Kadena Launches $50 Million Incentive Program, Betting on RWA to Seek New Opportunities

Recently, the public blockchain Kadena, established in 2016, announced the launch of an incentive program of up to $50 million, seemingly aimed at regaining market attention through the currently popular RWA sector. 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 technical architecture, as well as explore whether this large-scale incentive program can bring new development opportunities and its potential in the RWA field.

The "Programmable POW" Innovator Originating from Financial Giants

Kadena's development is deeply linked to traditional financial giants and regulatory agencies. The company was co-founded by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino in 2016, both of whom previously worked at a large 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 for the Juno project and was the technical lead on the cryptocurrency advisory board of a regulatory agency. They were involved in developing the infrastructure for the first version of the digital stablecoin of that financial institution.

This experience in blockchain practices originating from traditional financial giants gives 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 a network formed by multiple independent, concurrently running peer chains that are interconnected in a "weaving" manner. Each chain mines independently and can process transactions in parallel. This design approach is significantly different from other types of POW chains on the market, thus, Kadena positions itself as the only programmable L1.

Under this design architecture, it theoretically has extremely high throughput. In 2020, with the expansion of 20 chains, Kadena claimed that its theoretical TPS reached 480,000. This figure far exceeds that of other public chains during the same period, including a certain high-performance public chain known for its speed.

With the halo of its financial background and technological advantages, Kadena became a star among public chains shortly after its establishment. In 2021, its token price peaked at $27, skyrocketing over 100 times from $0.2 at the beginning of 2020, with its market capitalization once nearing $4 billion. Additionally, the Kadena network quickly expanded to 20 chains at its launch, becoming the fastest POW public chain at that time.

High-Stakes RWA: Can 50 Million Incentives Break the Deadlock?

However, Kadena's glory faded away with the end of the bull market in 2021. Since 2021, its price has plummeted significantly, and its market capitalization has dropped to around 150 million USD. Its official blog has not been updated since 2023, and there has been little news about Kadena 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 the market's attention back to this established public chain. Will it also begin to rebrand itself like some other public chains?

According to official information, 25 million dollars from the total funding pool of 50 million dollars 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) as well as AI integration projects. This funding is non-equity support, meaning that the funded projects do not need to give up equity.

The first RWA funding recipient of Kadena's new incentive program is CurveBlock, a UK company that received $400,000 in funding in June 2025. Established in 2018, CurveBlock is a UK real estate tech startup focused on sustainable real estate investment. In terms of background, CurveBlock is the first real estate company admitted to the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS)). This also means that CurveBlock's ability to become Kadena's first funding recipient is closely linked to compliance.

In addition, Kadena proposed that besides providing financial support, it would also offer technical assistance, project development advice, marketing and promotion, etc.

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

RWA is a popular track in the market in recent years, and many established public chains are actively seeking transformation through this narrative. For example, a certain 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.

Previous $100 million incentive failed, funding plan becomes a difficult problem

It is worth noting that the $50 million incentive program launched by Kadena is not the first of its kind. In 2022, during a phase of overall market decline and reduced attention, Kadena also launched an incentive program with a total amount of up to $100 million to fund the development and adoption of projects such as gaming, metaverse, NFT, Web3, DeFi, and DAO 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 funded in the first batch," some of which have already "achieved remarkable success." Looking through the subsequent quarterly summaries, it can be seen that the program has gradually announced some projects, but ultimately no overall description of the incentive program has been found, and no specific funding amounts have been mentioned during each announcement of the funded projects.

From the data performance perspective, this $100 million incentive program has not been able to enhance Kadena's market attention and community activity. On one hand, its price is still on a downward trend, while on the other hand, the only visible data on the network shows that the TVL has dropped to several hundred thousand dollars at its lowest point in 2023. As of June 13, its TVL was only $940,000, and the market value of stablecoins was about $180,000.

Returning to the current $50 million incentive program, the launched market cycle is extremely similar to that of 2022. Both occurred after the first peak of a bull market. However, we are currently unable to 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, Kadena's incentive measures may face another challenge if it encounters a market trend similar to that of 2022.

In addition, unlike other public chains that directly incentivize users, Kadena's incentives are more aimed at project parties. In the absence of a user base, project parties may face greater investment risks by choosing Kadena solely for uncertain incentives. Looking closely at some of the user-oriented promotional plans launched by Kadena, the incentive 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 dollars, the user's promotion over a month may not even yield a reward of 20 dollars, which makes the cost-effectiveness of this incentive seem somewhat lacking.

Therefore, although the narrative of RWA is popular and the $50 million incentive is substantial, it seems that what Kadena needs to consider right now is how to gain recognition from the market and the community in a more sincere way. Otherwise, this time the $50 million incentive may face challenges that are difficult to implement.