Kadena Token Crashes as Company Behind Network Says It's Closing Up Shop

The company behind the Kadena blockchain announced Tuesday that it is shutting down—and while the decentralized blockchain will remain online, the KDA token tied to it has quickly plummeted in price following the news.

The Kadena organization wrote on X that it "is no longer able to continue business operations and will be ceasing all business activity and active maintenance of the Kadena blockchain immediately."

Traders reacted swiftly to the news, with the price of KDA currently down more than 47% as of this writing at a price of $0.121. That's down more than 99% from the all-time high price of $27.64 set in 2021, according to data from CoinGecko.

"We are tremendously grateful to everybody who has participated in this journey with us. We regret that because of market conditions, we are unable to continue to promote and support the adoption of this unique decentralized offering," the project posted on X.

It added: "The Kadena blockchain is not owned or operated by the company. As a thoroughly decentralized proof-of-work smart-contract blockchain, the network is operated by independent miners, while on-chain smart contracts and protocols are governed independently by their maintainers."

According to the statement, the developers “will shortly provide a new binary that ensures uninterrupted operation without our involvement, and will be encouraging all node operators to upgrade as soon as possible.”

The network was founded by a pair of JP Morgan veterans, Stuart Popejoy and William Martino, who had helped develop the financial giant's first foray into blockchain. The project's founders helped the bank work on other blockchain-related projects but then left to develop their own independent project, with the Kadena mainnet going online in January 2020.

Using a proof-of-work consensus mechanism like major cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Dogecoin, Kadena sold itself as "the blockchain for business." The project's founders said in 2020 that it could be bigger than the oldest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and more trustworthy than Ethereum.

Despite having a corporate headquarters in New York with employees, the Kadena team said that miners were scattered across the globe to give the project a real decentralized nature.

Kadena even debuted a $100 million grant program for Web3 developers to build projects on its blockchain back in 2022, joining other crypto projects like Solana and Ethereum. 

But the project seemingly failed to live up to the hype and its native coin, KDA, has a much smaller 24-hour trading volume than major coins and tokens—just a little over $48 million, according to CoinGecko. Bitcoin and Ethereum, by contrast, have rolling daily volumes of over $95.6 billion and $42.9 billion, respectively. 

Decrypt reached out to Kadena to ask for more details but did not immediately receive a response.

Editor's note: This story was updated after publication with additional details.