As one of our commitments on the Q3 roadmap, we’re providing an update on Kadena’s collaboration with Web3 Foundation to explore the implementation of our technology with Polkadot.

As part of our ongoing work with the Polkadot team, our lead language engineer Emily Pillmore developed an exciting long-term approach to extend the benefits of Pact to the Polkadot community while also furthering Pact as the standard for smart contracts: Pact Core. With Pact Core, Polkadot or any WASM-compatible platform can natively execute Pact smart contract code with the help of a minimal interpreter installed directly on-chain.

Toward this end, Kadena and Polkadot agree that the best path forward for Pact Core is to open an RFC (Request for Comment) where community members can participate in the design process. We’ve kicked off the public discussion here.

KadenaDOT: A Potential Near-Term Bridge to Polkadot

As an alternative to Pact Core, and a potentially faster integration with Polkadot, Kadena’s permissioned blockchain technology Kuro can be adapted to operate as a Polkadot parachain in a design called KadenaDOT. (Parachains are the term that Polkadot uses to describe an external system, like a blockchain, that forms a constituent member of their ecosystem.) Kuro is an evolution of J.P. Morgan’s Juno blockchain which was successfully deployed internally for the first generation of JPMCoin by Kadena’s founders. Kuro is one of the fastest enterprise-grade blockchains ever created with the built-in capacity to run Pact smart contracts.

KadenaDOT acts as a bridge technology between the Polkadot and Kadena ecosystems, offering the power of Pact smart contracts to parachain operators, while the Core Pact RFC will bring about the final goal of running Pact anywhere in the entire Polkadot network.

Request for Community Feedback

Enterprise blockchains that are a “real blockchain,” and not something masquerading as a blockchain like IBM’s Hyperledger or R3’s Corda technology, are quite rare. Real permissioned networks have all the features of a blockchain (e.g. hardened consensus, simple operation) needed for a killer layer-2 solution and they are battle-tested by some of the largest companies in the world.

As a “real” permissioned blockchain, Kuro is an excellent candidate for a parachain. KadenaDOT would be a major strategic pivot for Kuro. To help us prioritize, we want to hear your opinions on the idea of bringing KadenaDOT to market before Pact Core.

Would you use KadenaDOT? Do you think more parachains are important to Polkadot and/or to DeFi as a whole? Do you think the best way forward is using permissioned layer-2 blockchains as bridges between ecosystems?

Please join the conversation.