Kadena launches a $50 million incentive program, betting on whether RWA can reshape the position of public chains?

Recently, the public blockchain Kadena, founded in 2016, announced an incentive program of up to $50 million, seemingly aiming to regain market attention through the currently popular RWA sector. After a period of silence, this series of new developments from Kadena has attracted widespread attention in the industry. This article will delve into Kadena's recent strategic initiatives, its past development history, and its unique technical architecture, exploring whether this large-scale incentive program can bring new development opportunities and its potential in the RWA field.

The "Programmable POW" Dark Horse from Financial Giants

Kadena's development history has deep roots in traditional finance. The project was co-founded by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino in 2016, both of whom had previously worked at a large financial institution. Before founding Kadena, Stuart Popejoy led the blockchain excellence center at that institution, responsible for developing core distributed ledger infrastructure, and created the open-source blockchain project Juno. Will Martino served as the chief engineer for the Juno project and was the technical lead on the cryptocurrency advisory board of a regulatory agency. They were involved in developing the infrastructure for the first version of a digital stablecoin circulated within that financial institution.

This blockchain practice experience, stemming from traditional financial giants, endows Kadena with an "enterprise-level" or "institutional-level" design philosophy from the very beginning.

Kadena's core technological innovation lies in its unique Chainweb architecture, which is a scalable, multi-chain parallel proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Chainweb is not a single blockchain, but rather a network formed by multiple independent, concurrently running peer chains interconnected through a "weaving" method. Each chain mines independently and can process transactions in parallel. This design also significantly differs from other types of PoW chains on the market, which is why Kadena positions itself as the only programmable L1.

Under this design architecture, there is theoretically a very high throughput. In 2020, with the expansion of 20 chains, Kadena claimed that the theoretical TPS reached 480,000. This data value far exceeds that of other public chains during the same period, including a well-known public chain that is famous for its speed.

With the halo of its financial background and technological advantages, Kadena once became a star among public chains since its establishment. In 2021, its token reached a peak price of $27, which was over 100 times higher than the $0.2 at the beginning of 2020, with a market cap that once approached $4 billion. In addition, the Kadena network quickly expanded to 20 chains in its early launch, becoming the fastest POW public chain at that time.

High-Stakes RWA: Can a 50 Million Incentive Break the Deadlock?

However, Kadena's glory faded away with the end of the bull market in 2021. Since 2021, its price has significantly declined, and its market capitalization has dropped to around $150 million. Its official blog has not been updated since 2023, and there has been little news about Kadena on social media.

On May 20, 2025, Kadena announced the launch of a $50 million incentive program aimed at promoting the development of Chainweb EVM, RWA tokenization, and AI-driven blockchain solutions. This news has once again brought the market's attention to this public chain. Will it also begin to reshape its brand like a certain well-known public chain did in the past?

According to official information, 25 million USD of the total 50 million USD fund pool will be specifically used to support compliant RWA tokenization projects. The remaining 25 million USD will be used to support projects built on the Kadena multi-chain EVM-compatible network (Chainweb EVM) and AI integration projects. This funding is non-equity support, meaning that the funded projects do not need to relinquish equity.

The first RWA beneficiary of Kadena's new incentive program is CurveBlock, a UK company that received $400,000 in funding in June 2025. Founded in 2018, CurveBlock is a UK PropTech startup focused on sustainable real estate investment. From a background perspective, CurveBlock is the first real estate company accepted into the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS)). This also means that the reason CurveBlock was able to become Kadena's first funded entity is closely related to compliance.

In addition, Kadena proposed to provide not only financial support but also technical assistance, project development advice, marketing, and promotion.

However, Kadena has not specified how much each funded company will receive, nor has it disclosed the specific criteria for funding. As of now, the only publicly disclosed funded company is CurveBlock.

RWA is a popular track in the market in recent years, and many established public chains are actively seeking transformation through this narrative. For example, a well-known public chain has also recently expanded in this direction. In addition to launching incentive programs, Kadena has also recently developed an RWA token standard based on its native smart contract language Pact, which references Ethereum's EIP-3643. This standard aims to enforce on-chain permissions and regulatory controls, supporting compliant asset issuance, trading, and redemption.

The $100 million incentive failed, and the funding plan has become a challenge.

It is worth noting that the $50 million incentive plan launched by Kadena is not the first of its kind. In 2022, during a period of overall market decline and reduced attention, Kadena also launched an incentive plan totaling up to $100 million. In that incentive, Kadena provided funding for the development and adoption of projects such as gaming, metaverse, NFTs, Web3, DeFi, and DAOs within the Kadena ecosystem.

According to Kadena's official year-end review in late 2022, the $100 million incentive program received "overwhelming interest and hundreds of applications," with "a total of 9 projects being funded in the first batch," some of which have already "achieved extraordinary success." Looking through the subsequent quarterly summaries, it can be seen that the program has gradually announced some projects, but ultimately no overall description of the incentive program could be found, and the specific funding amounts were not mentioned during each announcement of the funded projects.

From the performance of the data, this $100 million incentive plan has not managed to enhance Kadena's market attention and community activity. On one hand, its price continues to decline, while on the other hand, the only observable data on the network, related to TVL, fell to a minimum of several hundred thousand dollars in 2023. As of June 13, its TVL was only $940,000, and the market value of stablecoins was approximately $180,000.

Returning to the current $50 million incentive plan, the market cycle launched is also extremely similar to that of 2022. Both occurred after the first peak of a bull market. However, we cannot predict whether the subsequent market cycle will replicate the overall bear market of 2021-2022 or open up a new, larger market cycle. Nevertheless, to some extent, if Kadena's incentive measures encounter a market trend similar to that of 2022, it may lead to yet another "bamboo basket fetching water."

In addition, unlike other public chains that directly incentivize users, Kadena's incentives are more directed towards project parties. In the absence of a user base, project parties may face greater investment risks when choosing Kadena solely for uncertain incentives. A closer look at some of the user-oriented promotional plans launched by Kadena reveals that the incentives involve at least 4 weeks of promotion followed by a lottery, where 50 lucky winners can receive 40 KDA. Based on the current price of KDA at $0.48, a user's one-month promotion may not even yield a reward of $20, making the cost-effectiveness of such incentives seem somewhat questionable.

Therefore, although the narrative around RWA is popular and the $50 million incentive is substantial, it seems that Kadena needs to consider how to gain market and community recognition in a more sincere way. Otherwise, this time's $50 million incentive may end up being just a lot of noise with little impact.