Kadena Posts Double-Digit Losses as More Layer-1 Cryptocurrencies Tank

Kadena (KDA), the native cryptocurrency of the eponymous proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain network, is down more than 10% over the last day, trading at $2.89 by press time, per CoinMarketCap.

Kadena was founded by two former JP Morgan employees–Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino–who both led JP Morgan’s Blockchain Center for Excellence, the American investment bank’s in-house blockchain team.

By combining the PoW consensus mechanism with directed acyclic graph (DAG) principles, Kadena claims it can provide the security of Bitcoin while offering high throughput that makes the blockchain usable by enterprises.

Kadena Establishes $100M Grant Program For Web3 Development

Kadena, founded by JP Morgan blockchain alumni Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, has announced a $100 million grant program for Web3 developers to build projects on its blockchain. While Martino worked as JP Morgan’s lead engineer for its open-source blockchain product, Juno, Popejoy was JP Morgan’s executive director of new products. They left JP Morgan in 2016 to start Kadena together. In a statement, Popejoy said he wants projects built on Kadena to “transform the world.” “We’re doubling down...

The price of KDA hit an all-time high of $28.25 last November amid the broader crypto market rally before dropping a significant part of its value in the following months.

Currently the 89th-largest project by market cap, Kadena is also the worst hit coin among the industry’s Top-100 largest digital currencies in the past 24 hours.

Last week, KDA hit a one-year low of $1.38 before surging to $3.40 on Sunday. Still, it went into a downward spiral again despite Monday's launch of KDSwap, a decentralized exchange (DEX) built on Kadena.

The launch was not exactly smooth, as the KDSwap team admitted in its latest blog post, with several bugs hindering trading. Issues included discrepancies among visitors to the site from different geographical locations as well as many charts not showing the correct price for KDS, the platform’s own token, among others.

According to the team, an updated version of the DEX that fixes the known bugs is already up and running, with more features like multi-asset staking and additional KDS trading pairs to be added in the coming weeks.

Layer-1 cryptocurrencies follow Kadena

Besides Kadena, several high-profile layer-1 crypto projects have taken a beating too.

Polkadot (DOT) is down 7.36% in the past 24 hours, the Near Protocol (NEAR) is down 6.2%, Celo (CELO) is down 5.62%, Fantom (FTM) is down 5.4%, while Harmony (ONE) is down 4.26% over the same period of time.

Bitcoin (BTC) is meanwhile down 2.6% in the last day, currently trading around $29,806, according to CoinMarketCap. Ethereum (ETH) is down nearly 3% over the span, changing hands at $2,027.