Kadena Launches $50 Million Initiative Focused on RWA Development

The public chain project Kadena, established in 2016, recently announced the launch of an incentive program worth up to $50 million, aiming to attract market attention once again through the currently popular RWA track. This move has sparked widespread discussion in the industry. This article will delve into Kadena's strategic layout, development history, and technical characteristics, exploring whether this large-scale incentive can bring new development opportunities and its potential in the RWA field.

Blockchain Projects Originating from Financial Giants

Kadena was co-founded by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino in 2016, both of whom have backgrounds in financial technology. Stuart Popejoy was responsible for the development of core distributed ledger infrastructure for a large bank, while Will Martino served as the chief engineer on related projects and worked on the cryptocurrency advisory committee for regulatory bodies. This blockchain practice experience rooted in traditional finance gives Kadena an "enterprise-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 composed of multiple independent, simultaneously running peer chains that are interconnected in a "woven" manner. Each chain mines independently and can process transactions in parallel. Based on this design, Kadena claims to be the only programmable L1 public chain.

In theory, the Chainweb architecture has extremely high throughput. In 2020, with the expansion to 20 chains, Kadena claimed its theoretical TPS reached 480,000, far exceeding other public chain projects at the time. With its technological advantages and background, Kadena once became a star project in the public chain field. In 2021, its token price peaked at $27, increasing more than 100 times compared to early 2020, with a market capitalization that approached $4 billion at one point.

Betting on RWA: Can 50 million in incentives turn the tide?

However, as the bull market of 2021 came to an end, Kadena's brilliance gradually faded. Its price plummeted significantly, and its market value fell to around $150 million. The frequency of updates on official social media also noticeably decreased.

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. Of this, $25 million will be specifically allocated to support compliant RWA tokenization projects, while the remaining $25 million will support projects built on the Kadena multi-chain EVM-compatible network and AI integration projects.

The first RWA field beneficiary of Kadena's new incentive program is the UK-based company CurveBlock, which received a funding of $400,000 in June 2025. Founded in 2018, CurveBlock is a UK real estate tech startup focused on sustainable real estate investment and is the first real estate company to be accepted into the UK's digital securities sandbox.

In addition to financial support, Kadena has also committed to providing technical assistance, project development advice, marketing and promotion support, and more. However, Kadena has not yet disclosed the specific amounts and funding criteria for each funded company, and currently, the only publicly funded company is CurveBlock.

To support the RWA development strategy, Kadena has recently developed an RWA token standard based on its native smart contract language Pact, referencing Ethereum's EIP-3643. This standard aims to enforce on-chain permissions and regulatory controls, supporting compliant asset issuance, trading, and redemption.

The effectiveness of the historical incentive program is limited

It is worth noting that this is not Kadena's first large-scale incentive program. In 2022, facing challenges of market downturn and reduced attention, Kadena launched an incentive program totaling $100 million, covering areas such as gaming, metaverse, NFTs, Web3, DeFi, and DAOs.

However, this $100 million incentive program seems to have failed to effectively boost Kadena's market attention and community activity. Its price continues to decline, with the network's TVL dropping to several hundred thousand dollars at its lowest in 2023. As of June 13, 2025, its TVL was only $940,000, and the market value of stablecoins was approximately $180,000.

The current $50 million incentive program is launched during a market cycle similar to that of 2022, both occurring after the first peak of a bull market. If the subsequent market trends resemble those of 2022, Kadena may face a situation of poor incentive effectiveness again.

In addition, unlike other public chains that directly incentivize users, Kadena's incentives are more focused on project parties. In the case of a weak user base, project parties may hesitate to choose the Kadena platform due to the uncertainty of incentives. Moreover, Kadena's user-oriented promotional plans, such as a lottery event that requires at least 4 weeks of promotion, offer relatively limited rewards and may find it difficult to effectively attract user participation.

Therefore, although the RWA narrative is popular and the $50 million incentive scale is considerable, Kadena currently needs to think about how to gain market and community recognition in a more appealing way. Otherwise, this $50 million incentive program may struggle to achieve the expected results.