Kadena’s Stuart Popejoy on Building a Scalable Public Blockchain
When taking its blockchain public, “there was an adjustment period where we had to learn to love crypto,” Kadena founder and CEO Stuart Popejoy said. Although the admission seemed technical rather than emotional, he continued, “The people who participate in your ecosystem really are your network and that is obviously not a very enterprise-y thing, that’s very grassroots.”
The merits of private blockchains remain a topic of ongoing debate. However, Kadena transitioned from a private JPMorgan blockchain in 2016 to a public spinoff in 2020, taking Popejoy — a former JPMorgan executive — with it.
“There was some innovation in private blockchain for a second, and that kind of represents us. However, there was this idea that we needed something […] that could serve business-scale needs, and that’s how we arrived at our version of a public blockchain,” Popejoy explained during an interview with Cointelegraph.
He added, “This stuff is never going to take off if it can’t handle industrial loads.”
Kadena offers horizontal scaling as a feature. “We focused on safe smart contracts and scalability as a safety measure, in the sense of risk management, like if you have to wait a day for your Bitcoin transaction to go through,” when the system is backed up, Popejoy stated. Throughout the discussion, he frequently referenced Bitcoin.
“We are very thrilled by the fundamental design of Bitcoin,” he said. “We believe that the real problem with proof of work is not that it uses energy, but that it uses energy inefficiently.” He elaborated, saying, “Bitcoin: there’s all this energy being used and it’s not improving the system. It’s the same slow system it was 10 years ago.”
Like Bitcoin, Kadena employs a proof-of-work consensus mechanism. “But it scales it so that we actually have horizontal scaling for proof of work,” Popejoy noted. “We like to say, and it’s true, because I know how this stuff actually works, we could settle the entire U.S. stock market today, daily, on Kadena.”
While not everyone agrees with that perspective, Popejoy pointed out that clawbacks can be programmed into smart contracts and security tokens.
Kadena currently operates 20 chains running in parallel, but he emphasized that creating more chains would still utilize the same amount of energy.
The primary concern with proof-of-work, according to Popejoy, is the distribution of money. “Proof of stake produces money and then it uses ownership of that money to determine who runs the system,” he explained. Conversely, he argued, “Proof-of-work is the fairest distribution for getting coins into people’s hands.”
