As Kadena continues working toward the full launch of our hybrid blockchain platform in January 2020, we’d like to share the progress we’ve made so far. In addition to reaching the business and technology milestones following our last roadmap update, we have appreciation for the industry-leading conferences and partners that have collaborated with us because they see the value in Kadena’s hybrid network. Utilizing Kadena’s open-sourced Pact smart contract language (with Formal Verification), our platform will deliver simple and secure interoperability between both public and permissioned chains. With founders Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino providing leadership gained from building J.P. Morgan’s first blockchain, Kadena is solving the scaling challenges of Bitcoin and the security issues of Ethereum.

Click here to visit Kadena’s timeline from founding through to Q1 of 2019.

In April 2019, we passed 10,000 blocks on Kadena Testnet, an early and promising signal of Kadena’s approach with parallelized Proof of Work on public blockchain. We also added support for integrated trustless SPV proofs for cross-chain interactions. Additionally, we released full Formal Verification coverage of Pact smart contract guards and capabilities.

During Consensus in May, Kadena announced a partnership with $3 billion fund USCF, a leading asset manager in alternative investments. As USCF is known for innovation in the financial industry, Kadena is working with them to explore opportunities for deploying our hybrid blockchain technology to their business. In addition to presenting at Consensus, Kadena Head of Research and Networks Monica Quaintance also spoke on stage at MIT Technology Review’s Business of Blockchain conference the same month.

During the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy in Stockholm in June, Kadena’s Monica Quaintance and Gauntlet Networks Founder & CEO Tarun Chitra presented peer-reviewed research that used agent-based simulations to validate that Kadena’s braided Proof of Work chains scale securely. On the product side, the company released Simple Payment Verification (SPV) support and updated Pact to version 3.0 with modular governance and other features.

During the summer, we released a public monitoring dashboard at the same time as Kadena Testnet v2. (The testnet dashboard has since been taken down now that we have a live block explorer.) Following up on our AWS Marketplace listing at the start of the year, we deployed the Kadena Scalable Permissioned Blockchain to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. The team also hosted a Blockchain Summer community event, featuring a panel discussion about the road to mainstream adoption with thought leaders including investor Arianna Simpson, Gauntlet’s Tarun Chitra, and Elizabeth Polanco (former Executive Director of J.P. Morgan’s blockchain payments team). Rounding out the summer was an announcement that Kadena received a grant from the Interchain Foundation to integrate Pact with the Cosmos ecosystem, an implementation we’re calling Kadenamint.

Fall of 2019 brought the beginning of our mainnet rollout. First, we released Kadena Testnet v3 and revealed our mining hash function (blake2s). Then, as promised to our mining community, we gave them initial notice of mainnet mining on October 30. To give community members visibility into block performance and other metrics, we provided the Kadena Block Explorer. To correspond with mining on Kadena’s mainnet, Anastasia Bez, Will Martino, and Monica Quaintance published our token economics model.

After mining began, Web3 Foundation and Kadena agreed to explore an implementation of Pact for the Polkadot ecosystem. Kadena would like to thank the mining community for all the feedback and support so far. As of December 3, the network has seen over 1,000,000 blocks mined by more than 10,000 GPUs (at an average hash rate between 10–15 TH/second).

To understand more about Kadena’s approach to community mining as a bootstrapping mechanism, please read the assessment by Mohamed Fouda of Token Daily. In Messari’s analysis of our mining release, they found that Kadena “ignited a frenzy among miners to join the network and develop more advanced mining tools.”

As we approach the close of the year, Kadena Founder and President Stuart Popejoy has published the Kadena 1.1 Release Schedule/Chainweb Transfers Roadmap, a near-term development schedule. He explains that we will start with a low gas limit that defaults to approximately 10 transfers per block with steady increases in capacity throughout December. On December 17, the enabling of Kadena (KDA) token transfers represents the second stage towards completing full launch. Coins earned by miners will be transferable from and to other people (peer-to-peer). We will also release a beta version of the Chainweaver wallet. The Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallet support will allow people to recover their keys from a single 12-word recovery phrase.

Thanks again to everyone in our community. Looking ahead to 2020, Kadena will fully launch our hybrid blockchain platform in January, including Pact smart contract transactions. For those interested in 2020 blockchain predictions, Forrester recently published a Forbes article that includes Kadena.

To learn more about Kadena’s technical progress, reach out to our developers on Discord or simply subscribe to our newsletter, which delivers news and updates directly to your inbox.