Kadena Launches $50 Million Incentive Program, Betting on RWA for Breakthrough

Recently, the public blockchain Kadena, established in 2016, announced the launch of an incentive program of up to $50 million. This move seems aimed at regaining the spotlight in the cryptocurrency market through the currently popular RWA sector. After a period of dormancy, 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, as well as explore whether this large-scale incentive program can bring new development opportunities and its potential in the RWA field.

Financial Elites Create "Programmable POW" Dark Horse

Kadena's development history has a profound connection with traditional financial giants. Founded in 2016 by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, both of whom have a financial background, Kadena's two founders had significant experience in the finance sector. Before founding Kadena, Stuart Popejoy led the blockchain excellence center of a major bank, responsible for the development of the bank's core distributed ledger infrastructure and creating its open-source blockchain project. Will Martino served as the chief engineer for the project and was the technical director of the cryptocurrency advisory committee at a regulatory agency. They were responsible for developing the infrastructure for the first version of a major bank's digital stablecoin.

This blockchain practice experience, which originates from traditional financial giants, gives Kadena 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 a network formed by multiple independent, concurrently running peer chains connected through a "weaving" method. Each chain mines independently and can process transactions in parallel. This design approach significantly differs from other types of PoW chains on the market, and thus, Kadena positions itself as the only programmable L1.

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

With the halo of its financial background and technical advantages, Kadena became a star among public chains since its establishment. In 2021, its token reached a peak price of $27, which was more than 100 times higher than the $0.2 at the beginning of 2020, with a market cap nearing $4 billion at one point. In addition, the Kadena network quickly expanded to 20 chains shortly after its 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 plummeted, and its market value has dropped to around 150 million dollars. 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 also brought the market's attention back to this established public chain. Will it also begin to reshape its brand like a certain public chain did in the past?

According to official information, $25 million of the total $50 million fund pool will be specifically used to support compliant RWA tokenization projects. The remaining $25 million 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 the funded projects do not need to give up equity.

The first RWA domain beneficiary of Kadena's new incentive program is the UK-based company CurveBlock, which received $400,000 in funding in June 2025. Founded in 2018, CurveBlock is a UK proptech startup focused on sustainable real estate investment. In terms of background, CurveBlock is the first real estate company to be accepted into the UK's Digital Securities Sandbox (DSS)). This also means that the reason CurveBlock was able to become Kadena's first funding recipient 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 the exact amount of funding that each supported company will receive, nor has it disclosed the specific criteria for funding. So far, the only publicly disclosed supported company is CurveBlock.

RWA is a popular sector in the market in recent years, and many established public chains are actively seeking transformation through this narrative. For example, a certain public chain is also expanding in this direction recently. 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 previous $100 million incentive failed, and the funding plan has become a difficult problem.

However, the $50 million incentive program 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 program totaling up to $100 million. In that incentive, Kadena funded the development and adoption of projects such as games, the metaverse, NFTs, Web3, DeFi, and DAOs within the Kadena ecosystem.

According to Kadena's official annual review at the end of 2022, the $100 million incentive program received "overwhelming interest and hundreds of applications", with "a total of 9 projects funded in the first batch", some of which have already "achieved extraordinary results". Looking through the subsequent quarterly summaries, it can be seen that the program has successively announced some projects, but ultimately no overall statement about the incentive program was found, and no specific funding amounts were mentioned during each announcement of the funded projects.

From the performance data, the $100 million incentive plan has not been able to enhance Kadena's market attention and community activity. On one hand, its price continues to decline, while on the other hand, the only visible data online related to TVL has plummeted to several hundred thousand dollars at its lowest point in 2023. As of June 13, its TVL stood at only $940,000, with the stablecoin market cap around $180,000.

Returning to the current $50 million incentive program, the launched market cycle is also very 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 and larger market cycle. Nevertheless, to some extent, if Kadena's incentive measures encounter a market trend similar to that of 2022, it may once again face a "basket of water" situation.

In addition, unlike other public chains that directly incentivize users, Kadena's incentives are more aimed at project parties. In the absence of user volume, project parties may face greater investment risks when choosing Kadena solely for uncertain incentives. Looking closely at some of the user-oriented promotion plans launched by Kadena, the incentive involves 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, the user's promotion over a month may not even yield a reward of $20. This cost-effectiveness of the incentives seems somewhat lacking.

Therefore, although the narrative of RWA is popular and the $50 million incentive is substantial, it seems that what Kadena needs to consider right now is how to gain recognition from the market and the community in a more sincere manner. Otherwise, this $50 million incentive may again end up being a case of much ado about nothing.