FAQ
Answers to commonly asked questions about Kadena.
Last updated
Answers to commonly asked questions about Kadena.
Last updated
import PageRef from '@components/PageRef' import Tabs from '@theme/Tabs'; import TabItem from '@theme/TabItem'; import YouTube from '@components/YouTube';
Proof-of-Work
Blake2s_256
Every chain of the 20 braided chains has a new block on average 30 seconds in between. Total is 20 blocks every 30 seconds. Which translates to 1.5 seconds theoretical block time.
Kadena uses proof of work for a few key reasons:Evidence: PoW is the only “battle-tested” consensus protocol primitive.
Economic incentive alignment: PoW creates an economic incentive for the majority of the hashpower to validate and honestly support the entire network. It is an open research question if a non-PoW approach can reasonably achieve the same.
Regulation: In the eyes of certain financial regulators, proof of work miners are not considered money transmitters, making a probabilistic PoW mining system safer from a US regulatory perspective than a system with more “finality” like PoS.
Kadena’s public blockchain scales by providing a mechanism to asynchronously produce many blocks on different peer chains all at the same height, with each block requiring a fraction of the hash power of the total network. This configuration drastically increases the number of transactions per second over the total network.
Transaction costs will rise as the number of transactions rise on one chain. You can set up an account on a less congested chain, where transaction costs are cheaper, and move your tokens through a simple burn-receipt using on-chain SPV. Miners have economic incentive to cooperate with reconfiguring the network to a larger size when the entire network starts to become congested.\
Braiding chains together was first proposed for security purposes. In effect, chains are “braided” as each chain’s newly mined block incorporates the Merkle roots of its peer chains. By having multiple mined blocks at the same height each referencing each other’s past, the protocol decreases the duration of time where an attacker could get “lucky” against an honest network. Think of an attacker needing to flip 6 coins and get all heads (mine 6 blocks) vs. needing to flip 12 coins and get all heads (mine 6 blocks from two related chains). The latter is harder. This same intuition applies to Kadena’s multi-chain configuration.\
Tokens are moved across chains using a Simple Payment Verification (SPV) smart contract.\
Block rewards are readjusted against a set schedule every six months, with roughly half of the remaining minable coins issued as block rewards every 20 years. See the complete miner block reward schedule .
View the block explorer which visualizes the mining, propagation and braiding of blocks across multiple Kadena chains in real time
Yes, the open-source repository for the Kadena public blockchain is .
Official information for running a node is maintained at , and supplementary resources here.
Official information for mining KDA is maintained at , and supplementary resources here.