A Conversation with Kadena CEO, Will Martino

Kadena aims to provide secure, scalable, and fast layer-1 blockchain infrastructure for production applications. Kadena employs a unique design with a parallel Proof of Work architecture called “Chainweb.” They created their own smart contract language called “Pact,” which is human readable. Kadena is delivering important features such as Formal Verification, interoperability, scalability, and more.

Justin Gregorius: Thanks for speaking with us, Will. To start, what is Kadena and what motivated you to start working on it?

Will Martino: So before JP Morgan, I worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in their cryptocurrency working group researching blockchain technology. Then, at JP Morgan, Stuart, my co-founder, and I led the Blockchain Center of Excellence and built the first version of what later became JPM Coin.

We founded Kadena in 2016 because after building the first blockchain for JPMorgan, we realized that we were truly capable of advancing blockchain technology in ways that no one else was thinking about. Three years later, the Kadena smart contract platform becomes complete with the release of our scalable Proof of Work public blockchain.

Kadena is a public blockchain that is ready right now for real businesses and apps — we’ve solved sharding and scalability, formal verification, interoperability, and more, and we’re excited to share our work with the world.

JG: Dozens of layer-1 blockchains have launched and/or raised capital in the last 18 months, many of which have an explicit goal of becoming a dominant smart contract platform. Given this crowded market, what is unique about Kadena relative to its peers?

WM: The Kadena public blockchain is the only layer-1 protocol that uses scalable, parallelized Proof of Work for its consensus mechanism. Kadena builds on the fundamental decentralized and anonymous foundation of Bitcoin by using the proven mechanism of PoW in a braided, multichain architecture that massively increases both the throughput and security of the network.

In addition to network structure, the other distinguishing feature of Kadena is the smart contract language Pact. We’ve built Pact to be the most versatile and user-friendly language available by first allowing the needs of users to inform our design choices and then spending years rigorously testing and building features based on input from developers.

JG: I’m glad that you brought up Pact there. You mention in your documentation that you strongly believe that smart contracts need to be readable by humans. Can you elaborate on why you think that is so important and how Pact addresses this issue?

WM: When we say that smart contracts should “readable by humans,” we mean that everyone, not just developers, should be able to interact with and understand code on a blockchain. Blockchain will only become widely adopted when regular users, including business people and the casual consumer, can trust smart contract code. Smart contracts represent transfer of real value, and as we’ve seen with Solidity if smart contract code has bugs then money can be irreversibly lost. Pact is designed with extremely clear syntax and that same clear code is executed directly by the blockchain so that code can be easily verified and trusted.

JG: While Pact may be readable by humans, it is not a Turing Complete smart contract language like Solidity or Michelson. More, this was an intentional decision by you and your team. Why did you decide to create a Turing Incomplete smart contract language?

WM: We chose to make Pact Turing Incomplete because we believe that it makes the language safer for end-users without impacting its usability. Turing Completeness is a necessary feature when you’re programming a server, but when you’re programming a wallet having code that can infinitely withdraw is obviously dangerous. Pact can perform all the functions users need on a blockchain without exposing them to unnecessary risk.

A more nuanced point is that, because execution on a blockchain is limited by gas, even supposedly “Turing Complete” languages like Solidity are actually restricted in their available execution, which means that Solidity opens users up to risk but doesn’t even allow for functional Turing Completeness. As a result, we see no justification for needing Turing completeness on the blockchain.

JG: Kadena also uses something called “Formal Verification.” What is Formal Verification and how is it different from solutions found in other smart contract platforms?

WM: Formal Verification is a tool to mathematically verify and test for bugs present in code, and is used in mission-critical systems like nuclear power plants and spacecraft navigation. In Pact, users can describe the intent for their contract in human-readable form and then apply Formal Verification to convert that intent into code for mathematically proving its accuracy. While other projects focus on being able to verify small subsets of code, Pact can verify entire modules, schemas, interfaces, and functions. Since Pact is an interpreted language, these properties to formally verify your code are visible on the blockchain and can be verified by anyone at any time. Our approach to Formal Verification is just more advanced and user-friendly than anything else on the market.

JG: Kadena’s protocol is called “Chainweb,” which is described as a “parallel-chain Proof of Work architecture comprised of braided chains.” Can you elaborate on the technical architecture of Chainweb and how those architectural decisions impact Kadena’s ability to scale?

WM: Chainweb works by taking the foundation of a Bitcoin mining chain and parallelizing this work across multiple chains. In other words, we have figured out how to keep the hash rate of the network the same while mining blocks across multiple chains. The fixed graph structure of Chainweb allows us to launch with ten chains in parallel, then expand to larger configurations without sacrificing decentralization or security. Many other proposed sharding protocols seem to have a fixed maximum size. Chainweb stands apart in that it does not have that limitation.

JG: Kadena supports multiple forms of interoperability. How does this work?

WM: Inside the network itself, users can burn coins on one chain (shard) and create them on another chain without having to involve a 3rd party. This same cross-chain transfer capability can be used by popular dApps to load balance so that adoption doesn’t slow down the network. Pact also offers support for native smart contract interoperability. Now for the first time, smart contracts will be able to act as service providers for other smart contracts in a safe and decentralized way. Additionally, Pact supports several primitives for interoperability between other blockchains or oracles.

You can learn more about Kadena by visiting their website here.

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