WORLD’S FASTEST BLOCKCHAIN PLATFORM: KADENA SCALES TO 480K TPS ON 20 CHAINS

New York-based blockchain technology company Kadena has completed hybrid blockchain scaling to 480,000 transactions per second on 20 chains.

Fastest blockchain in the world

Kadena, which was the first blockchain tech company to come out of JP Morgan’s Blockchain Center for Excellence, has revealed that its scalable layer-1 public blockchain has increased from 10 to 20 chains – becoming the fastest blockchain platform in the world. 

Functioning through a braided, parallelised consensus mechanism, and a unique architecture that boosts speeds, it nevertheless preserves the security of the Proof of Work consensus utilised by Bitcoin. 

Kadena Kuro now open-source and free

The platform’s next generation private blockchain, Kadena Kuro, has now also been designated as fully open-source and is available free of charge. Kuro Community Editions were previously available for trial, with some limitations, on AWS Marketplace and MicrosoftAzure. 

Responding to an increase in demand for Pact, Kadena’s smart contract language, as evidenced by collaborations with Polkadot and Cosmos, the company is making Kuro accessible to as many organisations as possible. 

Explaining the move Co-Founder and President of Kadena, Stuart Popejoy, said: “With the open-sourcing of Kuro, our high-performance permissioned blockchain, smart contract developers working in Pact can now effortlessly leverage our hybrid platform to scale to unmatched transactional performance and throughput. We’re giving blockchain engineers the freedom to customize their architecture to achieve their specific requirements.”

Scaling Proof of Work, securely

In late 2019 Kadena was subject to a rigorous pro-level Wall Street quantitative analysis to prove its scalability and security. Independently verified third-party research was conducted by Gauntlet Networks, and confirmed Kadena as the first, and thus far only, project to successfully scale Proof of Work securely. 

Following the launch of its sharded Proof of Work layer-1 network earlier in 2020, Kadena has completed its most significant upgrade to date, expanding from 10 to 20 braided chains on mainnet. This has doubled throughput, and means the platform can achieve an industry-leading 480,000 transactions per second. 

No increase in power consumption, and unlimited scalability

Critically, despite the massive increase in speed, Kadena’s blockchain does not increase energy consumption as it scales – negating one of the main criticisms of the Proof of Work consensus mechanism. 

By growing the shard count from 10 to 20 chains, Kadena has not only doubled current throughput, but also proven the feasibility of scaling to 100, 1,000, and an ever-increasing number of chains on the public network. 

Kadena Co-Founder and CEO, Will Martino, explained: “We created Kadena to fix the fundamental scaling problem with Bitcoin, which has been a barrier to mainstream adoption. Launching Kadena, and now expanding to 20 chains, proves that we can scale a layer-1 blockchain to the point where digital assets can go mainstream.

“Growing from 10 to 20 chains means that the infrastructure now exists to service the needs of the digital economy. Kadena has solved the previously long-standing problem of how to securely scale a public blockchain — we’re the only project that has been able to do it.”

Accelerated integration with Polkadot

Kadena has also accelerated integration with Polkadot via two new technologies. Pact Core allows Polkadot or any WASM-compatible platform to natively execute Pact smart contract code with the help of a minimal interpreter installed directly on-chain.

As a short-term alternative to Pact Core, Kadena’s permissioned blockchain technology Kuro can be adapted to operate as a Polkadot parachain in a digital design called KadenaDOT – which acts as a bridge technology between the Polkadot and Kadena ecosystems, offering the power of Pact smart contracts to parachain operators. 

Blockchain pioneer Dr. Haber joins Kadena

Blockchain co-inventor Dr. Stuart Haber has also joined Kadena’s advisory board. A true pioneer of decentralised technology, Haber is widely recognised as having laid the groundwork for blockchain way back in 1990, and went on to operate the world’s first blockchain. He is one of the most cited authors in Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal 2008 Bitcoin white paper. 

1m+ transactions per second

Looking forward to the rest of 2020 and beyond, Kadena says it plans to continue scaling its blockchain, with the next major upgrade set to make 50 braided chains work in parallel. This is expected to deliver a throughput exceeding 1 million transactions per second. 

The company is also planning to announce a licensed cryptocurrency exchange for officially trading the KDA coin in the United States, before the end of 2020. Earlier this year, Kadena (KDA), was identified as one of several cryptocurrencies under consideration by Coinbase and other major crypto exchanges. 

AYO.NEWS says:

Kadena seems to have torpedoed some of the most popular criticisms of Proof of Work, namely speed, power consumption, and scaling while maintaining security. Its unique braided, parallelised consensus mechanism offers a compelling avenue for overcoming many of the roadblocks encountered by blockchain so far, and clearly has the potential to catalyse mainstream adoption. 

In January, AYO.NEWS’ Simona Pinterova caught up with Monica Quaintance, Head of Research & Networks at Kadena to get an inside view of the project. Check out the video here.