Kadena Launches $50 Million Incentive Program, Betting on Whether RWA Can Make a Comeback?

Recently, the public chain Kadena, established in 2016, announced the launch of an incentive program of up to $50 million, seemingly aiming to regain the spotlight in the cryptocurrency market through the currently popular RWA track. After a period of silence, this series of new developments from Kadena has attracted widespread attention in the industry. This article will delve into Kadena's recent strategic moves, its past development history, and its unique technological architecture, and explore whether this large-scale incentive program can bring new development opportunities and its potential in the RWA field.

The "Programmable POW" Dark Horse Created by Financial Elites

Kadena's development has deep connections with traditional financial giants. The project was co-founded by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino in 2016, both of whom previously worked at a major financial institution. Before founding Kadena, Stuart Popejoy led the institution's blockchain excellence center, responsible for the development of core distributed ledger infrastructure, and created the open-source blockchain project Juno. Will Martino served as the chief engineer of the Juno project and was the technical director on the cryptocurrency advisory committee of a regulatory agency. They participated in developing the infrastructure for the first version of the digital stablecoin of that financial institution.

This blockchain practice experience, derived from traditional financial giants, has given Kadena an "enterprise-level" or "institutional-level" design philosophy from the very beginning.

Kadena's core technological innovation lies in its unique Chainweb architecture, which is a scalable, multi-chain parallel proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Chainweb is not a single blockchain, but rather a network made up of multiple independent, concurrently running peer chains that are interconnected through a "weaving" method. Each chain mines independently and is capable of processing transactions in parallel. This design approach also significantly differs from other types of PoW chains on the market, thus positioning Kadena as the only programmable L1.

Under this design architecture, there is theoretically a very high throughput. In 2020, with the expansion of 20 chains, Kadena claimed that the theoretical TPS reached 480,000. This data value far exceeds that of other public chains at the same time, including a certain well-known public chain that is famous for its speed.

With the halo of its financial background and technological advantages, Kadena once became a star among public chains since its establishment. In 2021, its token reached a peak price of $27, a more than 100-fold increase compared to the $0.2 at the beginning of 2020, with its market capitalization approaching $4 billion at one point. In addition, the Kadena network quickly expanded to 20 chains shortly after its launch, becoming the fastest POW public chain at that time.

High-Stakes RWA: Can a $50 Million Incentive Break the Deadlock?

However, Kadena's glory faded away with the end of the bull market in 2021. Since 2021, its price has plummeted, and its market value has dropped to around $150 million. Its official blog has not been updated since 2023, and news about Kadena is rarely heard on social media.

On May 20, 2025, Kadena announced the launch of a $50 million incentive program aimed at promoting the development of Chainweb EVM, RWA tokenization, and AI-driven blockchain solutions. This news has also brought market attention back to this established public chain. Will it start to reshape its brand like a certain public chain did in the past?

According to official information, 25 million dollars of the total 50 million dollar fund pool will be specifically used to support compliant RWA tokenization projects. The remaining 25 million dollars will be used to support projects built on the Kadena multi-chain EVM-compatible network (Chainweb EVM) and AI integration projects. This funding is non-equity support, meaning that the funded projects do not need to give up equity.

The first RWA beneficiary of Kadena's new incentive program is the UK-based company CurveBlock, which received $400,000 in funding in June 2025. Founded in 2018, CurveBlock is a UK real estate technology startup focused on sustainable real estate investment. In context, CurveBlock is the first real estate company to be accepted into the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS)). This also means that the reason CurveBlock was able to become Kadena's first beneficiary is closely related to compliance.

In addition, Kadena proposed to provide not only financial support but also technical assistance, project development advice, marketing, and promotion.

However, Kadena has not specified how much funding each supported company will receive, nor has it disclosed the specific criteria for funding. As of now, the only publicly disclosed funded company is CurveBlock.

RWA has become a popular sector in the market in recent years, with many established public chains actively seeking transformation through this narrative. For example, a well-known public chain has also been expanding in this direction recently. In addition to launching incentive programs, Kadena has also developed an RWA token standard based on its native smart contract language Pact, which references Ethereum's EIP-3643. This standard aims to enforce on-chain permissions and regulatory controls, supporting compliant asset issuance, trading, and redemption.

With a $100 million incentive faltering, funding plans become a challenge

However, the $50 million incentive program launched by Kadena is not the first of its kind. In 2022, during a period of overall market decline and reduced attention, Kadena had also launched an incentive program totaling up to $100 million. In that incentive program, Kadena provided funding for the development and adoption of projects such as gaming, metaverse, NFTs, Web3, DeFi, and DAOs within the Kadena ecosystem.

According to Kadena's official annual review at the end of 2022, the $100 million incentive program received "overwhelming attention and hundreds of applications," with "a total of 9 projects being funded in the first batch," some of which have already "achieved extraordinary results." Looking through the subsequent quarterly summaries, it can be seen that the program has gradually announced some projects, but ultimately no overall situation report regarding the incentive program was found, and specific funding amounts were not mentioned when each funded project was announced.

From the performance of the data, this $100 million incentive plan has not been able to increase the market attention and community activity of Kadena. On one hand, its price is still on a downward trend, and on the other hand, the only visible data related to TVL on the network has fallen to several hundred thousand dollars at its lowest point in 2023. As of June 13, its TVL was only $940,000, and the market capitalization of stablecoins was about $180,000.

Returning to the current $50 million incentive program, the market cycle launched is also very similar to that of 2022. Both occurred after the first peak of a bull market. However, we currently cannot predict whether the subsequent market cycle will replicate the overall bear market of 2021~2022 or open up a new and larger market cycle. Nevertheless, to some extent, if Kadena's incentive measures encounter a market trend similar to that of 2022, it may once again face a "bamboo basket fetching water" situation.

In addition, unlike other public chains that directly incentivize users, Kadena's incentives are more focused on project parties. In the absence of user volume, project parties may face greater investment risks when choosing Kadena solely for uncertain incentives. Looking closely at some of the user-oriented promotional plans launched by Kadena, the content of the incentives involves at least 4 weeks of promotion, followed by a lottery, where 50 lucky winners can receive 40 KDA. Based on the current price of KDA at $0.48, a user's month-long promotion may ultimately yield rewards of less than $20, which makes the cost-effectiveness of such incentives seem somewhat inadequate.

Therefore, although the narrative of RWA is popular and the $50 million incentive is substantial, it seems that what Kadena needs to think about right now is how to gain market and community recognition in a more sincere way. Otherwise, this $50 million incentive may once again end up being a case of much ado about nothing.