When taking its blockchain public, “there was an adjustment period where we had to learn to love crypto,” Kadena founder and CEO Stuart Popejoy said. The admission sounded more like a technical adjustment than a surge of emotion on his lips, but he added, “The people who participate in your ecosystem really are your network and that is obviously not a very enterprise-y thing, that’s very grassroots.”
The merits of private blockchains remain a matter of debate, but Kadena transitioned from a private JPMorgan blockchain in 2016 to a public spinoff in 2020, taking Popejoy, former a JPMorgan executive, with it.
“There was some innovation in private blockchain for a second, and that kind of represents us.” However, “there was this idea that we needed something […] that could serve business-scale needs, and that’s how we arrived at our version of a public blockchain,” Popejoy said in an interview with Cointelegraph, adding:
Kadena has horizontal scaling as a feature. “We focused on safe smart contracts and scalability as a safety thing, in the sense of risk management, like if you have to wait a day for your Bitcoin transaction go through,” when the system is backed up, Popejoy said.
Popejoy mentioned Bitcoin frequently. He said:
“We believe that the real problem with proof of work is not that it uses energy, it’s that it uses energy inefficiently,” he added. “Bitcoin: there’s all this energy being used and it’s not improving the system. It’s the same slow system it was 15 years ago.”
Related: The blockchain trilemma: Can it ever be tackled?
Like Bitcoin, Kadena uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, “but it scales it so that we actually have horizontal scaling for proof of work,” Popejoy said. “We like to say, and it’s true,
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