The Kadena Foundation, the team behind the blockchain once touted as a scalable proof-of-work alternative to Ethereum, said it would cease all business operations and dissolve its organization, citing market conditions and its inability to maintain active development.
The Kadena team “is no longer able to continue its business operations and will immediately cease all active activity and maintenance of the Kadena blockchain,” it said in an X article.
The announcement caused KDA, Kadena’s native token, to fall more than 55% in 24 hours to less than 9 cents, erasing almost all of its five-year price action.
A small team will oversee the transition and release a new binary node to ensure network continuity without operational involvement from the foundation.
The Kadena blockchain itself will continue to function, the team noted, because it is maintained by independent miners and community developers. Over 566 million KDA remains allocated to mining rewards until 2139, and 83.7 million tokens are still expected to be unlocked by 2029.
Nonetheless, the loss of the core development team effectively leaves the channel’s future in the hands of its independent community and ecosystem projects, creating a precarious position for a network once backed by prominent early-stage investors and marketed as a hybrid public-private channel.
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 features and its own programming language, Pact.
At its peak in 2021, KDA traded above $25 and the project reached a valuation of $25 billion, driven by speculative enthusiasm for alternatives to Ethereum’s high fees. Developer activity and participation have declined in recent years as new proof-of-stake and modular blockchains dominated funding and user attention.
