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🚨BSCN Exclusive: Kadena Co-Founder, Stuart Popejoy
Recorded: April 21, 2025 Duration: 1:03:03Space Recording
Short Summary
Kadena is set to launch a groundbreaking testnet this summer, introducing 20 EVM chains and a $25 million grants program to foster innovation. With a focus on scalability and decentralization, Kadena aims to position itself as a leader in the evolving crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you to everybody that's joined already. This is a space that we're
very, very excited for, but we're just a few minutes early. We're planning to start on
the hour. So in just three or four minutes, I can see that Kadena has already joined. I know that the Kadena account won't be the speaker for
this event. But if you are available, maybe we could just do a quick sound test to check
that everything's working okay. Okay, please bear with guys. I'm just going to get in touch with the team. Testing, testing. testing testing
loud and clear that's absolutely brilliant so we'll just wait just a couple of minutes
for Stuart to join and we'll get all the sound testing done there too
so thanks so much for bearing with us everyone Thank you. Nearly there everyone, thanks so much for your patience, just hopefully just a few seconds
now. patience just hopefully just a few seconds now Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We're very, very nearly there, everyone.
So thank you so much for your patience.
Just a short while now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. fantastic fantastic i think we are ready to kick things off now we've got both the kadina account
itself and also our very very exciting special guest who i won't introduce for for just a moment
but stuart very quickly do you want to do a quick sound test check that everything's working okay
can you hear me all right i check my check fantastic Can you hear me? Loud and clear. Yeah, thank you everyone for waiting just while we got things set up. I'm sure you're all very, very familiar with just how Twitter or rather X spaces can be. And actually, we've had very few technical difficulties over the last few weeks, which is surprising for the platform, that's for sure.
that's for sure. But you know, for those of you that have joined us for the spaces for the
interviews that we've been running over the last few weeks, you'll know that we've had a massive
range of projects on we've had some focus on the B&B chain ecosystem, we've had some focus on Bitcoin,
we've had everything from hardcore DeFi products all the way through to sort of up and coming
meme coins, understanding that ecosystem. And today's interview is a little bit different. And
you know, in my opinion, a little bit different and you know in my opinion a little
bit more exciting for a few reasons um the first is the caliber of the guests that we have on
i'll let him introduce himself in a minute but you know it really goes without saying that he
is one of the brightest people in the space and you know i'm lucky that i'm hosting and i think
everybody is is very very fortunate to be available and able to listen to him speak. But the second reason is really the project itself.
And at BSCN, you probably know we do our best to cover everything in the space,
anything that we think is exciting, valuable, impactful, and everything in between.
But obviously, part of what we do is we look to identify exciting projects,
or rather projects and ecosystems that are going to become even more
exciting over the next few months. And the sort of traditional way to do that is to look at which
projects are launching soon, which projects have just done TGE or are doing it soon. But actually,
another thing we do is we look at ecosystems that may well have been around for some time,
who have been building for multiple times the lifespan of a lot of the
projects that we speak about. And this is very much one of them. So without giving too much away,
this was a project that we saw they were doing some very, very exciting stuff in 2025. So we
decided to write some organic coverage, some deep dives, some insights. The team got in touch with
us. And frankly, when we got talking, heard about the vision, heard about what's being worked on, the whole prospect just
seemed all the more exciting to us. But I will allow our guests to introduce both
himself and the project. We're talking today with Stuart Popejoy who is not
only one of the most successful founders in the space but as I mentioned one of
the brightest minds. How are you doing today Stuart? I'm doing great yeah excited to be on BSCM. Yeah we're
really really excited to have you and hopefully this is the start of quite an exciting long-term
relationship at least that's that's that's what we're hoping for for sure but before we dive into
I guess some of the nitty-gritty really impactful topics that we have today
I was wondering if maybe you could just give the audience I suppose an overview of both yourself
your background but also Kadena's as well so where it started where the vision was and really what
the journey has been like between I suppose over the last sort of you know seven to eight years
now which is which is just incredible sure um yeah so my name is stewart popechroy i've been
technology since the 90s i started apple computer in the 90s um came to new york got into fintech
exchange backbones and trading systems uh you know ended up at jp morgan building there uh doing a
complete overhaul of their equity algo system that, you know, was responsible for almost
a billion a day of agency equity trades, brand new system we built. But at a certain point,
I wanted to do something new and got into the innovation group at JP Morgan. And quickly,
it became clear that blockchain, this is is around 2014 that blockchain was going to
interestingly enough uh enterprise even though you had jamie diamond you know uh talking smack
about uh bitcoin at the time for a long time right yeah yeah and you know very much then um
meanwhile you had groups like ours all over uh you know, the kind of bankosphere, you know, taking blockchain very seriously.
And one of the things that was great about that was that as JP Morgan, you know, it was easy to get people to talk to us.
So we talked to everybody in blockchain at that time.
Vitalik came in. All the people who would kind of do private blockchain were there.
who would kind of do private blockchain were there.
You know, the Cosmos team,
everybody who was anybody in blockchain came in.
And one of the things we quickly realized
was that a lot of this stuff
was not being designed for scale.
It was being designed, you know,
Bitcoin, obviously incredible system,
changed the world.
But, you know, if Bitcoin could scale,
let's be honest,
we wouldn't probably be talking about a lot of these other systems uh because yeah yeah you know so bitcoin's great but it's
not efficient um and then ethereum comes along and it's far more flexible uh you know bitcoin
interestingly enough could be more flexible and indeed we've seen kind of use cases added to Bitcoin over the years but Ethereum really grabbed the smart contract story and ran with it but they also
did not address scalability and of course we're still dealing with that today so we launched to
solve that we launched to solve that initially in private blockchain, which was also kind of dogged by bad solutions
that couldn't scale.
But quickly we realized that the innovation
was not happening in the private space,
but was happening in public blockchain
and sought to launch a layer one blockchain.
That again, we wanted to solve the scalability issue. We also wanted to solve
the safety issue because another thing that was going on and still goes on, although I think,
you know, smart contracts are kind of mastered better now. You know, in the late 2010s,
there was a hack every week and millions were getting stolen. Well, and, you know,
this still happens, of course, but it course, but it was happening all the time.
So we designed a blockchain algorithm
based off of some early Bitcoin research
and also using some of the stuff in our,
that we had developed in our custom smart contract layer,
packed to design a scalable proof of work layer one blockchain
to design a scalable proof of work layer one blockchain that gave the scale that is needed
for crypto to really come into the mainstream without sacrificing decentralization.
And not only were we standing on the shoulders of certain giants, namely Satoshi, but also Adam
Back and some of the people who had worked on the original Betacoin
the original designs that would eventually be changed to make Litecoin. That was what we we grabbed the original design which was using SPV to scale our network to multiple chains and we
started working with Stuart Haber, Dr. Stuart Haber who ended up authoring the original Chainweb paper with us, Stuart Haber
being the most cited author in the original Satoshi Bitcoin paper and the inventor of
key aspects of blockchain in the 90s. So just legendary dude, came through and really loves PACT too. So that's what we launched with.
And we're still the only, to this day,
we're the only parallel chain architecture
in public blockchain.
And we're also the only,
and we're the only scalable proof of work architecture
in blockchain as well.
So that's kind of our background.
And again, it's all trying to take things that we learned,
me and my co-founder, Will Martino, his background was in fintech as well.
But not only that, he worked at the SEC for a while.
So the recent announcement about proof of work,
this is something we've been anticipating for a long time because we knew that proof of work is the most decentralized
and the one that could um you know that you can really believe in in terms of something you can
build on in terms of avoiding regulatory concerns that might dog a proof of stake project that's insufficiently centralized.
So, you know, that's a lot. I'll stop there. There's more we can talk about, but that brings us up to almost the present. No, no. I mean, goodness gracious, what an incredible introduction,
right? Like not just the sort of the team and the context behind it, but to the project itself,
right? The idea of, I guess it almost feels sometimes like proof of work and scalability
are almost like an oxymoron, right? And the way that you guys are tackling that and the way that
you guys are taking the superior decentralization of one concept and overlapping it with what is
probably has been for the last seven or eight years the most important concepts in in in
cryptocurrency and we're still feeling the the impact of that today i think is is absolutely
awesome um you know some stuff i knew there, I think, you know, you're very, very humble about your own background
that I'm sort of familiar with as well.
But, you know, it's perhaps no wonder
with the caliber of the team and the origin story
and the experience that was there, you know,
through that sort of JP Morgan lens,
I think it's perhaps no coincidence that Kadena
is positioned the way that it is, which is fantastic.
So obviously, you know, you're not the only
project that was a response to a lack of scalability, even in that sort of smart contract
heyday that Ethereum was having in the mid-teens, right? It was very much an issue. You guys do
predate other sort of scalability-focused projects, like if you think about Solana or Nia, those were
later on, which I think is perhaps even cooler. But obviously,
you know, Ethereum scalability has been a massive issue for a very long time. I remember 2021,
and having to pay like $150 worth of gas to buy some stupid ape NFT that's now worth like,
you know, seven cents or whatever it is. I'm sure a lot of them are in there, right?
Guilty as charged. But you know, I think and ethereum has certainly come a long way like
layer 2s are uh you know to put it very bluntly a big deal in terms of what they allow but of course
they still have issues as well right centralization being being an obvious one and what we really want
to talk about today and in truth the reason that we got excited about kadina however many weeks ago
it was when we were really you know getting into the Ethereum layer two model is quote unquote broken and thereby why
the innovations that you're bringing in, right? Kadena that is, are going to solve that basically.
Sure. Yeah. I think the, the, I think the problems with layer two have really become clear this year.
You know, because a lot of there, you know, there's, there was basically with the optimism group coming
together and, you know, uh, kind of use case success on Arbitrum.
Uh, you know, there was a lot of enthusiasm surrounding layer two, and certainly a lot
of really great work that got done.
Um, you know, really hell of a lot of VC funding I would add as well.
Yes.
Well, that's, yeah, that's, you know, I don't know.
Let's put it this way.
It's people want to invest money in crypto.
That's good.
Like, I'm not always sure why, but, you know.
I'm not complaining for sure, but, you know.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, 100%.
Yeah.
And layer two, you know, when you've got Vitalik weaning so hard
and something like that, it's not really, you know,
there's no wonder why, you know, people were really going hard at this.
And, you know, Vitalik really made a vision surrounding this that,
and I think part of that came from a, you know,
a burst of confidence and optimism coming out of the merge.
And, you know, the fact that the merge went off so well,
which has to be called out as one of the most amazing real time upgrades ever
performed in human history.
I think it's a time I didn't appreciate it quite so much.
I mean, this never happens. You never upgrade a massive system. human history like i think it's a time i didn't appreciate it quite so much it's i mean this
never happens you never upgrade a massive system and just nothing goes wrong you know that's so
but you know in fact it was so it was like a lesson for technologists which it went so well
that yeah a lot of people are just like bored uh they should have had a few options just to like
make it look hard right if the media
companies were like us right to have a few little right right there's no news and it was priced in
by that time too so there's no bump so um so you know so it seemed like okay well they were able
to switch to proof of stake you know which was a bugbear for them for years you know they launched in 2014 saying they were going to go to proof of stake so um they were proof of work for you know until then
so um so you know so i think but this year i think is when you know it really started becoming clear
that that some of these things don't really have an end in sight. The fragmentation doesn't have really an end in sight.
Things like super chain are basically, you know, they're aspirational only at this point.
There's it's not clear when they're even how they're going to make this kind of, you know, super chain of L2s.
Then, you know, the centralization risks that have cropped up with sequencers and the
fact that there's really no way to make a decentralized sequencer.
Anytime you're in a situation with crypto and by this, I mean cryptography, where people
are dependent on developing brand new secure protocols, you're in trouble because, you
know, even Ethereum, you you know to do proof of
stake ethereum they did it in a pretty brilliant way i mean with the beacon chain but like
it's still basically proof of stake as we've seen in tezos or cardano or anywhere else um
so you know so they were they were doing something that had been done before not exactly but you know, so they were, they were doing something that had been done before, not exactly, but, you know, at least the crypto had been done before.
And now we're in a situation where, and then finally, the other thing is that the L2s themselves, you know, basically copied the Ethereum model so that they're all individually not very scalable.
So that while, you know, so now we have problems with gas on layer twos.
while you know you so now we have problems with gas on layer twos so you've got fragmentation
you've got risks around validator selection and roll-up governance uh you know if the finality
isn't what is it a week generally you know it's it's really starting to look like a pretty uh and
you know seven day periods right yeah so you know it's it know, it was like the kind of thing I think people were willing to put up with it while the technology was new.
And again, you know, just the single UX point of not having to pay an arm and a leg for gas.
final being able to you know execute a little bit faster than you might know ethereum although
not that much faster uh that is what was really driving you all too so in 2025 it's we're not the
only ones who are looking at this a little different right i mean you have um you have
other projects like say and monad you have not only that i think the big you know the big development was just solana kind of
crushing it in the execution space in terms of just launching apps that people wanted to use
getting uh getting transaction volume over onto solana uh they really kind of broke the monopoly
at least the monopoly story that like the entire world, all the TVL that we're
ever going to see is always going to be anchored on Ethereum. We now are in a world where people
are starting to see that it doesn't have to be on Ethereum. But the thing that took us a while to
figure out and indeed, you know, part of the, you know, the origin of where we started finally taking EVM seriously
was, frankly, in working with institutions, because what has become clear is that EVM
has emerged as a kind, you know, there's a lot of standards on EVM, very important standards
that, you know, have been really important to accelerate crypto, starting with ERC-20
and everything that would follow.
EVM itself has emerged as kind of a standard.
And while EVM is an imperfect platform,
and now people are talking about other platforms like RISC-V,
EVM is still the one that has the mindshare of
and has the developer community community and it's what
people understand they know how there's so much innovation that has happened in evm so so in a way
the story isn't ethereum it's evm and that's where cadena comes in because once once that became
really clear to us we realized that we have to become part of this story as well we need to
bring some of these benefits that users of Kadena have been enjoying.
You know, we launched in 2020.
We have a scalable blockchain proof of work system that has been operating without a single pause in block production since 2020.
Yeah, I can't say for basically any major L1 ecosystem at this point, and definitely not what we call the big ones, right?
Right, right, at all.
And not only that, a lot of the, you know, speaking of Solana, Solana really cut some corners to get to what they have,
which is a system that has kind of better UX on the surface.
And it does, because, you know, for many reasons,
I mean, one of the reasons that they've been so aggressive in serving developers, and that's
something, you know, we're, we're, we're learning from Solana, as we learned from other projects
that have done things well. But they cut, they cut serious corners when it comes to decentralization,
even when it comes to, I mean, the thing that we're dealing with
with some of these protocols is that there's more money
to be made in hacking the protocols
than in hacking the root consensus model.
Like if you were to, I mean, if you were to try
to hack Ethereum or hack Spolana, at a minimum,
you'd need a ton of Sol or a ton of ETH.
And why?
When you can go exploit some insecure protocol or some insecure bridge or some insecure L2.
Massive amounts of wealth in one place, be it a bridge or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just easy money.
So, for instance, in Ethereum right now, you know, an interesting thing about, you know, something like Ethereum, but even Solana too, is that if there ever was a major slash,
I don't really know what any of these ecosystems would do. I mean, just think about Lido, right?
Think how much money is tied up in Lido and how much Lido is predicated on the fact that you can
always get ETH for your
SDETH. Okay, great. Well, what happens if the ETH underlying that SDETH gets slashed
because somebody actually decided to hack Ethereum? Nobody knows. So that's something
that it makes doing financial engineering on a proof ofwork model like cadena an entirely different
situation because there's no slashing without that like systemic foundational
risk that comes with that that can yeah yeah and and what's weird is that
aetherium now is even moving further in the direction of pre-confirmations
they're they're integrating it into the protocol increasingly you know so
they're just basically doubling down on this problem.
They're saying we're never gonna roll back.
And that's basically just saying that,
hey, there's enough money behind this
that it's basically just trusting game theory
and that's not really what crypto is supposed to be about.
That's not what Bitcoin's about, that's for sure.
And that's not what we're about.
Very, very cool and a hell of an introduction and i i guess to i guess to move on slightly from the problem itself let's talk a
little bit more about chain web evm and i i know that that's going to be a discussion that probably
sort of spins out right but i guess as someone that's completely new to the kadena ecosystem
and to the innovations that you guys have been working on the innovations that you're planning
to implement how would you best describe the the roadmap for the next few months and obviously with
with chain web bvm being at the core of that yeah so the roadmap is really aggressive, actually. We're the test net for Chain Web EVMs this summer.
So we're really making incredible progress there.
I mean, we started major engineering on this in November
and rolled into ETH Denver with a fully operational dev kit
that was running two EVMs under our consensus model.
So today you can download a dev kit and you can start working with
our cross-chain uh protocol uh to you know innovate and develop uh develop use cases on evm on chain
web today um you know and i encourage builders who are interested to you know come check out our
landing page for that we'll we'll we'll throw some stuff up uh for people to come check out our landing page for that. We'll throw some stuff up for people to come check that stuff out.
But the reason why I say this is not just to talk how quickly we're moving,
although I think it's pretty remarkable.
It's that it shows that what we're doing is actually not a fundamental change to
our architecture.
Chain web consensus is what powers the cadetra network today.
And it is how we have 20 chains, each chain as powerful as an Ethereum or as a Bitcoin.
We have 20 of them all operating in a true parallel configuration where no chain is like
a hub.
It's not hub and spoke, it's not a DAG,
it's a true parallel network of chains.
And again, it's something,
and it has the unique property that as we add more chains,
which we will be doing to bring EVM chains on,
we're bringing on 20 EVM chains,
so we're doubling the size of our network.
Chain Web has a unique property that the more chains you add,
actually the stronger the network gets
and the more efficient it gets because you don't need,
proof of work is unique in the sense that the security
it delivers is infinitely divisible.
So we can use the same unit of work to secure 20 chains,
40 chains, 100 chains, 1,000, 10,000 chains.
There's actually no limit.
And which is pretty amazing because that's not something that really happens in computer
engineering a lot.
But the point I'm trying to make is that this is not, you know, this is not next-gen sauce
that we're rolling out.
This is stuff we already have.
PACT runs as an application layer on top of our 20 chains today.
Tomorrow, we'll introduce 20 chains that have EVM running as the application layer.
And what's great about that is that insofar as your EVM developer, who's new to our ecosystem,
deploying on our network is simple because you just pick a chain and you deploy to
it and you just, you know, to get started, you just treat that one chain like Ethereum or like
Polygon or like anything else. And you just deploy to that chain. All the tools work,
hard hat, foundry, whatever you're used to using, and you can deploy directly onto one of our
chains. So that's a huge win in the sense that, you know, it's going to be exactly what people are already used to.
But the big win here is that scalability is not just a word.
It translates into real benefits.
The first benefit is that gas never gets out of control.
And you always have something to do if you run into a situation where gas is making it hard for your users to use your product.
In our networking, always scale your application to more chains.
And, you know, so if you're hitting one chain too hard, great.
Deploy to five more and spread your users out on those chains.
We're really the only network that offers this.
So gas is a huge, so the point being is that it's not that gas goes away
forever. It's more that if you run into a situation where gas is a problem, there's a
solution. And then from there, it just gets into all the great things that are actually happening
with EVM, like they're coming out with Pectra for chain abstraction, for gas stations. And,
you know, we have a more kind of a more advanced application layer in PAC.
We have things like gas stations.
We have things like inherent multisig.
You know, so people who have been building and builders working in PAC
are used to working in a significantly more advanced and secure environment than EVM.
But we're not going to, one, EVM is making some exciting changes with Pectra that is going to bring gas stations, bring chain abstraction.
And we're bringing our cross-chain, our parallel cross-chain technology.
And so I think it's a really exciting offering for EVM.
It just makes it, especially with all the things we see happening with Move and some of the other technologies that are out there,
I think it's a really exciting time for EVM technology and caden is a big part of that absolutely absolutely
and so so i guess almost to bring it back down to the most basic level that anybody that's been in
in cryptocurrency for even a few weeks will likely understand what what is basically happening here
and then please interrupt interrupt me correct me if I'm wrong,
but you basically have a fully decentralized
and not just decentralized in a sort of gimmicky way,
but a genuinely decentralized L1
that leverages realistically
the most secure consensus mechanism in proof of work,
but in energy efficient fashion.
Therefore, no need for big governments
to be stressed out about about you
know the resources that are being expunged um but that also scales you know i'm cautious of saying
infinitely in any context but at least in theory is able to scale infinitely provide practically
zero level gas fees and crucially those gas fees are controllable predictable not prone to getting
out of hand like a lot of us have been have been burnt by in, I don't know, I guess, I guess years past, but that is also
now or very, very soon to be completely portable with the biggest developer pool in cryptocurrency.
Is that correct?
Is that sort of in a nutshell?
Yeah, no, that you nailed it.
You know, it's near zero gas fees.
I think I mean, look look you can't say infinite
in computers uh because nothing's infinite aws isn't infinite google isn't infinite but they're
practically infinite i mean you know it's just a question how much money you want to spend
um and in our case you know the uh the the bill that comes due eventually is the amount of network
traffic if we had a hundred thousand chains running uh we would need to, I mean, we'd
be soaking up some pretty fat pipes at that point. But we're very, very, I mean, what's
crazy about crypto in general is that crypto market is big. There's a lot going on. You
know, it's very exciting. There's a lot of interesting work being done, lots of assets
are changing hands. But from the point of view of data crypto is nothing i mean there's no you know the amount of network traffic being taken up by
by all crypto projects is nothing compared to you know a single ai deployment so you know so it's
it's it's a little bit funny how much you know one thing that makes us different is that we've always been looking to the future of
professional crypto blockchain platforms you know by professional that means and you know and that's
what's maybe a people might not understand about cadena is that you know we have the jp morgan
background uh you know we have a lot of really exciting use cases firing up in the rwa space uh
you know there's going to be some great announcements coming with people
that we're partnering with to be tokenizing onto our chain.
You know, so we're all about the buttoned up business use cases.
But at the same time, it's important to recognize that how important
decentralization ultimately is for the future of crypto and why decentralization
is what's actually attracting a lot of these
traditional finance people is that that's the you know in traditional finance they understand that
you can't so just look at something like solana you can't i mean solana looks a lot like goldman
sacks or something you know in the sense that like if you go on to you know if goldman sacks
rolls out of private blockchain you know that's nice but like maybe it'll you know maybe it'll give you some use case that you know works great but you know
most people are probably not going to trust gold you know most banks are probably not going to
trust goldman sachs not because they think they're evil but just because it's goldman sachs they're
a competitor so very centralized right yeah yeah i mean it's it's it's even if they had
decentralized technology,
so the, so decentralization is important from a trust point of view and an interop point of view.
So the, you know, so keeping decentralization at the core of what we're, what we're doing has
always been important to us. And then the infinite scalability, and I think we can say infinite,
just because it's within the same bounds as any other compute there's nothing in our protocol that puts an upper limit on let's put it that way and if
once we get to something like 100 chains the important thing to realize too is that we're
still you know kind of in ethereum block time zone uh you know and we always will in terms of how a
single chain works so that's important for decentralization. But our effective block rate today is three seconds.
When we launch the 20 chains, it'll go down to 1.5 seconds.
And say we double it again, it goes down to 0.75 seconds.
It keeps dropping.
In other words, the time it takes for a new block to show up on the network keeps dropping.
So, you know, when we go to 40 chains, we're already going to be faster than any L2 and then any optimistic L2,
you know, which are, which are locked at two second blocks. So,
so the, the paralyzed execution, it's not just important from,
from a gas point of view. It's also important from offering, you know,
kind of scaled protocols to users so that, know once we get into the you know the
kind of future we're looking at now with like intents and brokers and you know when something
like that if you have that running on and we're bringing you know one of the great things about
ubm is that we have a lot of great partners you know lining up to be part of our testnet launch
um so you know people get it and they understand they
understand what what is it what we're what we're bringing to the table but the point being is that
you know when you get to the point that you have the kind of you know when you have chains offering
kind of multi-chain performance and you have a mature you know kind of intent broker ecosystem you know we're going to start seeing
decentralized truly decentralized UX on the level of trading systems that you're used to for equities
today which is frankly pretty spectacular to put it bluntly so here's a question and maybe it's
one that I'm conscious that time is just completely zipped
by while we while we've been yeah it's crazy so great my intuition is that if you had said to uh
you know Vitalik Buterin and you know even even the early teens right if you'd said what is gonna
you know really push ethereum scalability to the limit I wouldn't have said NFT trading. I wouldn't have said meme coin trading. I think if you'd asked Anatoly back in, you know, whatever, 2018, 2019,
you know, what is really going to, you know, drive transaction volume on Solana, I think,
you know, he probably wouldn't have said, you know, meme coins and this sort of speculative frenzy.
So, you know, I guess the reason I say that is because it's so impossible to predict
A, what people will do, predict a what people will do but
also what people will do with blockchain right especially so um so I guess you know a big
incentive for you guys rolling out the VM element of chain web and and so much of whatever else
you're doing is going to be ecosystem expansion it's going to be ecosystem growth it's going to
be encouraging development of genuinely impactful and exciting apps. What does that future look like to you?
I think it's really exciting because one, I think we do have a unique offering in terms of
launching new protocols that take advantage of our... So just to get into the details,
the tiny bit, one of the things that makes our chain unique is that... So let's talk about KDA,
our token. KDA runs on the's talk about KDA token.
KDA runs on the entire network as a single token. And what does that mean?
It means that when KDA moves from one chain to another,
it gets burned on the source chain
and minted on the target chain.
And that means that over the entire network,
KDA is never there, you never burn it, you know,
you never burn, the only minting that happens
with KDA is in mining. And after that, it's one token that operates over all the
chains. So it's, it's something that really doesn't exist in other systems, which is a,
which is a mint burn, sorry, a burn mint parallel token protocol. So that's something that when,
when, when DeFi really gets their head around that, it's
going to be pretty incredible because the kinds of basically what it offers is the ability
to have margin that is can be fully booked in the time it takes for a block to propagate
in our system, which is under 10 minutes, under five minutes in most cases.
You know, if it's
immediately anyways it can be anywhere from one to six to seven minutes for something to fully
propagate and you know achieve a achieve at least network finality and the reason why that's
important is it means that you could offer like you know you could be backing somebody you could
have a market maker being willing to back trades on any chain in the system
and they only have to carry that risk for minutes and you know so the idea being that it is a it you
have more scalable leverage if that makes sense then you do uh you know in some of these like if
you look at what's happening with intense and all that kind of stuff you know it's basically like
the winter mutes and the jumps that are backing all this stuff so it's really kind of a centralized ecosystem so even
there like when we start working with these like you know really smart teams that are coming both
in pact and in evm um it's figuring out how we can have kind of more sustainable leverage, if that makes sense. You know, which is kind of a weird concept
to inequities because everyone loves leverage.
So that's one thing.
And then the other thing is that RWA
and institutional use cases are really important too
because we're in a rare situation where business is, especially like tradifying kind of big banks and people like that.
They're actually leaning into this because out of a belief in what the future holds for finance.
And they really see that the future is going to be on chain and they really see the advantage.
future is going to be on chain and they really see the advantage they know better than anybody
how important decentralization is going to be for this because they don't because you know banks
don't trust each other they're only going to uh you know and and so some of the like the places
where that's happening now is kind of in wealth management where um you know there's a lot of
people have a lot of money on chain you know they've made all their money on chain and they
don't really want to go off chain they don't want to they don't want to have to take all of their money off chain and put it
in fidelity or something like that and trade around they want to be able to natively work
inside of a public chain environment so there's a huge addressable market and that's something
that a lot of the tokenization is you know is looking towards in terms of like, the reason why I say this is it's not something that's necessarily going to print money for them in the near term.
But they see that the market is, you know, that this is a market that will that will develop over the next few years.
And so it's so it's a combination of those things. It's a combination of bringing real scalability, DeFi,
and then giving a truly decentralized
and proof of work backed environment
so that some of these real world use cases
can really find a home.
That's what Cadena is about.
I mean, that's brilliant.
And I think it does make a lot of sense.
It makes a lot of sense, I think, in particular
from a developer standpoint, right?
Especially a developer that has an understanding of call them the weaknesses of
traditional finance right um so another question i had i think this is something that was that was
mentioned to me um is that you know you guys are taking pretty active steps to encourage development
i think one of the one of those elements is i think a pretty special grants program amongst the
sort of grants
programs that exist in the space today is that something that you'll be able to speak about or
is that one for a later date no no we we announced it at east denver you know we have 25 million
available immediately for evm projects to launch on our chain um you know we have an you know if
you check out our token economics we're we're one of the fairest token distributions out there in terms of platform versus, you know, versus stuff that's been distributed to miners and users.
But the other thing is that that means that there's still money coming out of the network that we put directly towards developing new products and, you know, and giving to builders to build exciting new protocols on chain.
So right now we're, you know, we're gearing up for test net this summer.
So it's a great time to get in touch.
It's a great time to get in touch with the BD team and,
and learn about you know, what,
what we're looking for in terms of ecosystem participants.
But you know, it's certainly not all sewn up yet. So that's, that's, but what we're looking for in terms of ecosystem participants.
But it's certainly not all sewn up yet. So that's, but same with the PAC side.
On the PAC side, we're innovating
in this multi-chain protocols I'm talking about.
We have a lot of exciting things coming live
in the upcoming months on the PAC side,
including finally launching our Hyperlane bridge.
We even have a ZK decentralized bridge coming in the summer, plus CDP protocol, plus, you know, some exciting developments in swaps and perp dexes.
So there's really a ton to do and a ton that needs to be built on the Kinena ecosystem.
So, you know, builders who want to challenge and want to be part of the future and also want to be part of a great low gas ecosystem, you need to come check out Kinena.
Absolutely. And I guess for context, obviously, I'm not a developer.
I work very much on, I guess, the other side of the technology,
right, in terms of discussion and research and growth and this kind of stuff. But I have already been in communication with the, I guess you'd call them the ecosystem growth or the marketing
or business development side of the Kadena ecosystem. And honestly, having spoken to so
many different L1s and L2s over the years, I think they are a team that is genuinely in it to help
the developer, which I think is, you know, without naming names or anything like that, is not
necessarily something that is true across the entire space. So I really would encourage if
anybody is interested in getting involved in the ecosystem from a developer standpoint, or frankly,
just from a, you know, I want to find out more about this standpoint, then I really, really would
advise getting in touch. And Stuart, what's the best way to do that
in terms of getting in touch?
Is it as simple as a Twitter DM?
Is it joining servers?
Like what would be your advice there?
All of the above.
We have a Telegram chat that's very active.
We have a Discord group.
Of course, we're here on X.
So anybody who wants to tweet at us,
many of the people, you know,
many of the team members are on this call right now and we'll be, you know, and we'll be sharing.
Also, our landing page for specifically EVM has a bunch of helpful links there, including, you know, some stuff to read about what we're doing, the Chain Web EVM.
So, you know, Twitter DMs are good, but yeah, we're there on Telegram. So we're all the chain web evm um so you know twitter dms are good but yeah we're there on
telegram so we're all the usual ways that makes an awful lot of sense and and i had i guess before
i just give you a few minutes at the end to sort of take the floor share anything you'd like to
a couple of things that i'd like to touch on so almost to go back to what we were speaking about
before but almost questions that have come to me and I think would be pretty important is,
you know, EVM is the obvious candidate, right?
To attack for any L1 network in terms of developer pool,
in terms of establishment,
in terms of, you know,
the value of that portability.
It makes a lot of sense,
but I get the impression that,
you know, Kadena's outlook
is going to be practical.
It's going to adapt to changing circumstances.
Does, for instance, ChainWeb EVM open up the door in the future to ChainWeb SVM or whatever environment it is
that might be crucial? Yeah. I mean, SVM is an interesting case. I think there are some kind of
noises in the Solana community about wanting to have a more evm compatible uh layer so i think that's one that
yeah if svm kind of emerges as an actual standard um you know then that's something we could
certainly consider another one is risk five um that's or risk the very very typical at the moment
right yeah yeah i mean that's you know uh's, that's something honestly that we've talked about for a while because you know,
as we roll out the, the,
the low level requirements for the ZK bridge that's coming in the summer,
that's, you know, the, any of the proofs that get validated, you know,
we're using the same we're using the same protocol as Sysync labs.
You know, so SP one and plonky 2 verification on chain um the the the things that
you're proving happen in a risk 5 environment already so um you know so i think that's the big
question mark with risk 5 is whether or not actually application development happens in that environment, you know, like, like happens in SVM or AVM
or PACT today, or if it's really something that is, you know, targeting kind of a proof
environment, in which case we already have the industry standard solution coming on chain
in summer. And, you know, I think there's that there's still a lot,
you know, I mean, you know, Vitalik is, as always, you know, pushing new ideas forward,
because he loves to give the Ethereum Foundation tons to chew on, I guess.
So I don't think RISC-V is mature enough to be considered as a proper application layer. I don't,
I just don't think it has advantages,
especially when you consider that smart contracts are,
you know, we understand smart contracts well,
we have our own smart contract language.
It's similar to EVM in the sense that it needs gas to operate.
That's a fundamental fact of smart contracts
is that you need to have gas as a fairness mechanism.
And that's a significant detail if you're gonna start executing things in
risk five or something like that so you know there's all these they seem like
small things but they're actually big things that need to get teased out you
know one point we were considering having a wasm executable so that we could just
have native rust running but EVM is you know as you said we're
practical the first thing we want to do is make sure that builders have a place to go using
technologies they understand to leverage a scalable decentralized system to build the apps
they want to build when risk five is something that they're demanding then good news we can always launch chains that run risk 5 natively so we we do
enjoy a very good architecture that allows us to launch any application layer that makes sense
and today that's packed in evm again that makes a lot of sense and i think it's it's it's quite
hard to argue against the fact that the approach that you're taking is is
you know it does make a lot of sense i think that's pretty hard to argue against um and also
one thing i would mention is i think you mentioned that um you know evm testnet is is really looking
like you know as soon as the summer 2025 um you know what i would say there is you know even though
i'm not a developer i've met um and worked with enough blockchain developers you know rather than call it called application developers to understand
right the implications and the time frames that sometimes this can take and that is a
an impressive sort of uh roadmap milestone to be aiming for i guess you know before i i just sort
of let you take the floor and and discuss anything you'd like to before we end um is there anything
else you can share about that that testnet phase in terms of,
I guess when it's coming is maybe a hard question to ask, but what it's going to be like,
you know, what the plans are for it to make it unique to Kadena, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I mean, the main thing we're focusing on, I mean, the architecturally, it's already,
you know, understood what we're building, which is our same multi-chain protocol, but now available to EVM. And that's really not a very different environment than developers are
already used to. It basically has some special pre-compiles and, you know, we have code available
to make any ERC-20 natively multi-chain. So that part is a a pretty there's not a big lift involved in but you don't
even have to go multi-chain if you want to start you know uh working with cadena because right off
the bat there's multiple chains to work with so um merely by achieving a nice distribution of apps
across the chains we can keep gas under control for the near future um so test net is uh is
definitely summer um i don't have a specific date
but it's it's not late summer let's put it that way um we're targeting an early summer release um
you know let's just say we'd like to have some big news at ecc that's what we're shooting for
and rest assured that when that does happen bscn will be covering it in full form so so keep an eye
And rest assured that when that does happen,
BSCN will be covering it in full form.
So keep an eye.
Yeah, so it's gonna be multiple EVM chains in testnet.
And it's going to,
the other thing is that we're looking to incorporate Pectra.
So we expect that to be available for the,
so that's gonna be interesting
because Pectra is fully backwards compatible. So it's not something you have to engage with, uh we expect that to be available for the so that's that's going to be interesting because
pector is fully backwards compatible so it's not something you have to engage with but
um really i mean this is something that developers should be looking at because the
benefits for ux are going to be tremendous in terms of chain abstraction gas stations all this
kind of stuff um so you know a lot of what we're working on is the partner mix in terms of making it that all the kinds of services and on-chain infrastructure that, you know, people expect in a modern EBM environment are there.
So that's our goal for Testnet.
And then from there, you know, we're going to march as aggressively into production as we can. One of the things we are very interested in working on
is with partners is the best way to start offering
a truly multi-chain protocol to users
so that they can start taking advantage
of that 1.5 second effective block rate, things like that.
So it's, I mean, the amount of kind of innovation
and just sheer buildness that's gonna happen in Kadena over the rest of 2025 is really going to be incredible.
And I'm super excited about it.
I love that phrase, the sheer buildness.
I think that's such a good phrase to end on, for sure.
And yeah, I mean, from what I've heard directly from the Kadena team and what I've heard just from, frankly, reading what what is out there in in in the public domain uh it is going to be a really really exciting few
months at Kadena and I know that we'll be watching it very closely um before I let you go to it is
there anything else that you would like to share stuff that I haven't asked stuff that I haven't
touched on anything that you think people are going to find find worthwhile uh I mean we've
covered most of it EVM is what we're focused on a lot um you know there's
there's always interesting stuff going on in pact you know in on because again that's where
i mean one of the interesting things is going to be that once people are on our network with
their evm solutions you know you don't have to just use gnosis safe if you want to do multi
multi-sig for instance you
can simply you can bridge assets over to PACT and you can use PACT as a
multi-sig environment with so there's a lot of you know so one of the things
that we're really targeting by end of year is having the ecosystem
infrastructure impact to be ready for people you you know, in terms of, again, that's where a lot of stuff like
perp decks, new decks, CDP protocols, stable coins, a lot of that stuff is launching this
year on the pack side. So, you know, so we're not, we're not staying still on the pack side.
That's, you know, that's where a lot of our innovation, that's where a lot of next gen
protocols, that's where we worked out our parallel, that's where a lot of next gen protocols,
that's where we worked out our parallel chain protocol
in the first place.
So it's the kind of thing that,
and it's just a really fun environment to work in for,
I mean, it's refreshing if you've worked in EVM,
EVM is obviously a great place to build apps
that people will actually use
and it's got incredible tooling,
but it's a very frustrating environment
in a lot of ways too.
So, when you really run into that wall
of something that's hard to build in EVM,
the good news is that you will have this other environment
that you can interop with to, you know,
for instance, we have multi-sig with, you know,
with WebAuthn passkeys, that's our SpireKey product
so that you can be signing with your phone uh natively you know right
now you do that in evm and it actually takes like 10 minutes for that to go or longer it takes like
an hour or something for that stuff to go through of course pector is going to be a huge improvement
for that but like this is the kind of thing where uh you know kind of cutting edge tech is going to
be being developed on both sides of the application ecosystem in cadena so uh it's just a
it's a really exciting time to be a builder again yeah and that optionality like it's it is genuinely
exciting even as someone that is not a builder i can understand sort of the appeal there and what
that could mean over the not actually that long term um but honestly stuart it's been absolutely
fantastic to have you on it's been a real privilege
to host you the background the caliber and frankly the level of detail um that you've managed to go
into while still keeping some of the technical stuff accessible um it just makes us all the more
excited for for what's going to come ahead and i really hope you'll come back on and join us maybe
you know maybe there'll be some milestones to be discussing next time who's to say but it's been absolutely brilliant and um huge thanks for
your time and an enormous thanks to to the entire audience for joining the attendance has been great
and and i think that's a reflection great yeah it's been great to chat great questions and uh
yeah it's really great to be uh you knowN and yeah, we'll definitely be back.
Fantastic.
In which case, enjoy the rest of your day.
I think it's earlier on your side than it is on mine.
So thank you for joining.
I'm sure we'll speak again soon.
Great, thanks so much.
