Kadena was founded in 2016 by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino. Stuart Popejoy led JPMorgan's Emerging Blockchain group before founding Kadena and has 15 years of experience building trading systems and infrastructure in finance. Will Martino was the Lead Engineer for JPMorgan's blockchain prototype Juno and led the Securities and Exchange Committee's Cryptocurrency Steering Committee and Qualitative Analytics Unit. Another key persona in founding Kadena was Dr. Stuart Haber, who is the co-inventor of blockchain technology and the most cited author in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Furthermore, Kadena raised capital from a number of crypto venture capitalists like Multicoin Capital, CoinFund, Amino Capital, and others.

Kadena offers a public proof-of-work blockchain with unparalleled throughput by combining two separate consensus mechanisms: DAG and proof-of-work.

In simple terms, Kadena achieves this by braiding chains together, meaning it offers not one but several (20) separate blockchains that all work simultaneously and asynchronously to validate transactions. This allows Kadena to mint multiple blocks simultaneously, thus increasing its throughput. This also increases security by reducing an attacker's time between block confirmations.

Kadena uses a directed acyclic graph structure to scale from one proof-of-work blockchain to theoretically an unlimited amount. However, its DAG structure is fixed and multi-channel, meaning Kadena's blockchains only communicate with three peer chains instead of randomly confirming transactions. This improves real-world performance and scalability.

Kadena can scale as required by the needs of its users. However, the main limitation is adoption, as scaling and adding additional blockchains requires the network to undergo a hard fork. In theory, Kadena can scale to 50 or 100 blockchains or even more if it demonstrates continued adoption. The process is not automatic though: once the network becomes congested, fees rise and miners forming a DAO are incentivised to cooperate in reconfiguring the network to a larger size.

KDA is the blockchain's native token with a total supply of 1 billion KDA. It is used to pay for gas and as a miner reward for producing new blocks. Kadena pre-mined several rounds of KDA. The first private token sale was in 2018 and raised $2.25 million for 4.5 million KDA. The second round raised $12.9 million for 17.2 million KDA. The distribution of KDA looks as follows:

• Mining: 700 million to be emitted over 100+ years
• Platform share: 200 million to be emitted over nine years
• Investors, strategic reserve, and contributors: 90 million
• Burned at launch: 10 million

Currently, 171 million KDA are circulating. The token emissions schedule will decrease gradually over time, and the entire Kadena tokenomics model can be found here.

Kadena uses a chain architecture called Chainweb to combine its several proof-of-work blockchains. Each chain confirms its three peer chains' blocks, thereby increasing throughput linearly with the addition of new chains. This also increases security as Kadena chains achieve a single view of transaction history across chains. An attacker would have to fork not one chain but all the running chains to attack just one.

Kadena's smart contract language is called Pact and is human-readable and Turing-incomplete language specifically built for blockchains with powerful security features.

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