Hybrid Blockchain Maker Kadena Adds Chainlink Price Feeds

Kadena is now integrated with data provider Chainlink for streamlined pricing feeds.

Announced Tuesday, the project helmed by former JPMorgan blockchain leads has inked a deal to use Chainlink’s existing set of off- and on-chain oracles for pricing Kadena-based assets, beginning with kadena (KDA), co-founder Stuart Popejoy said in a phone interview. 

For Kadena, which markets itself as a high-throughput alternative to both the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, Chainlink will provide developer tools for decentralized applications (dapps) based on Kadena’s Pact smart contract language.

KDA itself has yet to be listed on any secondary markets, but Popejoy said the token should be listed on two top-ten cryptocurrency exchanges by the end of Q3 2020.

“Chainlink has figured out how to incentivize an ecosystem of multiple players with their LINK token. They’re already able to enforce certain concepts of governance and data quality, just [by] having a diversity of vendors,” Popejoy said.

For Chainlink, the Kadena integration amounts to another non-Ethereum blockchain subscriber to its price feeds. Tezos and Polkadot announced integrations earlier this spring.

“Chainlink is a blockchain-agnostic oracle network that works equally well with both public and private blockchains, and is therefore capable of providing off-chain connectivity to Kadena’s unique approach to enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure,” Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov told CoinDesk. “Our decentralized oracle network allows access to high-quality data that is valued by institutions using Kadena’s enterprise-focused hybrid blockchain.”

Popejoy said the Kadena blockchain is both sharded – meaning data is siloed across databases yet still communicative – and runs in parallel for optimum speed, technical features he believes mainstream markets will demand as the blockchain industry grows.

In fact, Popejoy sees a future where nodes are too complex for the average user to manage, a value not shared by the leading public blockchains.

“We don’t have a resistance to the network getting large enough that you really need professional services to run a node because we think that’s where blockchain is headed,” Popejoy said.

Launched in January, Kadena raised $15 million in a 2018 funding round joined by Multicoin Capital and the venture arm of the owners of Fidelity Investments. The network is currently working on interoperability projects with both Polkadot and Cosmos.