🚨 Exit strategy

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For sure, there are still signs that we are in a bull market. Even if calling the top is now so passé.

Good luck deciding whether the sticky situation with Kadena is bullish or bearish, however. But here goes.

Users on X figured Kadena’s account had been hacked when it suddenly announced that the project was immediately shutting down, despite an EVM testnet launching in June.

“We regret that because of market conditions we are unable to continue to promote and support the adoption of this unique decentralized offering,” Kadena wrote.

Kadena’s coin tanked by more than half in response, going from a tiny $70 million market cap to an even tinier $29 million right now. That’s down from an all-time high of close to $4 billion during peak bull market in 2021.

Turns out, Kadena had not been hacked.  From now on, the network will be operated only by independent miners and noderunners, and the group hopes to transition governance and maintenance to the remaining community.

“End of an era :(. I've been an engineer on this project for the past 4 years. I can't really put into words how much of my life has gone into Kadena. How many amazing people I've met and worked with throughout the years. The ups and downs of it all has been a ride,” wrote Jose Cardona.

Launched in 2019, Kadena has had ups and downs which, as Jose put it, are indeed chaotic once you dig into its trajectory over the years.

The project styled itself as the result of an in-house blockchain pilot from JPMorgan, spun out by some former execs. And the network itself is (or was?) somewhat interesting as a technical curiosity: Instead of one longest proof-of-work chain determining the current state, Kadena ran on a so-called Chainweb which integrated multiple PoW chains mined in parallel. 

If each chain could handle about 10 TPS — like Bitcoin — then a Chainweb populated by 20 chains could hypothetically handle 200 TPS. 

Which is cool, I guess, but the team would go on to push fanciful numbers like 480,000 transactions per second — more than double the highest maximum theoretical limit on Chainspect, and over seven times that of Solana’s.

That figure was the result of a test that included two private, permissioned chains integrated into Chainweb. So, far less impressive all things considered (validating transactions with a single machine can indeed boost TPS significantly — just look at MegaETH).

Mix that with some goofy tokenomics invoking Bitcoin but with more centralization and mutability: Mining rewards are supposed to be paid out for another 120 years, but almost one-third of the supply was to be ultimately split across a platform treasury and early investors/contributors (there’s no such thing in Bitcoin).

Not to mention that emission schedule was notably changed in 2021 at the whim of project insiders. 

The team later faced community allegations of self-dealing in 2022, when an official DEX project was accused of using investor funds to buy massive amounts of its own token during a public sale.

All this to say, good riddance? Only that projects usually wind down like this during deep bear markets, and not when coins are close to all-time highs. But it’s not like Kadena ever recovered from the last bull market. 

The naive read here is that it’s a blessing that we might not have one more zombie chain in Kadena, forever leeching bagholders of their attention, patience and capital. 

Then again, something tells me that the leeching has already happened.

🥷💎 Runaway favorites

While we all wait for the inevitable Netflix documentary about this past weekend’s robbery at the Louvre, there is, of course, a Polymarket playing out.

The robbers are still on the run, having broken into the Apollo Gallery by smashing windows and cutting open cases with disc cutters on Sunday. 

They made off with eight items of precious jewelry, including emerald earrings worn by Napoleon’s second wife Marie-Louise, altogether worth $102 million. 

Polymarket has the thieves’ probability of evading capture until New Year’s Eve at 48%. 

Which, I have to imagine would be a helluva confidence boost if they’re checking Polymarket. Hey, maybe they’re even betting, too.

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Katana was built by answering a core question: What if a chain contributed revenue back into the ecosystem to drive growth and yield?

We direct revenue back to DeFi participants for consistently higher yields.

Katana is pioneering concepts like Productive TVL (the portion of assets are actually doing work), Chain Owned Liquidity (permanent liquidity owned by Katana to maintain stability), and VaultBridge (putting bridged assets to work generating extra yield for active participants).

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