KDA Concepts

With most blockchains, accounts are modeled as simply public/private keypairs (i.e. your account name is the same as your public key). This “one-to-one” model keeps things simple, but runs into problems when you want to use multiple keys for a single account, such as with jointly-owned or majority-ruled accounts.

Kadena natively supports multiple keys governing the same account name, and thus the distinction between “keys” and “account name” becomes important.

In simple terms, “account name” refers to your unique name on the blockchain, and “keys” refers to the public/private keypairs that grant access to your account. In other words, it is the keys that determine ownership of an account.

Some Kadena account examples:

Unnamed account — account name is the same as a single public key

Account Name

Public Key ("Keyset")

Named account — account name is some memorable user-defined string

Account Name

Public Key ("Keyset")

Multi-signature account — a single account is governed by multiple keys

Account Name

Public Keys ("Keyset")

All Kadena accounts are comprised of 3 parts:

“Predicate” is something that determines how many signatures are required to transfer coins from the account. The three built-in predicate options are keys-all, keys-any, and keys-2. Most KDA holders will never see, or even know about, their account’s predicate because they will have a traditional single-key account wherein keys-all and keys-any do the same thing. However, the predicate becomes more important with multi-signature accounts. For example, the keys-2 predicate requires that at least 2 keys in the account must sign in order to authorize a transaction.

If you would like to learn more about keys and accounts in Kadena, check out this article.

Kadena’s major breakthrough is that it has solved scalability in Proof of Work blockchains. To achieve this, Kadena has braided together multiple Bitcoin-like chains. This means that Kadena is not just a single blockchain, but rather it is comprised of several interconnected blockchains. Therefore, we say Kadena is a multi-chain network. To visualize how this works, check out this 3-minute video.

For users, this means that any account you create will only exist on that chain. If you would like to own a particular account name across all chains then you must be the first person to create that account on each chain.

Important: The account name alone does not determine ownership. The keyset associated with an account determines ownership. You could own account Alice on chain ID 0, and someone else could own account Alice on chain ID 5.

The key takeaway is that you should pay attention to the chain on which you are transacting.

As the title suggests, there are 2 main ways to move KDA; on the same chain or across chains.

The key takeaway here is related to gas—the small fee that users pay in order to have their transactions included in a block.

Cross-chain transfers interact with two different blockchains, so sending KDA from one chain to another requires two separate transactions, one on each chain.

The good news is that cross-chain transfers sent to a recipient with no funds are not necessarily lost forever, they are just incomplete transfers. Anyone with funds on the destination chain can help to pay the required gas, allowing the transfer to finish as intended. Further, Kadena has set-up gas stations which will cover the cost of gas on the destination chain. One such gas station can be accessed at this page which provides an interface for finishing cross-chain transfers.

If you would like to learn more about transfers in Kadena, check out this article.