AMA Recap: CRYPTO MINERS X KADENA
Kadena is the industry’s only scalable layer-1 Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain. The principal feature that drives Kadena is scalability, which enables Kadena to deliver infrastructure-grade performance for any blockchain project. Along with our own smart contract language Pact, Kadena’s platform provides the world the tools and environment to turn ideas and ambitions into reality. Founded by Stuart Popejoy and William Martino who created JP Morgan’s first blockchain and led the SEC’s Crypto Committee, Kadena aims to allow for true blockchain mass adoption. Kadena was founded on the idea that blockchain could revolutionize how the world interacts and transacts. But to get to mass adoption, chain technology and the ecosystem connecting it to the business world needed to be reimagined from the ground up. Their founders built a proprietary chain architecture and created the tools to make blockchain work for business — at speed, scale, and energy efficiency previously thought unachievable.
We hosted an AMA session with Kadena on 30th September.
Mr. Ramsy was the host from Crypto Miners and Mr. Doug Beardsley and Mr. Jeffrey was the guesta. They shared delightful knowledge and unique features of Kadena with our community.
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Segment 1️⃣: Introduction
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Hello everyone 👋 Welcome to Our Another #Special AMA session With Kadena
To help us learn more about Kadena, We are lucky to be joined By Mr. Doug
Hello Doug 👋
Doug Beardsley:
Hi, great to be here!
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Welcome here Mate
Thanks for bringing Us Kadena ❤️
Doug Beardsley:
My pleasure!
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
First of all Can you Make a self introduction to the community?
Doug Beardsley:
Absolutely…Hi, I’m Doug Beardsley, Kadena’s Director of Engineering. I have 18+ years of software engineering experience including 12 years using Haskell professionally. I also co-organizes the Compose Conference, the New York Haskell Users Group, and am one of the original authors of the Snap web framework.
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Nice to meet you Doug 🤝
I’m pretty sure that our Community is very much excited to learn more about #Kadena
So let’s get started if you’re ready!!
Doug Beardsley:
Yep, let’s get into it!
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Guys Today we have one more guest
Welcome Mr. Jeffrey
Jeffrey:
Hi everyone! Will be supporting Doug Beardsley on today’s AMA 💪!Thanks for hosting us Ramsy!
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
That’s Cool 🤝
So Guys Let’s see our first question from this segment
1. Please make a concise and brief introduction about Kadena.
Tell us features of Kadena that makes it superior and special as compared to its competitors?
Doug Beardsley:
Wow, there’s a lot here but let’s stick to the biggest highlights…First, Kadena is a scalable layer-1 proof-of-work blockchain.
We manage to scale where other chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum couldn’t because of our unique parallel chain structure.
You can see a visualization of this structure at our block explorer https://explorer.chainweb.com/
I like to use the analogy of multi-core computers. Kadena is basically a multi-core blockchain.
We launched almost 3 years ago with 10 chains, giving us roughly 10x the transaction throughput of other PoW chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
9 months later we increased our network to 20 chains while running the production mainnet, proving that our approach can scale to meet increasing transaction demand.
What does this mean for you? Well, the biggest one is lower gas fees.
As Vitalik has pointed out, the solution to high gas fees is scaling, and Kadena has that. And we achieved it without changing to a different consensus system and sacrificing decentralization.
So this is one big area where we’ve innovated.
The other is in our smart contract language.
We designed a language specifically for the needs of modern smart contract blockchains.
It learns from the years of experience with other chains and adds things that are going to be important to take blockchain into the mainstream…things like support for multi-sig built-in from the ground up, safer smart contracts, ways to prevent your money from disappearing if you mis-type a private key, and on and on…
I could go on for awhile but I think I’ll call it good with that bit.
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thanks Doug for this great start about Kadena 👌
Now Let’s move to the second one…
2. Share to us about the Chainweb and Kuro. Also about Chainweaver wallet and its features?
Doug Beardsley:
So Chainweb is the name that we gave to the protocol that our Kadena public blockchain is built on.I have a tweet storm about it here
Kuro is Kadena’s private blockchain software.
Kadena was originally founded to tackle the enterprise blockchain space, and the founders built Kuro to be a very fast and efficient private/permissioned blockchain solution.
Later after we came up with the Chainweb approach to scaling proof of work, we shifted to focus the company’s efforts more on the public blockchain side of things.
But that core private blockchain system is still there and because it also has native integration with our smart contract language Pact, it’s a good candidate for anyone who wants to do any kind of off-chain stuff.
Kind of like rollups or layer-2s in other blockchains
That hasn’t been our focus recently but it’s still there and can be easily upgraded to work with the latest version of Pact that Chainweb uses.
Now, Chainweaver…
Chainweaver is Kadena’s in-house wallet / smart contract IDE.
It is focused on really leveraging the power of what the Kadena blockchain has to offer.
One bit that I personally wrote is something I call Safe Transfers.
I tweeted about this awhile back
The short version is that a safe transfer makes it completely impossible for your money to go into a black hole.
It basically lets you do a test transfer and the real transfer all in one!
And it does it in way that actually makes you safer than if you had done the test transfer separately.
I think it’s absolutely unacceptable that blockchain users tolerate this crazy uncertainty about losing money with a small mistake in your transfer.
…and Kadena has a solution to this kind of problem.
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Indeed 🙂
Doug Beardsley:
If the blockchain industry can’t solve that, there’s no way it will see truly mainstream adoption.Here’s a Safe Transfer demo video that I tweeted awhile back:
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Yes, The Blockchains Must be Solve that
Cool 👍
What facilities does Kadena provide builders and developers to be built on it?
Doug Beardsley:
We’re a fully general smart contract blockchain. So anything that you might build on Ethereum you could also build on Kadena.One pretty unique thing that Kadena gives developers is access to powerful Formal Verification to get more confidence about the smart contracts that you write.
Because of this and other innovative features of our Pact smart contract language, builders on Kadena have tools to gain unparalleled confidence that their code actually does what they think it does.
Awhile back we did a survey of a bunch of Rekt blockchain projects and discovered that a really large percentage of those hacks simply couldn’t have happened on Kadena.
We have some information about this here https://savedby.kadena.network/
I realize this is kind of abstract and harder to understand for people who aren’t devs, but I think it’s going to be huge.
We’ve seen a really significant increase in people building on Kadena in the last few months and we’re focused on creating more and more tools to help builders create safer dapps in less time on Kadena.
I think that’s a good enough overview for now.
Here’s a blog post with some details on our in-progress tools for JS developers. https://medium.com/kadena-io/first-steps-a-new-developer-experience-starts-with-kadena-js-594850bae039
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Wow, Kadena has some really great incentives for developers👌
Doug Beardsley:
Yeah, we’re firing on all cylinders working to grow the ecosystem
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Now tell us about the native coin $KDA, what are its usecases and utilities in Kadena ecosystem? Also provide us with the Tokenomics
Doug Beardsley:
The best thing to compare KDA to is ETH. KDA is our native token that powers the Kadena blockchain. Like ETH, transactions on Kadena have to pay gas with KDA.The KDA tokenomics are described here https://medium.com/kadena-io/update-to-the-kadena-token-economic-model-21e1ec18f099
One thing we did that I think will be really helpful over time is we don’t have an abrupt halvening like Bitcoin has.
As you can see from the chart there the mining rewards decrease smoothly a little bit every month over a 100+ year period.
We really wanted to design a system for stability and long-term viability.
Another noteworthy bit that’s worth pointing out is how much LESS of the total supply was allocated to insiders/investors/etc than with many other similar projects. Here’s a nice summary of that:
That data came from a bigger piece of research by Messari here: https://messari.io/pdf/smartcontracts-q3-2020.pdf
So I think we’re quite noteworthy for our community-oriented tokenomics.
Oh, on a related point, Bitcoin.com recently listed us as the most profitable PoW project out there right now. https://news.bitcoin.com/these-are-the-most-profitable-proof-of-work-algorithms-since-ethereum-moved-to-proof-of-stake/
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Kadena — Top Of The List 🚀🚀
Doug Beardsley:
Kadena miners have been near the top of ASIC profitability charts for much of the last year. https://www.asicminervalue.com/Here’s a screenshot for posterity. You can see that about half of the top 10–12 most profitable ASICs are Kadena miners.
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Lastly, what important updates and developments we’ll get in coming months and years in Kadena ecosystem?
Doug Beardsley:
We’ve got tons of exciting things in the works…First of all, in a time where most crypto companies are laying off employees in huge numbers, Kadena has been and continues to be hiring aggressively.
I think that’s one of the most telling facts about Kadena TBH
One thing I’m really excited about that we’ve been working on is a new specification for communication between dapps and wallets. We put the first draft out for public comment yesterday. https://github.com/kadena-io/KIPs/pull/29/files
This may not seem flashy but it’s going to pave the way for TONS of innovation in all areas of our ecosystem.
This is what enables things like this teaser video I tweeted awhile back:
If you’re not familiar with Kadena it might not be obvious what’s going on in that video but this tool can automatically manage the details of spreading your money across multiple chains and choosing to send your transfers on chains that are the least congested.
We also have an ecosystem incubator/accelerator called Kadena Eco (https://kadena.io/eco/) that has a grant program for onboarding new devs and projects
We think that this will be the key to fueling mass adoption and Kadena hypergrowth.
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thanks Doug for this well detailed introduction about Kadena 🤩
And that’s the wrap up of our the first part of the AMA session ✅
Doug Beardsley:
Oh, we’ve also got some really nice tools for JS devs coming soon
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Let’s now proceed to our Twitter Questions section
i hope you’re ready for that!!
Doug Beardsley:
Bring it!
Segment 2️⃣: Twitter Questions
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
1.Your mining system looks innovative but I have a question. What is the minimum hash rate limit that is required to start a mining process? What is the number of miners that Kadena requires to keep the blockchains running in the event of a power failure or blackout?
Doug Beardsley:
Ooh, great question.Like Bitcoin and other PoW blockchains, there is now minimum hash rate to mine. However, you do have to have a device that’s efficient enough to be profitable. There are a number of ASIC miners (see link above) that can mine Kadena very profitably right now.
…including a miner that was recently released by Bitmain
You do need to have one of these ASIC devices but there are some of them that are quite affordable and targeted at home miners.
One other interesting aspect to this question has to do with mining to pools.
Bitcoin miners have to mine to pools because the hash rate is so high and there’s only one block available to be mined every 10 minutes.
Because Kadena has 20 chains and will grow to even more chains in the future, miners don’t actually need to mine with a pool to be profitable. You can easily win more than one block per day with even the smaller ASICs because Kadena is generating 20 blocks every 30 seconds so there are many more opportunities to win.
I think this someting that a lot of people forget about that helps decentralization by making solo mining profitable for a lot longer.
Here’s a video for the Bitmain miner launch event
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
2.I read that, @kadena_io has CRYPTO GAS STATION” feature that allows businesses to eliminate all transaction fees for their customers. What are the CONDITIONS to be fulfilled by the business for such reduction of fees? Tell us more about this feature..
Doug Beardsley:
Oh yes, that’s a good one!Kadena’s innovative smart contract language has made it possible to set up accounts that can autonomously pay gas for certain types of transactions.
This is a really significant win for user experience IMO because it makes it so users don’t have to have KDA to do a transaction.
So imagine you want to swap kBTC for kUSD using a DEX on Kadena. On Ethereum, you have to also have ETH to pay the transaction fee. But on Kadena if you have a gas station, you don’t actually have to also hold the KDA.
I think this has the potential to really lower the barrier to entry for people using Kadena.
The gas stations can be funded by services like a DEX that earn profits in other ways and are able to cover the gas costs for their users.
Also, there’s nothing special about creating a gas station.
Anyone can do it.
Here’s an example of a transaction that creates a gas station. It really boils down to nothing more than a simple transfer to an account controlled by a special guard. https://explorer.chainweb.com/mainnet/txdetail/7sblC12aRCQ5uc1yfX-KCHZ7FgfR4pQQSXKVyIl0mlw
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
3.i saw you been collaborated with some strong projects like Chainlink, API3, and USCF so how are they gonna support the kadena ecosystem in long run and how you both parties gonna get benefitted from this relation ? if possible can you list out some results of this relationship.
Doug Beardsley:
These kinds of corporate collaborations are always covered by confidentiality agreements, so I can’t talk about details. But we’re always looking for established companies to partner with to grow the ecosystem. Like I mentioned above, Kadena Eco (https://kadena.io/eco) is where a lot of that work is happening today.
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
That’s the wind up of our twitter segment
Now Moving on to our last segment — Live Q&A
Shall we Doug?
Doug Beardsley:
Woo hoo!Hit me with your best questions! Hint…since I’m Director of Engineering I tend to look for questions more on the technical side of things. 😄
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Note that guys 😁
Lets go
Segment 3️⃣: Live QnA
(In this segment group was opened for 60 seconds and Miners sent hundreds of questions. Guest choose some best to answer)
1) LFC:
You stated Kadena Eco has a grant program for onboarding new devs and projects. Can you tell us the criteria used to onboard project and devs and how our favourite project and devs can apply?
When will the next batch of grant cohort application start?
Doug Beardsley:
There are lots of criteria of course, but the most important thing to keep in mind is that our goal is to grow the ecosystem as much as possible. So we’re going to pick projects with that in mind.
2) Itz Abhi ⚡️ ️️️️️️:
Does Kadena have a block explorer? How does Kadena deal with congestion? Why does Kadena’s public blockchain use proof of work?
Doug Beardsley:
Yes, we do have a block explorer at https://explorer.chainweb.com/ Check out my comments above about Intellisend for ways we can deal with congestion. We use PoW because it’s the most decentralized and proven consensus mechanism out there and we were able to make it scale to handle huge transaction load.
3) Esra:
Kadena is based on PoW consensus algorithm. What are the benefits for using it now as the Ethereum is shifted to PoS somedays ago. So PoW lovers will not leave that.
Will this increase users in Kadena?
Doug Beardsley:
As I mentioned above, PoW is just plain more decentralized than PoS. PoS is really at it’s core a rule-by-the-wealthy system. If the original majority stakeholders don’t sell their stake, there’s nothing you can do to influence the governance of the network.
4) R. Alberto:
DApp builders will surely find super smart contract systems more attractive on the Kadena platform. How effective are your contracts in automatically detecting bugs and how does Pact free dAppp creators from vulnerabilities in order to do more innovative work?
Doug Beardsley:
As described at our site https://savedby.kadena.network/ Kadena’s formal verification mechanisms and other features make it so that many bugs that were the cause of hacks simply can’t happen…and absolutely zero special effort on the part of the developer is required. But it also has really powerful tools for proving that your code does what you want for all possible inputs. It’s very effective at finding bugs and it has even helped us find bugs in the implementation of Pact itself.
5) Johnolofs:
What’s you’re favorite dish Doug? 😜🔥
Doug Beardsley:
My favorite is a nice Zone-proportioned fruit smoothie for breakfast.I’ve got that thing dialed in!
Hahaha
6) Manaure:
You said that your protocol continuously scales at transactions per second and this can increase depending on the chains that are added to the project. What is the speed with which Kadena currently operates and how do you plan to increase this speed in the coming months?
Doug Beardsley:
Since we have 20 chains, a good rough estimate is that we have 20x more throughput than single-chain PoW projects right now. And if that gets saturated, we’ll add more chains to increase it even more.Here’s a talk I gave that goes into a little more detail
*This segment ends here*
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Thankyou So Much Doug For your valuable answers and information about Kadena 💜
It’s a Pleasure Hosting An Ama With You
Doug Beardsley:
My pleasure, thanks for having me!
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?
Doug Beardsley:
Be sure to follow me on Twitter for tech-focused content
Ramsy | Crypto Miners:
Time To Conclude Our AMA Session
Have a nice day Doug 🥂
Follow Kadena by following links:
Website: https://www.kadena.io
Twitter: http://twitter.com/kadena_io
Discord: https://discord.io/kadena
Telegram: http://t.me/kadena_io
Medium: https://medium.com/kadena-io
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/kadena/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kadena-llc/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/kadenablockchain
