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$KDA | Kadena News #1 🎙️
Recorded: June 10, 2025 Duration: 0:31:15Space Recording
Short Summary
Cadena is making waves in the blockchain space with its recent announcements, including a $400,000 grant for green real estate tokenization, the launch of its innovative ChainWeb EVM, and a significant sponsorship with the Global Blockchain Business Council. With a total grant program of $50 million and over 100,000 users engaging with its Galaxy platform, Cadena is positioning itself as a leader in the crypto ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Mike check, Mike check.
Can everybody hear me?
Hey, Stu, I can hear you.
Great.
Well, hey, everyone.
My name is Stuart Popejoy, and I'm CEO and co-founder of Cadena.
And I'm psyched to be doing this Twitter space with everybody.
Thanks for joining.
Joining me as my honored guest today is my co-founder and president of Cadena, Will Martino.
Hi, Will.
Hey, Stuart.
How you doing?
Excellent.
Nice.
So for those who are listening who are new, a little bit about Cadena.
Cadena is a public layer one proof of work blockchain.
Will and I launched in 2020.
We founded Cadena in 2016 after developing JP Morgan's first blockchain, Juno.
We founded Cadena after seeing the potential in blockchain and smart contract technology and our goal has always been to deliver industry-leading performance
and then it was with private blockchain but after 2020 it was with the only scalable layer
one proof-of-work blockchain that offered and which soon will offer full EVM compatibility to run not just our packed
smart contract layer but also solidity but most importantly with our parallel chain architecture
it delivers low fees high throughput and enterprise-grade security so So today's Cadena News X space, we're kicking off a recurring series
to keep everybody in our great community ecosystem and all our partners updated on what's happening
here at Cadena. So we're going to touch on some news items, but then we'll get into a more
unstructured conversation with my guests. And with all the really exciting things we have coming up,
I felt it was really important to get back in touch
with all of you in the community and dive deeper
into what's happening.
I'll be your host each episode, and we'll
bring in a guest to talk about important things
happening in our space.
This will be accessible on our website, YouTube,
and other platforms. In
addition to this new segment, we've launched today a roadmap page on our website to keep
everyone informed of our roadmap developments. Visit cadena.io slash roadmap to check it
out. Later this month, you will also find new website enhancements that will help us
position ourselves closer to our target audiences, as this summer, we'll be opening up a lot of opportunities.
All right, so let's dive in and start with some headlines.
So we have some really exciting grants coming through.
The biggest one is Curve Block RWA grant.
So this is for tokenizing green property real estate,
working with the Financial Contract Authority
and the FCA and the Bank of England.
It uses our brand new RWA token standard,
which we developed in PACT,
and involves our Onara partnership.
So this is a project from our very exciting grant program.
So they are receiving 400,000 in funding for that.
So our grant program is a $50 million program. It's one of the biggest in the industry.
We're working, we're doing a lot with our PR agency to push the grants program out to the
industry. It's getting a lot of pickup and there'll be some more articles coming out with
specific media networks.
25 million is specific to tokenization, RWA and institutional.
And the remaining is focused on EVM and new efforts like privacy and AI.
Upcoming, we are sponsoring the Global Blockchain Business Council, GBBC, in DC.
This is something our illustrious CBO, Anneliese Osborne, has been working very hard on.
It's with both, not just US, but also UK initiatives.
And interestingly enough, our sponsorship was paid entirely in KDA and it's the first crypto they have ever accepted.
So we're making history there. Annalise will be the main participant there, speaking with regulators and policymakers.
So that's that's that's coming up very soon. That's very exciting.
We're continuing with our bridge bounties with the upcoming Kinesis Bridge.
We kicked this off a month ago.
And the way the bridge bounty works is that we actually fund the bridge with real money and then just leave it there for hackers to come through and try to find vulns in the system.
And it succeeded in finding a pretty tricky vulnerability the last time.
The next one is coming very soon.
We're in the final stages of making sure the fix actually is comprehensive.
And it'll be a very similar structure and it's coming very soon.
So that's super exciting.
And then finally, one of the big things in marketing community is the launch of Galaxy.
This has we've had over 100,000 users participate in our campaigns.
We've paid out awards of 100,000 KDA, a bunch of marmalade NFTs,
various ecosystem projects are starting again. I mean, the idea here is that Galaxy is not just a platform for us to blather on and on about what we're doing, but also to get other projects
involved as well. And we're kicking off KDA raffles soon. So it's a really important way for us to reach more users
and make interacting with KDA fun and involving.
So that's going really well,
and congratulations to the marketing team for getting that going.
All right, so that's our little news summary there.
But I'm going to launch into our main topic today,
which is we're going to be talking about ChainWeb EVM.
So this is our ongoing effort to roll out new chains
on our Kadena Chain Web Network.
But instead of running PACT,
they're going gonna be running,
we're gonna be the first multi-chain EVM network in history.
And in December, we announced that we're gonna be,
we announced that we're gonna be implementing
these EVM chains.
But today with Will on here,
I wanted to provide some more historic context
to how this all came about.
Because, you know, if it seems like an obvious choice,
it wasn't something, it didn't seem that way.
But it's something that we've been talking about a long time.
So, Will, you know, we, you know,
obviously we were doing stuff at J.P. Morgan with AVM.
The group at J.P. Morgan was also,
also had the people who would eventually go and design Quorum,
which is a, was a EVM private blockchain solution.
So, you know, we were always very aware of EVM,
but I feel like you had,
you were thinking harder about like how EVM would, whether it made sense for EVM,
for Cadena to adopt EVM, even back when we were in private chain land, but definitely in public,
that was something that we had conversations about. So, what was our thinking in 2019, 2020,
and why or why not were we looking at EVM?
Yeah, I mean, back then, I mean, it was what, 2017, 2018?
And then as we were getting ready for launch in 2019, 2020,
we had been working with different groups that had been using EVM.
We had been talking with a bunch of chief Morgan.
We had the quorum team that was there.
And back then it really wasn't obvious that, well, for one, that EVM was going to be as
much of the standard that it's become today.
There was, this is back when like things were getting hacked all the time.
It was back before Uniswap was able to deploy.
And the amount of tooling effort and form of verification effort,
design effort that went into making those contracts work
was just kind of awe-inspiring, to be honest.
And it really wasn't obvious that there wasn't going to be something else
that came along that ended up running on top of EVM.
So Solidity would go or that, you know, EVM is going to be just widely adopted by a bunch of different networks.
For the main reason back then that getting the EVM runtime out of the node, like the actual deployed nodes,
like getting that chunk of code that actually runs the EVM was really difficult because it was so kind of spaghetti
coded with the different parts of consensus
and mempool and everything else. It really
wasn't just a standalone, like, executable
type of thing that you could pick up and
do an interface to and actually
bring into another platform.
A lot of work went into doing that
over the years, too.
So, but yeah, I mean, like, one of the main
things, like, back then, because we thought about doing it,
I mean, you had written that, what was it called, Masala, I think, which was the EVM port.
Yeah.
It was the Haskell port of EVM. And just getting it bug for bug compatible was already a lot,
but then actually getting it to run in such a way that you could just deploy native Ethereum
contracts onto the Masala runtime was just a huge lift that we,
frankly, I don't think we're that confident that we could actually develop in a way that
would be bug for bug compatible. Well, and just to jump in there, I think we were right about that
because there were a lot of alternative EVM platforms at the time and they've, and they're all gone. I mean, the ones that are around it now it's geth first and foremost, and then ref and, uh, you know, and then maybe, uh, Bezu, but that's
more in the private blockchain world. So it, it really consolidated and geth is, you know, geth
and with ref trailing, it is really the main game in town. So we weren't, you know, so we were right
about that. Yeah. And so what was the tech change that happened recently So we were, you know, so we were right about that.
Yeah. And so what was the tech change that happened recently? You know more about this than I do that allowed us to start to look at it. Yeah. So this was, um, uh, we, uh,
when we started, when we started doing this in earnest a year ago, the, uh, one of the things
that made it possible for us to move as fast as we have is because Ethereum basically had to adopt a component-oriented architecture to, I think, over a year before the merge happened.
So they needed a way to basically drop a consensus on top of the execution layer.
And then great news. That's exactly what we needed.
We needed the ability to run EVM as just an execution layer.
execution layer. And that really solidified, you know, nicely over the previous, you know, over the
following since 2021. The other thing, though, I was interested in your perspective on was
just the idea that that kind of interop was going to be so important. You know, that at the time we
were, you know, really trying to solidify pack,
but I always saw you as the person who was, who had the most, who, who,
like, for instance, you remember we were doing a, I think,
what do we call it? Cadena mint or something like that.
Yeah. With Cosmos.
Right. We were trying to do stuff with Cosmos. We were basically,
which that was like putting pack, I guess that was putting pact on cosmos but uh the other thing was uh evm on you know evm like some kind of compatibility
layer with evm and so you know i guess my question for you is, you know, that was a pretty consistent theme. Was it interop?
Was it or, you know, was it did you did you think that Cadena needed to have multiple technologies?
Like, what was it that was that kept EVM in the front of your mind at the time?
I think it was, well, for one, it was just the ability to have a base layer, so a layer one, multi-chain EVM, just to have finally a scalable layer one EVM that didn't need
layer two to increase execution throughput, that didn't need zero knowledge,
didn't need additional technologies, that didn't need additional
consolidation and centralization, just the M.
Because you can only scale a single threaded
system so much. So just bringing a multi-threaded solution to the table, one where, okay, like if,
you know, the, when we put this out and have EVAM running across a number of chains on top of
chain web, you know, when those get all of a sudden saturated, well, we can just fork and add more
chains so that the gas price never goes too high. So that we can actually just keep increasing the throughput of the base layer.
And that just being a... GDN has always had this mantra of if decentralization and scalability
matter, if decentralize scalability matters, then we matter. And if it turns out that doesn't,
that you can have a much more centralized and consolidated approach to blockchain infrastructure on layer one.
And by this, I mean either proof of stake or things that are even more consolidated than that.
And if that turns out to be the future, then our strategy for what we've been building will just have turned out to not have been what actually matters to the community and to this technology long term.
But I think that everyone who's involved is pretty confident that, okay, no, decentralization
matters. And having it be scalable, the base layer is the only way to keep decentralization
long term. So just the ability to have that and to show it. I mean, we have the ability
to add other execution layers as well, but I'm suspicious if we end up actually doing it longer term. It's still to be seen if another, you know, Lingua Franca develops for,
like if there's a, because right now, like the EVM is basically Solidity.
Sorry, it's basically the JavaScript of crypto.
And it's, I find it to be unlikely that another standard will absolutely develop.
I mean, one of the things that I love about bringing EVM on
is that we get access to the massive developer contingent
that's been working in the EVM community
and all the tooling that comes along with it.
But as well, we have these already running packchains
that are going to be on the exact same network
where bridging over to them is going to be trivial
because it's all on the same network.
So you can go multi-chain across to them. And i wouldn't be surprised if we see in the next year
some projects that come on that are ethereum based that want to go and expand and they realize
that actually you know working in pact is a safer and faster road to development than you know doing
another iteration on the evm client so it's also going to be a gateway for people to get into pact i mean i really wouldn't be surprised if we see you know some apps that take off on the EVM client. So it's also going to be a gateway for people to get into PACT. I
mean, I really wouldn't be surprised if we see some apps that take off on the platform
that decide that their version two or their version three is going to end up being on the
PACT side purely because it's faster and easier to use and it's already on the network that they're
already on. Also, it gives access to all the bridging technology that's already out there
and all the different interoperability technology for going cross-chain that's
out there in all of its various forms, just because everything
is built against the standard EBO.
For sure.
Yeah.
I mean, just the tooling alone is incredibly mature surrounding Solidity and EVM.
I think you bring up a good point too, which is that where the scaling discussion was at
at that time um you know uh
ethereum hadn't it didn't even look clear that ethereum was going to be able to and you know it
still is one of the great i credit ethereum tremendously with pulling off the merge i don't
think anybody thought something like that could happen nearly as smoothly as it did
um really quite a marvel. Absolutely.
That was amazing to see them pull that off
without any hiccups.
Yeah.
Whoever does that actually migrates a massive live system
with zero outages.
So at the time, it wasn't clear that they were going to make
or it wasn't clear how the switch proof stake was going
to happen. And all the stuff, all the scaling stuff that we've seen then since then
with rollups, that wasn't really around yet. So it really seemed like the future seemed very cloudy
in terms of scaling. So, yeah, so I can see why the scaling argument, you know, the thing we've always said about ChainWeb being, you know, the only horizontal and also the fact that proof of work is the only architecture that can, you know, that has divisible work that can really scale that way.
Can you talk about that just quickly?
Why ChainWeb needs proof of work and why that's difficult or maybe even impossible to do with
proof of stake? What, you know, the parallel chain thing? Yeah, I've never been able to get a very
easily understandable metaphor for this. I always end up talking about the wallboards numbers and
just sampling from probability spaces. So I'll try. But the basic gist is that because the security
or proof of work is coming out of this random thing
that is mining, and mining itself
is taking samples from something.
So you're doing a bunch of different experiments
and you're getting some sampling,
you're getting some success rate, which
is some sampling frequency type of thing.
That because of how probability works, you can split that up
and still maintain your security because the security in a blockchain is based on how many
samples you've taken. It doesn't really matter where they've taken. So how many times you've
tried to mine something. And so long as things are building on top of each other, you know,
traditional blockchain block after block, so long as they're building on top of each other, you know, traditional blockchain block after block, so long as they're building on top of each other, that security will spread around to the rest of the network.
So when it comes to proof of stake, and I've worked with a bunch of different of the leading consensus developers over the years on just like, okay, can you actually take ChainWeb and make it a proof of stake system?
Just like, okay, can you actually take ChainWeb
and make it a proof-of-stake system?
And the answer always seems to be no
because proof-of-stake just doesn't work like that
because the security comes from the centralization
of voting assets on the chain.
And when you split those up,
the security just fundamentally degrades.
Even if you were to go and use proof-of-stake
and this architecture where instead of having one ledger
where all the votes are being tallied,
you have 20 and each of them has 120th of the voting power. Those things are still 1 20th as secure.
So as you scale it up, let's say to hundreds or thousands, the security really degrades on a
block by block basis. Whereas for a proof of work system, it just doesn't work the same way.
So when you try to put proof of stake on top of it, you end up degrading. Sorry, the solution ends up degenerating into either a hub and spoke where you have one
central chain that kind of acts as like a beacon for the other chains that are around
it, which we've seen in proof of stake land, or you kind of have a Cosmos like system where
you have a bunch of different chains, each with their own security.
But you can never really get a unified network that doesn't degrade security as it scales up, which is why none of the proof of stake networks have tried to use the chain web architecture for scaling their layer ones.
Right. And so that's interesting because, you know, just to let, you know, I'll talk a little here about like one, you know, one of the things that made us decide to do this now.
And one of them, you mentioned EVM being a standard.
That was a concept that I was pretty, in a way, I was pretty unfamiliar with until Annalise came in and started initiating all these conversations.
we did a lot of institutional stuff, obviously, back in, you know, from 2016 to 2019, like
Humana and some of our other big, big POCs. But, you know, but then we focused on public chain
at launch and, you know, stayed with that until Annalise came on board. And as she was getting
out there and talking to, you know, we've done a lot of stuff in PAC to support standards that are basically lookalikes of the most important EVM standards.
Obviously, the most well-known one, ERC-20, that's our fungible standard.
The, you know, the various NFT, 721, 1155, those became marmalade.
And then we were already kicking off work on an rwa standard i
forget the i forget the number of that one which eip that is but interestingly enough it became
the the feedback that she was getting from you know institute one of the things if you're chasing
institutional adoption is that they really care about standards for a number of reasons. One, obviously, because that means there's more developers when things are accepted
as a standard. But, you know, they, you know, eventually, while public chain is still kind of
the Wild West in terms of, you know, the actual technology layout, you know, as you start working
with governments and regulators, and, you know, and these are all obviously highly regulated companies, you know, they look at, you know, they want to see that you're adopting standards.
They don't want to see that you're like making stuff up, you know, and going off in your own road.
They want to, they basically want to recognize every piece of technology you're working with.
And from that point of view, EVM has emerged as a standard. EVM and Solidity have emerged as the kind of standard language for developing blockchain technology.
Now, interestingly enough, I think, you know, this is something where crypto is, you know, it's always interesting to be, you know, a project that's been around for a while because, you know, to see it until like maybe a year or a year and a half ago it seemed like
evm was unstoppable but then solana has really managed to establish themselves uh by you know
by one point i think they actually managed to have more transaction volume than ethereum even
though i think it was all mean coins and stuff. But, you know, so they just they kind of broke that narrative that everything has to be EVM.
But at the same time, we saw this thing that like we wanted to show people that we were serious about offering technology that they understood.
And and so that really drove that was kind of like the final impetus to say, OK, we really need to start looking at this.
us to say, okay, we really need to start looking at this. And then as you pointed out, we actually
discovered how well the architecture works to use EVM as a blockchain layer. So, I mean, sorry,
use EVM as an execution layer with ChainWeb providing the consensus layer, basically acting as a beacon chain to each EVM instance.
And that's why we've been able to move as fast as we have and get EVM in place for our upcoming testnet,
which is, you know, really, really exciting to see and see all the partners.
Very soon you're going to be hearing some really exciting noise about all the people,
all the projects that are involved in our testnet. So this is going to be a really exciting time.
And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to dive into this is to give people,
so that our community understands that this isn't something that we just brushed into
and that it's something that we've had a conversation going on for a very, very long time about whether or not to do this.
Interestingly enough, you know, I think why, Will, can you talk about why EVM is safer now?
Because like one of the reasons why I think another, at least myself,
one of the reasons why I really didn't want to do EVM in 2019 is because it just seemed, you know, the hacks were just
so bad then. So what's changed since then? I think it's tooling. I think it's just like,
just tooling and just, it's just a monumental amount of effort to make the system safe enough
to, you know, be really reliable for things beyond, you know, just simple token transfers and some meme coins and other tokens.
Uniswap did a huge amount to get their system up and running in a safe way.
but outside of that i think it's just like the amount of work by the community uh they've really
But outside of that, I think it's just the amount of work by the community.
moved heaven and earth to make it as reliable and as robust as it's become today and this is one of
those things that yeah back in 2019 like it wasn't the same and it's not even talking about you know
all of the gnarly hacks that were required to get you know it to work on the consensus nodes um
you know that's really this is more about the tooling that comes afterwards and all the safety
protocols i mean a lot of the work on ethereum that takes place is you know copy pasted but it's really this is more about the tooling that comes afterwards and all the safety protocols.
I mean, a lot of the work on Ethereum that takes place is copy-pasted, but it's because all that stuff is copy-pasted
is verified and really, really robustly tested
and is pretty much ironclad at this point.
And a lot of that has been, a lot of the way that it works
and the safety around it has been written in blood over the years from just various acts
and exploits that have happened.
So at this point, it's to me a very trusted
and reliable execution layer.
And yeah, like I, it's amazing to see how far it's come
since back in the day when we were first,
trying to work with the back of Jake and Morgan.
Yeah, I mean, that's why we built PACACT after all is that we thought EVM was too unsafe. And PACT, I think it's been eye-opening to work this closely with EVM and see how far
it's come because PACT has a lot of features to make it safe, but it doesn't have as many
people hacking on it.
So one of the things we're finding
with like rolling out this bridge
is that there's more work to be done on the PAC side
for really establishing best practices
around safe smart contract execution and things like that.
Because while PAC is more safe by default,
smart contracts are just hard.
You know, there's a lot,
these are systems that are gonna be, you know, public systems that are going to be blasted on by, you know, and there's lots of money waiting for you.
It's a, you know, that's that was why our that was why our bug got found so quick.
After all, it's because there was, you know, real money sitting right there that, you know, you didn't have to ask us for if you had if you that's that's what we like about the bounty is that you don't have to go through some
bug bounty procedure. Money's right there. You can hack it, you can get it.
So that's, that's why we're going to go back to that. Well, awesome.
Thanks, Will. And thanks everybody for joining us today.
We're hoping these Cadena News X spaces are useful in giving you a,
giving you some news and a recap of the progress we're making here at
Cadena and talking about what's to come or, you know, in the case of today, giving you kind of a
deeper insight into, you know, the thought process and our thinking about how we, you know, how we've
decided to make some of the moves we're going to do and why we're excited about the future of Cadena and blockchain and crypto as a whole.
So don't forget to follow us on Twitter at cadena underscore IO to stay up to date.
As I said, check out the 2025 roadmap page at cadena.io slash roadmap and get involved,
participate in our galaxy quest. You can learn earn KDA and win NFTs.
Also, if you're a developer and you're interested
or anybody and you're interested
in the new ChainWeb EVM technology,
you can join our Discord to learn more.
And if you're a project and you wanna get involved
in our grant program, apply for our grant
at cadena.io grants. So thanks thanks everybody again and we'll see you next time
see you soon bye Thank you.
