The Kadena Foundation, the team behind blockchain that once billed itself as a scalable proof-of-work alternative to Ethereum, said it will cease all commercial operations and dissolve its organization, citing market conditions and an inability to sustain active development.
The Kadena team “can no longer continue business operations and will cease all activity and active maintenance of the Kadena blockchain immediately,” it said in an X post.
The announcement caused KDA, Kadena’s native token, to drop more than 55% in 24 hours to below 9 cents, wiping out almost all of its five-year price action.
A small team will oversee the transition and launch a new binary node to ensure network continuity without the foundation’s operational involvement.
The Kadena blockchain will continue to function, the team noted, because it is maintained by independent miners and community developers. More than 566 million KDA remain allocated to mining rewards until 2139, and 83.7 million tokens will still be unlocked by 2029.
Still, the loss of the core development team effectively leaves the future of the chain in the hands of its community and independent ecosystem projects, creating a precarious position for a network that was once backed by prominent early investors and marketed as a hybrid public-private chain.
Kadena, founded by former JPMorgan blockchain engineers Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, launched in 2019 with the promise of scaling proof-of-work networks through a unique multi-chain “braided” architecture. It combined traditional mining with smart contract functionality and its own programming language, Pact.
At its 2021 peak, KDA was trading above $25 and the project reached a valuation of $25 billion, fueled by speculative enthusiasm for alternatives to Ethereum’s high fees. Developer activity and participation has declined in recent years as new modular and proof-of-stake blockchains have dominated funding and user attention.
