The established public chain Kadena has launched a $50 million incentive program, betting on whether RWA is the remedy or a repeat of past mistakes.

Author: Frank, PANews

Recently, the well-established public blockchain Kadena, founded in 2016, announced the launch of an incentive program of up to $50 million. This move seems aimed at regaining the spotlight in the cryptocurrency market through the currently popular RWA sector. After a period of silence, Kadena's series of new developments has attracted widespread attention in the industry. This article aims to deeply analyze Kadena's recent strategic initiatives, its past development history, and its unique technical architecture, as well as to explore whether this large-scale incentive program can bring new development opportunities and its potential in the RWA field.

Morgan Elite creates a "programmable POW" dark horse

Kadena's development process is profoundly related to traditional financial giants like JPMorgan Chase and the SEC. Kadena was co-founded by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino in 2016, both of whom previously worked at JPMorgan Chase. Before founding Kadena, Stuart Popejoy led the bank's Blockchain Center of Excellence, responsible for the development of the bank's core distributed ledger infrastructure, and created its open-source blockchain project Juno. Will Martino served as the chief engineer of the Juno project and was the technical lead at the SEC's cryptocurrency advisory committee. They were responsible for developing the first version of the infrastructure for JPMorgan's JPM Coin (a digital stablecoin for interbank circulation).

This blockchain practice experience derived from traditional financial giants gives Kadena an "enterprise-grade" or "institution-grade" 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 composed of multiple independent, concurrently running peer chains that are interconnected in a "braided" manner. Each chain mines independently and is capable of processing 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, 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 value far exceeds that of other public chains during the same period, including Solana, which is known for its speed.

With the backing of JPMorgan's prestige and technological advantages, Kadena became a star in the public chain space since its establishment. In 2021, its token reached a peak price of 27 dollars, which was more than a 100-fold increase from 0.2 dollars at the beginning of 2020, with a market capitalization that once approached 4 billion dollars. In addition, the Kadena network quickly expanded to 20 chains at 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 Medium 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 drawn the market's attention back to this established public chain. Will it begin to rebrand itself like the former EOS?

According to official sources, $25 million of the total $50 million fund pool will be specifically used to support compliant RWA tokenization projects. The remaining $25 million 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 the funded projects do not need to give up equity.

The first RWA field beneficiary of Kadena's new incentive program is CurveBlock, a UK company that received $400,000 in funding in June 2025. Founded in 2018, CurveBlock is a UK proptech startup focused on sustainable real estate investment. Background-wise, CurveBlock is the first real estate company admitted into the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS)). This also means that the reason CurveBlock was able to become Kadena's first funding recipient 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 enterprise will receive, nor has it disclosed the specific criteria for funding. As of now, only CurveBlock has been publicly announced as a supported enterprise.

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

Previously, a $100 million incentive failed, and implementing the funding plan has become a challenge.

However, 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 decreased attention, Kadena also launched an incentive program with a total amount of up to $100 million. In that incentive, Kadena funded the development and adoption of projects such as games, the 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 interest and hundreds of applications," and its "first batch of grantees included 9 projects," some of which have already "achieved extraordinary results." Looking through the subsequent quarterly summaries, it can be seen that the program gradually announced several projects, but ultimately no overall description of the incentive program was found, and no specific funding amounts were mentioned during each announcement of the funded projects.

From the performance of the data, the recent $100 million incentive program has not improved Kadena's market attention and community activity. On one hand, its price continues to decline, and on the other hand, the only visible data on the network related to TVL has dropped to several hundred thousand dollars, the lowest in 2023. As of June 13, its TVL was only $940,000, with the stablecoin market cap at approximately $180,000.

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

In addition, unlike other public chains that directly incentivize users, Kadena's incentives are more aimed at project parties. In the absence of user volume, project parties may face greater investment risks when choosing Kadena merely for uncertain incentives. Furthermore, looking 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 individuals can receive 40 KDA. Based on the current price of KDA at $0.48, users might not even earn $20 in rewards for a month of promotion, making the cost-effectiveness of such incentives seem somewhat lacking.

Therefore, although the narrative of RWA is popular and the $50 million incentive is substantial, it seems that Kadena needs to consider how to gain recognition from the market and the community in a more sincere manner. Otherwise, this time the $50 million incentive may end up being another case of much ado about nothing.