Kadena (KDA) is a proof-of-work blockchain that seeks to offer a scalable version of Bitcoin. It combines the proof-of-work consensus mechanism from Bitcoin with directed acyclic graph (DAG) principles. Kadena's unique infrastructure is decentralized and built for mass adoption due to its multi-chain approach. It aims to provide the security of Bitcoin while offering high throughput, making the blockchain usable for enterprises and entrepreneurs. Kadena also seeks to support global financial systems with industrial scalability and can be scaled as necessary. It aims to maintain energy efficiency at scale and deliver more transactions with the same energy input. Kadena also offers crypto gas stations, which aim to allow businesses to pay for their customers' gas fees, potentially removing a significant barrier in adopting blockchains for business.

Kadena achieves its unique functionality by braiding chains together, meaning it offers not one but several separate blockchains that all work simultaneously and asynchronously to validate transactions. This allows Kadena to mint multiple blocks simultaneously, thus increasing its throughput. This also increases security by reducing an attacker's time between block confirmations. Kadena uses a directed acyclic graph structure to scale from one proof-of-work blockchain to a large number of blockchains. However, its DAG structure is fixed and multi-channel, meaning Kadena's blockchains only communicate with three peer chains instead of randomly confirming transactions. This seeks to improve real-world performance and scalability. Kadena can scale as required by the needs of its users, but the main limitation is adoption, as scaling and adding additional blockchains requires the network to undergo a hard fork.

Kadena's unique features and flexibility seek to support a wide range of use cases. It can potentially power global financial systems due to its industrial scalability. Its unique architecture makes it a platform that seeks to deliver increased energy efficiency as transactions per second (TPS) scales. Kadena also offers the first crypto gas station, which aims to allow businesses to eliminate all transaction fees for their customers, potentially removing a key barrier to mass adoption of decentralized applications (dApps). Furthermore, Kadena's smart contract language, Pact, is human-readable and specifically built for blockchains with powerful security features, making it suitable for creating safer smart contracts.

Kadena was founded in 2016 by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino. Stuart Popejoy led JPMorgan's Emerging Blockchain group before founding Kadena and has 15 years of experience building trading systems and infrastructure in finance. Will Martino was the Lead Engineer for JPMorgan's blockchain prototype Juno and led the Securities and Exchange Committee's Cryptocurrency Steering Committee and Qualitative Analytics Unit. Another key persona in founding Kadena was Dr. Stuart Haber, who is a frequently cited author in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Kadena received funding from a variety of venture capitalists.