Kadena launches mainnet and two token sales to raise up to $20M

Blockchain startup Kadena announced on Monday the launch of its mainnet and two upcoming token sales, slated for Nov. 5. 

The Brooklyn-based company has been working on a high throughput proof of work blockchain network since last year. Now, the blockchain is open for public mining and miners can earn rewards of the network’s native token, Kadena (KDA). 

While the firm said most of KDA will be distributed through mining, it will also conduct two token sales on token listing platform CoinList soon after the mainnet launch, aiming to raise a maximum of $20 million through the distribution of up to 30 million tokens.

The non-U.S. token sale is for overseas investors at a price of $1 per token, while the other sale is available to everyone, including U.S. investors, at a price of $0.50, with a lock-up period until the end of 2020. The tokens distributed through the non-U.S. listing will be traded on CoinList’s new exchange, which the platform announced last week. 

“The key with this raise is that it’s more toned to be able to launch in an as compliant way as possible, and based on the guidance we get from various regulators,” said Kadena CEO Will Martino, who has worked at JPMorgan Chase and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

In 2017 and 2018, Kadena completed two funding rounds through a Similar Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) structure, an investment contract that promises the delivery of tokens on a future date. The firm in total raised over $15 million from the two rounds, according to a company statement. 

As previously reported, Kadena’s blockchain network, dubbed Chainweb, aims at providing high transaction volumes of up to 10,000 transactions per second while maintaining network speed and low cost. Chainweb’s protocol connects several blockchain networks simultaneously, sharing transaction volumes between them. 

“The core use cases that ethereum services we can do the same quite trivially,” said Martino.