How Kadena is Reimagining Blockchain Developer UX
By Randy Daal, Developer Experience Lead
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
- Lao Tzu
The primary focus of Kadena these last few years has been to create a state-of-the-art first layer blockchain development solution. In that quest, we’re not ashamed to admit that we’ve also gone big and bold by setting out to completely revolutionize the blockchain world.
As we’ve focused on building our core set of tools and development platform, our rockstar team of developers and early adopters have continued to provide us with outstanding feedback. And we’ve been listening very carefully. While this process hasn’t always been easy, the tradeoffs have been worthwhile as we’ve been able to slow down, assess, and validate the true value of our technology with our growing community.
One thing we’ve become convinced of along the way is that no matter how good our technology might be, nothing can replace the value of the user experience. That much is essential! And so, based on our research and feedback from builders, we’re very happy to report that Kadena is working on creating an entirely new developer experience that will be truly game-changing.
Let’s jump into some more details about what’s been happening behind the scenes and some of the cool new features and UI that you can soon expect.
We’ve been listening carefully
Obviously, Rome wasn’t built in a day. While Kadena has made great strides in transforming the DeFi and blockchain marketplace through its extended ecosystem, we still face challenges — especially in our front-end experience. Many of our users have already helpfully shared feedback with us in forums like Twitter and Discord. What we’ve heard is that:
- Building a basic application on our platform can be tough; the learning curve is high.
- Kadena’s documentation is disparate and not as organized as builders would like.
- Our JavaScript APIs and SDKs are written in a more traditional manner that’s out of scope with how Web3 developers want to work today.
At Kadena, all user feedback gets taken very seriously and we’ve heard you loud and clear. We are completely transparent about our challenges and unwilling to ignore what history has shown us — that even the best technologies will fail if the UX isn’t ideal.
Here’s what our team has been up to
We believe Kadena is set to become the dominant platform for blockchain development. Here are some major reasons why:
- First, we have developed a revolutionary braided architecture of 20 chains, which makes it the most advanced and fastest blockchain platform in the world. Kadena is currently the only proof of work platform capable of scaling to settle the 9+ million trades executed daily on the New York Stock Exchange. Kadena is also built on Pact — the first truly human readable smart contract language.
- Second, we’ve brought together a passionate community of 100s of builders, miners, and advocates who are spreading the word about Kadena and creating everything from smart contracts to crypto wallets to hosts of other decentralized blockchain applications (dapps).
- Third, we have some insanely smart people working to transform Kadena into the most secure, scalable, and resilient blockchain development platform in the world.
An entirely new user experience is just around the corner
Kadena aims to continue building and supporting our developer community with a robust, best-in-class experience for Web3 developers. We’ve already completed significant milestones to our platform and ecosystem, but even bigger plans lie in store for the near future. Some of the major benchmarks on our roadmap include:
- New documentation site release, frequently updated
- Revamped tutorial section and more engaging images and videos
- Kadena developer academy with certifications & badges
- User-friendly tooling and resources for Web3 development, including more robust API’s and SDK’s
After hitting these goals, the Kadena team will celebrate by hosting a super cool hackathon to promote new blockchain features and functionalities on our fresh new UI.
We’ve come a long way — but still just getting started
Remember the Internet browser wars? The battle was primarily between Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox in the early days of the Internet. Google’s Chrome was a relatively late entry into the market that went public in October 2008 but soon became the dominant market player by focusing on the technology and developer tools. Today, Chrome dominates the market with an estimated 3.2 billion global users. Meanwhile, IE 11 will no longer be supported as of June 2022, and Firefox struggles with a substantial flattening of active users.
Kadena was founded in 2016 by former leaders of J.P. Morgan’s first cryptocurrency team, built on a vision of transforming how the world interacts and transacts with blockchain. Similar to Chrome, our founders focused on the technology first. Now with that firmly in place, we’re turning our focus to reimagining the builder experience into something truly game-changing. We’re just getting started and would love for you to be part of that conversation!
Come and build with us!
At Kadena, we’re very excited about the revolutionary possibilities ahead in the world of blockchain development. With our superior technology, robust community, and strong commitment to scalability and resilience in the marketplace, we believe it’s possible to bring Kadena into the mainstream and help democratize the future of Web3.
Won’t you join us on this quest to change how the world interacts and transacts? With your help, we can create a more equitable, sustainable, and secure future for the entire global economic community.