment, there have been further EVM launches from heavyweights Ripple and TON, utilizing the Cosmos stack.
Kadena is pitching its proof-of-work roots as a function, not a bug:
“Proof-of-work remains to be probably the most safe and probably the most decentralized consensus know-how on the market,” Popejoy mentioned, though that is debated. “It eliminates the necessity for sequencers…and it’s a much more safe structure.”
However the actual query is whether or not builders and customers will come. Kadena is aware of that onboarding Solidity builders would require overcoming important UX complexity throughout a number of chains. Requested how they plan to summary this complexity away, Popejoy mentioned:
“Since its launch in 2020, Kadena’s multichain structure has uniquely allowed dApps to scale linearly with demand…With our upcoming Chainweb EVM launch, we’re bringing this know-how to Solidity builders, each by adapting strategies from Pact in addition to working with builder companions to leverage superior account abstraction and fuel station performance arriving with the Pectra EVM improve.”
To assist bootstrap the ecosystem, Kadena is placing up actual cash: a $50 million grant program, half of it earmarked for Solidity-based dapps, AI integrations, and half for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.
On the RWA facet, Kadena is making an attempt to distinguish with a compliance-first method, based on co-founder Annelise Osborne.
“Early adopters like MPact Capital and CurveBlock have chosen Kadenas’s RWA normal as a result of it solves a number of vital challenges confronted by establishments: regulatory compliance by means of our ONCHAINID framework, operational effectivity by way of programmable dividend distribution (with compliance updates), and institutional-grade safety with out sacrificing transaction velocity or affordability,” Osborn informed Blockworks.
Even with grants and bold claims, Kadena’s problem is obvious: can they entice sufficient builders and customers to maintain actual exercise as soon as these incentives dry up?
“The purpose isn’t simply to be one other EVM choice,” Popejoy informed Blockworks, however reasonably “the place the place DeFi builders go once they’re uninterested in coping with excessive charges, gradual transactions, and complicated bridging.”
