Kadena Telegram AMA with Binance Exchange, May 3 2022 Transcript
Quake (Binance): Helloooooo Binancians!!!!! Welcome to a special AMA with the Kadena team! It is my pleasure to introduce to you Stuart Popejoy, @SirlensAlot, who is the Kadena CEO. Joining him is Doug Beardsley, @mightybyte, Kadena’s Director of Engineering!
@SirLensAlot and @mightybyte, Thank you for joining us today! Would you please give us a brief introduction about yourselves and share a quick overview about Kadena?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Thank you and thanks to the Binance community for having us!! Hi, I’m Stuart! I’m the CEO of Kadena, and before that, I built the blockchain team at JP Morgan, been in tech for 25 years, and love blockchain and smart contracts. I’m the author of the Pact smart contract language — my cofounder Will is the inventor of the Chainweb scalable POW protocol used by Kadena.
Quake (Binance): We are hyped!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Happy to be here! I’ve been in the software business for close to 19 years. Over that time I’ve worked in defense, security, finance, and in a few startups building frontend and backend web apps. I’ve been programming Haskell professionally for 12 years which is what led me to meet the Kadena team. Now I’m Kadena’s Director of Engineering and love working with the talented team of engineers we have.
Quake (Binance): As we can see you both come from very extensive and knowledgeable backgrounds. Bringing vast experience in a fast-growing industry. Can we get a brief introduction regarding Kadena?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Kadena is all about bringing real-world scalability to blockchain, DeFi, NFTs, and smart contracts, by leveraging the proven unbeatable security and reliability of Proof-of-Work with real scalability as the only sharded PoW blockchain, and offering a full solution for industrial-scale apps: fast finality via our Kuro permissioned blockchain, and safe and secure apps with Pact, our smart contract language.
This has allowed developers to build in record time, which is why we have launched DEXes, tokens, and NFT exchanges since going live in January 2020. Our team is unmatched, including luminaries like Stuart Haber [one of the most cited author on the Bitcoin Whitepaper] who provided critical skills in developing the multi-chain security model and who now advises on crypto interaction protocols in Pact. Kadena is the only blockchain that can settle all the world’s assets and is the future of digital value.
Quake (Binance): Simply put. I will say WOW! Thank you @SirLensAlot and @mightybyte for such a great introduction! Binancians! Do not hesitate to learn more about Kadena, expanding your knowledge base can be highly beneficial as they have much to offer. I invite you to check out these links below. Follow the team on Twitter and join in on conversations about Kadena via their Telegram channel.
Website: https://www.kadena.io/
Telegram: https://t.me/kadena_io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/kadena_io
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/kadena/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kadena-llc
Discord: https://discord.io/kadena-io
Let’s jump right into the first segment of today’s AMA session. Kadena has a lot of content to share with you today!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): We got a rapidly growing community of builders to exchange ideas with!
Why POW over POS
Quake (Binance): Surround yourself with like-minded individuals and achieve success! @SirLensAlot and @mightybyte if you are ready, here is our first question for you here today. We know that Kadena is a PoW blockchain. Why has Kadena chosen POW over other Consensus Protocols like POS?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): We chose POW because it’s the most battle-tested consensus mechanism. Scalable POW means a Proof-of-Work blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum that can always handle an ever-increasing transaction load by increasing capacity. We launched in 2019 with 10 “braided chains” and in August 2020 scaled to 20, doubling throughput without using any additional hash power. We can scale without limit, bounded only by bandwidth: 100, 1000, or 100,000 chains. So for your hash rate, you’re getting ever-increased efficiency as utilization grows. All this, while increasing the already proven security of Proof of Work blockchains!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): First of all, the claim that PoW doesn’t scale in terms of energy/transaction fundamentally misunderstands the way PoW works. More transactions don’t require meaningfully more energy. Just because Bitcoin uses a lot of energy doesn’t mean that it has to. Back in 2009 when Bitcoin started it had the same transaction capacity but it used WAY less electricity.
Secondly, if you’re absolutely dead-set on looking at the flawed metric of energy/transaction, we win there because we can scale. As Bitcoin uses more and more energy the number of transactions it can process stays the same. But with Kadena, we can scale up our transaction capacity. So we can tap into energy efficiency that the other networks can’t.
Importance of Pact
Quake (Binance): Always break the barrier ahead. Strive for better, at all times! Having discussed a little bit about POW and the blockchain, may I ask what can you say about the importance of Kadena’s smart contract Pact and how it differs from other smart contract languages?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Sure! Love to talk about Pact :)
When Will and I started Kadena, we researched every smart contract technology before deciding to write our own smart contract language: the existing solutions for smart contracts could not provide the necessary safety we felt was needed to bring blockchain mainstream. We designed Pact with safety and security first in mind, and that has proven to be even more important today. Compared to other smart contract languages, Pact makes it both easier for builders to quickly develop dapps, while making it impossible to write the kinds of bugs that have cost billions of dollars in exploits. In addition to safety and security, Pact was designed to be human-readable. Users can go onto Kadena’s blockchain and be able to read the exact human-readable code that their transactions are executing, a level of security that EVM-based blockchains like Ethereum cannot provide.
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): One of my favorite things about Pact is its formal verification. This allows devs to guarantee that their code will behave in a certain way no matter what the inputs are. This allows Pact developers to have confidence that simply cannot be achieved by conventional testing methods. Last August we did a survey of DeFi hacks and found that over $800 million lost in hacks could have been saved by Kadena. We created a website called https://savedby.kadena.network/ that summarizes this information. Most of these hacks would have been prevented just by using Pact and Kadena with no special coding practices needed!
Quake (Binance): It seems Kadena has been tailored towards a due diligence mentality. Exploring best options and providing solutions towards security, functionality, and most importantly, TRUST!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Yeah. The only way to build really safe systems in my opinion is to as much as possible design them so they can’t go wrong. You can’t rely on humans getting everything right all the time.
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): It’s important for decentralization too. Can’t have decentralization without safety!
Types of projects building on Kadena
Quake (Binance): We are flawed, that is what makes us perfect. We learn, we adapt, we grow. Fantastic response gentlemen. Let us move onward to the next question we have for you! As we are discovering new ideas in blockchain, What are the types of projects currently being developed on Kadena that you are most excited about? Can you elaborate on the topic for us?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): With our ecosystem growing on all fronts like DeFi, gaming, infrastructure support, and exchanges, I’m particularly excited about the NFT projects that are building on Kadena. This is because Kadena has created a revolutionary new NFT standard called Marmalade that will allow creators, buyers, and communities to mint their own NFT marketplaces and participate in NFT ownership and sales without limitation. Users can now participate in NFT sales never seen before, such as an enforceable royalty system or fractional ownership of an NFT.
For example, DNA (Database of Native Assets) is using Marmalade to prevent counterfeiting of luxury brands such as Coach, Supreme, Gucci, etc. By using Kadena’s uniquely strong provenance system, called “Haber Content Integrity” [named] after research by our advisor Stuart Haber, companies are able to protect their brand and also reclaim the secondary market.
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): I’m really excited about all the mining-related projects that are building with/on Kadena. I like to say that proof of work allows excess hydropower in China to replace an armored truck in Denver, Colorado. Improving the flexibility of mining infrastructure is key to accomplishing this. We have been contacted by new ASIC manufacturers, mining pools, mining hosting companies, and more. These projects are investing significant capital to make Kadena mining more approachable, efficient, and energy-friendly.
Proof-of-work crypto projects are in a unique position to speed up worldwide adoption of green energy infrastructure because they can turn excess energy that would have gone to waste into productive work no matter where in the world the excess energy is located.
Quake (Binance): I am loving this team dynamic! both providing unique answers! Providing solutions to NFT creators is a necessary tool to bring into the future. I applaud you. Avoiding third parties can be a highly beneficial aspect to mass adoption for startup artists and projects. Focusing on what is important! We have a community of interested miners here at Binance as well! When listed on the platform our chat was going wild with questions regarding mining.
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Yeah, and having enforceable standards that survive if you switch NFT marketplaces is one that is important to me as a musician in my other life :).
Quake (Binance): As other methods become increasingly difficult Kadena is providing real-time green solutions. Absolutely amazing! Great job!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Kadena has been near the top of the list of most profitable ASIC miners for quite some time now.
Kadena and blockchain mass adoption
Quake (Binance): As we have just mentioned mainstream and mass adoption, my next question for your team would be to describe to us how Kadena is planning to bring blockchain to the masses?
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): One of the biggest obstacles to crypto transactions is gas. If your mom wants to do an on-chain swap between BTC and a stable coin, it’s really painful if she also has to have ETH to do the transaction. Kadena makes it possible to create gas stations that can pay the transaction fees for these transactions autonomously. We are also working on innovations that have the potential to allow third parties to grant loans for gas and make a small profit on the transaction. This will provide new ways for people to earn returns on their crypto holdings while at the same time making the network easier to use for the more casual users. This combined with the low gas fees that are enabled by Kadena’s scalability will make crypto accessible to a completely new part of the market that up to now has been excluded.
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Another initiative that launched early this year is Kadena Eco, headed by Francesco Melpignano, which will fuel mainstream adoption of Web3, DeFi, and NFT by adding vital expertise and resources needed to take the Kadena ecosystem into hypergrowth. While Kadena is the team that supports the blockchain protocol and provides infrastructure support for builders and developers, Kadena Eco takes these innovative technological advancements and brings them to blockchain leaders, VCs, and acceleration partners to support startups at all phases! Just recently, Kadena Eco announced a $100M grant program to turbocharge developers and entrepreneurs building their projects and ideas on Kadena and innovate with Web2.0 scalability!
Quake (Binance): We can all agree with gas being an obstacle, explaining altered transactions to accommodate gas fee’s can be a nightmare for an outsider. Facilitating this step feels necessary! Thank you KDA!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Here’s the link to the grant program: https://kadena.io/grants/.
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): We want builders to contact us to bring the next great dapp to Kadena!
Upcoming milestones and exciting news
Quake (Binance): You keep those doors open! The masses are noticing! As my final question for segment 1. I always enjoy asking a little fan favorite. Can you share any upcoming roadmap milestones or exciting news in the Kadena Ecosystem? What should we expect in the future? Binancians WANT TO KNOW!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): … drum roll… Alpha incoming….
Quake (Binance): I heard it in my mind. Boom here it comes!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): For a while now I’ve been talking about how I’m excited about upcoming improvements in our wallet and dapp integration infrastructure. Things like support for WalletConnect, the ability to sign multiple transactions at once, etc, which will transform the Kadena wallet experience and make it so that most of the time you won’t need to care what chain your coins are on. We are making really significant progress in this area and you will start to see some of the improvements before the end of Q2. We are also working on making it easier for builders to get up to speed with building on Kadena and teaching them how to take advantage of its unique features to make blockchain technology safer and easier to use than ever before.
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): If 2021 was the year where the world realized that Kadena had solved the trilemma, bringing something truly unique — a scalable, safe and fast POW blockchain platform for builders — 2022 is the year of the Kadena ecosystem which has kicked off with a bang with the Kadena Eco fund and the $100MM builder grant program. This year will see the launch of the first truly scalable DeFi and Lending platforms as builders leverage Pact’s features to scale their dapps to new heights of usability and performance, while our upcoming bridge to innovative Cosmos chains like Terra will see our vision of Kadena as the sole “settlement chain” for all of crypto become real. Come get involved and build the future on Kadena!
Quake (Binance): That was informative and interesting reading material! Absolutely amazing job. Thank you @SirLensAlot and @mightybyte!
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Great questions! Always a pleasure to talk about the exciting stuff
Quake (Binance): Chat, be sure to read if you missed anything! Make sure to follow Kadena. Engagement is wild in here! Great crowd, you brought with you!
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Kadenians what’s up! Woop woop!
Quake (Binance): Have they earned the rewards segment with all this crazy engagement?
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Quiz time now!
Quake (Binance): Yes! Let's get it going!
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Let’s roll!
Kadena Quiz
Quake (Binance): We will post our google form for 5 minutes as I go over the questions with Kadena team with you here! So, Stuart, let me know what the first quiz question is!
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Yessir! The first question is:
Q: Which of these wallets can be used to store $KDA:
A: Metamask, B: Chainweaver, C: X-Wallet, D: Trust Wallet, E: Zelcore
Quake (Binance): Nice one! How about question #2? Can you please share with us?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Second question… Q2. Which of the following is not a strategic component of Kadena Eco?
A: Incubator, B: Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), C: Grant programs, D: Venture fund
Quake (Binance): Responses are coming in hot. Some have followed you closely. They know. Can you please share with us question #3?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Third question… Q3: How many chains and TPS can Kadena scale to?
A: 30 Chains and 300 TPS, B: 20 Chains and 480,000 TPS, C: An infinite number of chains, and TPS D: 100 Chains and 10,000 TPS
Quake (Binance): How about question 4, please?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Fourth question… Q4: What is the name of Kadena’s NFT standard?
A: Rarible, B: Marmalade, C: Kaden-Art, D: Kadena Eco
Quake (Binance): Rolls right off the tongue vocally. Genius. And for our final question! May you share for the crowd?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Fifth question… Q5: Which of the following is NOT a feature of Kadena’s smart contract language, Pact?
A: Human readability, B: Formal verification, C: Turing completeness, D: Upgradable contracts
Quake (Binance): We are all closed up ladies and gentlemen! Participation levels are high. Thank you Kadena and thank you Binancians for being here today!
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Binance force is STRONG!
Quake (Binance): let's share the answers so they can then make you sweat with a bunch of LIVE Q&A questions!!
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): And the answers are ……..
Answer 1: Chainweaver, X-Wallet, Zelcore
Answer 2: B. DAO
Answer 3: C. An infinite number of chains and TPS
Answer 4: B. Marmalade
Answer 5: C. Turing completeness
Community Questions
Quake (Binance): Fantastic. Thank you. As we move on to Segment 3. Please take the time to think of some good questions, which will underline quality and uniqueness. We will unmute the channel for a few minutes for the first round and Kadena will select 5 questions per round!
Community Question 1: Smart contracts are prone to failure, and many projects fall victim to it, costing user funds and discrediting projects. How reliable and secure are your smart contracts? Did you test it with either party?
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): We have designed our smart contract language Pact in a way that makes it possible to completely eliminate whole categories of bugs. Also, Pact puts human-readable contract code on chain which makes everything much more transparent. Our formal verification system brings unmatched techniques to people to prove that their code is correct. I could go on and on…
Community Question 2: Will you as a private person be able to use Marmalade to mint and sell NFTs?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Yes! Not only that, with Marmalade you can “mint a marketplace” — design your own economic rules like royalties, and nobody can possibly rug you as a creator!
Community Question 3: I read on your site that Kadena offers a no-cost transaction, can you explain more about the no-cost transaction model?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): This is something to clear up: gas on Kadena is low-cost, and most importantly, predictable and can be subsidized by the dapp so the user never ever has to deal with gas. But gas itself is an important feature of a smart-contract blockchain to make sure people play fair and don’t use up too much of the blockchain resources. With Kadena you just don’t have to worry about success being your enemy by driving prices through the roof — because DAPPS CAN SCALE ON KADENA!
Community Question 4: What essential recommendations would you give to a Web 2.0 programmer to start a Web 3.0 programmer specifically in Kadena, of course?
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Be open to learning new things. The only way we can innovate in the blockchain space is if we are willing to make changes to the status quo. Kadena has a lot of new ideas. We know that they will require people to learn new things. We very carefully designed things so that developers are getting a lot of power and safety as a result.
Community Question 5: You have very strong partners behind you. Could this be the most important factor that brings more investors to the project? Strong partners and a great team that believes in the project…
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): The Kadena Eco team is super high powered, with Paul Hsu coming from gaming, crypto, and VC; our own Francesco Melpignano leading it up, and a host of other experts like Dan Wiggins with a huge background in gaming. It’s all about partners!
Community Question 6: What are the words that motivate the Kadena team? Success, popularity etc?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): We just really believe in the transformative power of blockchain, crypto, decentralization, and community, and want to see it WIN with massive mainstream adoption. Haters don’t get it: crypto is really about community and empowering people, and that’s what gets us up in the morning is to make it real for everybody.
Community Question 7: What type of projects are currently being reviewed by Kadena Eco?
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Just the other day someone announced a new mining hosting company that wants to make it easier for average folks to run ASIC miners.
Community Question 8: How can I build a gas station?
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): It’s as simple as a single transfer: https://explorer.chainweb.com/mainnet/chain/1/block/-c50pruuuIb2MwCl63Zks1KZDedy2Kb7W2F5Di7U9DQ/txs. Learn more about gas stations here.
Community Question 9: How the developers and entrepreneurs can get access to the $100M grant program?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): You can learn more and apply for a grant at https://kadena.io/grants/.
Community Question 10: Can you tell us how did you come up with the idea of Kadena? Have you been influenced by any special moment or story behind it?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): My cofounder Will and I started JP Morgan’s blockchain group in 2014, and we got to talk to everybody in the space (including Vitalik :) ). We really felt that scalability and safety were going to be critical for businesses and individuals to want to participate. That was back in 2016 but it still motivates us today!
Community Question 11 (Kadena): Thank you @SirLensAlot and @mightybyte for your time. I applaud you for your innovations on crypto scalability.
1. Considering the problems in the crypto-space, what are your thoughts on cross-chain services?
2. Will Kadena also facilitate cross-chain transactions in the future?
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Tx space in a global blockchain is a scarce resource. Therefore I absolutely see the future being multi-chain. Kadena is in a better position than just about any other project to operate well in a multi-chain world because Kadena itself is multi-chain! If you’re using KDA, you’re using multi-chain technology. It’s built into Kadena from the ground up.
Community Question 12: What does Stuart Haber do at Kadena?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Stuart Haber is our cryptography and technology advisor, for everything from Pact core technology (Marmalade content integrity) to the Chainweb security analysis by Gauntlet (https://medium.com/gauntlet-networks/analysis-of-kadenas-public-blockchain-protocol-31c66347e32e). Stuart Haber is also the most-cited author in the Bitcoin Whitepaper! He’s a legend!
Community Question 13: Let’s say we are starting to hit higher gas fees — how long does it take for the chainweb to expand to more chains and therefore lower the gas fee?
Doug Beardsley: It takes some engineering work, but we already doubled the capacity of our network from 10 chains to 20 chains about 8 months after we launched. So we’ve already developed and tested the approach, so it will be easier to do it again in the future.
Community Question 14: So it has the capability for infinite chains which leads to infinite TPS, my question is how projects can be linked to a chain and how users can easily understand which chain to use without any confusion?
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Great question, the right answer is a user should never have to care about what chain they are on. This is what is happening now in 2022, see this article on how a swapper could swap across chains without even knowing it :) https://medium.com/kadena-io/the-future-of-multichain-828a2547b697
Quake (Binance): It has been great to have you, @SirLensAlot, and @mightybyte with us today to talk more about Kadena’s business. The community has responded well to your presence here!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): Thanks so much for having us!
Stuart Popejoy (Kadena): Totally! Binancians and Kadenians UNITE!
Quake (Binance): Absolute delight to have hosted you!
Doug Beardsley (Kadena): For technical tweets about blockchain and Kadena, follow me on Twitter. https://twitter.com/BlockchainDoug!
Quake (Binance): Thank you chat for your time! Last but not least, thank you to the wonderful team at Kadena!
