At Kadena, we’re continually responding to the fast-moving crypto space. Starting as an enterprise blockchain company in 2016, we introduced the world to hybrid blockchain in 2018 before launching the only scalable POW public blockchain in 2020. In 2021 we’ve tightened our focus onto digital value, community and builders. Change is a constant for Kadena and to reflect this our roadmap is coming along for the ride.
But first, let’s look back on what was achieved in Q2!
Q2 Achievements
Our Q2 roadmap laid out an ambitious plan for advancing digital value, and we achieved a lot in the quarter:
KuCoin Listing. Listing is always a focus for layer-1 projects, and bringing on a top-five exchange like KuCoin is a major achievement. Our integrations have a broader scope than unsafe single-sig default of Ethereum compatibility, with sharded chains, multi-sig and greater security. We’re happy to announce that KuCoin will support deposits on all 20 chains in the near future.
Success of the Kadenaswap “Bountyswap” program which nabbed a major exploit.
First use-case of Kadenaswap AMM smart contract with the launch of Kaddex. Read more below about this important development reflecting our focus on providing game-changing DeFi infrastructure.
Launch of the Kadena Chain Relay Bonding program, which has been a huge success with 8.3MM TVL not to mention the 5MM reserve locked up, from the Kadena Platform Share. This is an incredible start for demonstrating Kadena as the most decentralized and community-focused DeFi platform, and offering incredible economic security with which to launch the Kadena Ethereum Bridge.
Testnet Launch of dao.init. Adding to our growing stable of core use-cases on Kadena, dao.init launched in testnet with a fully-featured wallet integration, voting and discussions. Importantly the discussions happen entirely on-chain showing the advantages of Pact and scalability leading to greater on-chain use to power decentralization and truly community-driven economic development.
Pact 4.0 upgrade. This is a major delivery that ensures that Kadena builders will have the most easy-to-integrate sharded and scalable platform, by radically enhancing the ability to emit provable events like cross-chain transfers. It makes indexing far easier and support for any smart contract on the platform is assured.
Integrate Torus Wallet. Torus provides a uniquely frictionless onramp to using Kadena and KDA by allowing users to simply authenticate with their Google account. This is the beginning of Kadena’s ambitious plans to provide radically better UX for transactions on the blockchain, with more exciting integrations to come in the near future.
Launch of the first major community project, the NFT exchange Colorblock. We are very proud of the team behind Colorblock for launching their product and integrated wallet on Kadena! We have new NFT projects cooking that will be announced soon.
Launch of a Kadena-based token. The Flux token is in full production on Kadena, with more tokens launching in the coming months.
Technical grants. Our technical grants program has been a great success with applicants from varying backgrounds, from independent developers to projects looking to integrate with Kadena. Highlights:
- Kadena statistics page is a web page that lists all the current statistics about Kadena’s network, from transactions per day to a rich list of all the wealthiest accounts.
- Torus wallet integration laid the foundation for a seamless browser-based wallet by allowing users to authenticate with their Google account. However, the benefit of Torus is that additional social media accounts can be integrated, such as Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and more.
- Kadenaswap UI restyle featured an overhaul of the old Kadenaswap, giving our DEX a new look and feel that one expects of a modern crypto project.
What do these Q2 milestones mean for the road ahead?
DeFi Infrastructure: Kadenaswap + Bridge Relay
Following the first use-case of Kadenaswap DeFi infrastructure with the launch of Kaddex, we plan on extending the idea of providing truly decentralized DeFi infrastructure for the Kadena ecosystem for the vast majority of proven use-cases. This means providing infrastructure for decentralized lending, flash-loans, MEV mitigations, interoperability and more. The simplicity and safety of Pact mean developers can easily leverage existing decentralized infrastructure to build out their business model and provide a front-end for users.
Going forward, we’re committed to providing Kadenaswap as core decentralized technology that powers Kadena becoming the clearing platform for all crypto, whether that’s on Kadena or on other leading platforms like Cosmos, Polkadot, Ethereum or BSV, being the only platform that can offer the unbeatable combination of security, scalability, and safety needed to bring truly industrial-scale operation to crypto.
Toward this end, we will continue to maintain Kadenaswap as 100% decentralized DEX technology that will be the first to scale liquidity provision across multiple chains and solve MEV.
The release of the Chain Relay program also marks a significant milestone in providing DeFi infrastructure for our ecosystem. This same technology can be easily leveraged to bridge to many more chains, improving Kadena’s interoperability and increasing total TVL on-chain, which is already totaling more than 6 months of mining emissions in KDA.
Kaddex
The Kaddex project launched in Q2 as the first company to leverage our DeFi infrastructure by wrapping the Kadenaswap AMM smart contract and providing a governance token, KDX, to ensure a community-led decision-making process when it transitions its governance to a DAO. Kaddex will provide the critical user experience and incentives to do what crypto does best: attract LPs and swappers to the platform by rewarding their participation in KDX.
This also means that Kaddex will truly operate independently with its own roadmap, and important efforts such as the Tokensoft kBTC and kETH launch will be coordinated there.
As a brand-new effort in incubation, we’ve learned a lot and are grateful to our incredible community, including a new community building around Kaddex. We envision many more projects coming to the Kadena ecosystem and leveraging our DeFi infrastructure to truly innovate and redefine the future of finance. We plan to make copy-pasting smart contracts a thing of the past, as projects can instead used shared infrastructure that is maintained by the Kadena core team.
Kadena Chain Relay + Ethereum Bridge
Kadena Chain Relay enables truly decentralized bridges to other protocols and provides economic security through bonded KDA.
The success of the bonding launch puts us in a great position to launch the Kadena/Ethereum bridge, which will augment the Tokensoft effort to bring valuable digital assets to the Kadena platform. We will continue to move forward on this development with a testnet launch of the bridge in the coming weeks.
Additional bridges to Celo, Terra and other EVM chains will be launched in the near future.
Website + Marketing
Scheduled in Q2, Kadena’s website redesign has matured into a much bigger marketing opportunity that will revitalize our brand, clarify our story, achieve our transition to a public blockchain and signal the start of a more aggressive communication style.
First, we will create a continuously evolving website, the first version replacing the old hybrid blockchain messaging from 2018 with messaging that amplifies Kadena as the only PoW blockchain that scales and the future of digital value. Soon after, a second version will focus our narrative even more and relaunch kadena.io with a more modern design template. Jointly with the website, the Kadena DAO will enable us together with our community to amplify our story across the crypto sphere.
Launch of the Kadena Live Roadmap
We’re aware that our Q2 roadmap exceeded what we delivered in Q2. Some of this was well-justified by structuring our DeFi infrastructure ahead of Q3 and Q4, or repositioning efforts as projects go live. At Kadena we strive for transparency and accountability, however, so we seek to learn from the experience of our Q2 roadmap.
We’ve learned that projects develop at speeds faster than the quarterly schedule, with exciting new achievements that were not promised at the beginning of the quarter. By providing more detail about near-term deliveries will offer more transparency, we can build excitement about happenings in upcoming weeks. Finally, we can finally start talking about projects that don’t have a fixed date but are going to be game-changing for the ecosystem.
For these reasons, we are moving away from quarterly roadmaps altogether and launching our live roadmap. We are committing to keeping this roadmap up-to-date and accurate, a living document that will have every exciting and critical project tracked. As near-term deliveries approach, we can announce dates for important sub-milestones. As strategic projects shift we can announce exciting new developments.
We’re very excited to launch our live roadmap and welcome all feedback on this important change. Check it out and get involved!
