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Kadena announced at EthCC in Cannes that its long-planned Chainweb EVM testnet is live. Unlike Ethereum L2s that promise scaling via rollups, Chainweb EVM runs on Kadena’s braided proof-of-work architecture, designed to scale horizontally without fragmentation from discrete sequencers or bridges.
The result, according to Stuart Popejoy, Kadena co-founder and CEO, is “seamless EVM compatibility without compromising decentralization or throughput.”
“This is vanilla EVM with Pectra, so you can deploy today right now onto our chains,” Popejoy told the audience in Cannes at EthCC today.
Chainweb EVM initially runs five parallel EVM chains on testnet, with Kadena’s architecture allowing this number to grow with demand, while still maintaining sub-cent transaction fees. As Popejoy explained:
“Every time we add chains, the throughput goes up linearly for that amount,” Popejoy said. “So for instance, when we went from 10 to 20 chains, our throughput doubled.”
Kadena’s existing chains run Pact, the network’s native smart contract language, designed to prioritize security, auditability, and formal verification. Unlike Solidity (which is Turing-complete and can express anything at the cost of complexity), Pact is intentionally Turing-incomplete.
But like so many L1s and former L1s which have adopted the EVM, the network effects of Ethereum’s virtual machine — especially for things like tooling and wallets — are hard to disrupt. Just today, there were additional EVM launches from heavyweights Ripple and TON, using the Cosmos stack.
Kadena is pitching its proof-of-work roots as a feature, not a bug:
“Proof-of-work is still the most secure and the most decentralized consensus technology out there,” Popejoy said, although this is debated. “It eliminates the need for sequencers…and it’s a far more secure architecture.”
But the real question is whether developers and users will come. Kadena knows that onboarding Solidity developers will require overcoming significant UX complexity across multiple chains. Asked how they plan to abstract this complexity away, Popejoy said:
“Since its launch in 2020, Kadena’s multichain architecture has uniquely allowed dApps to scale linearly with demand…With our upcoming Chainweb EVM launch, we’re bringing this technology to Solidity developers, both by adapting techniques from Pact as well as working with builder partners to leverage advanced account abstraction and gas station functionality arriving with the Pectra EVM upgrade.”
To help bootstrap the ecosystem, Kadena is putting up real money: a $50 million grant program, half of it earmarked for Solidity-based dapps, AI integrations, and half for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.
On the RWA side, Kadena is trying to differentiate with a compliance-first approach, according to co-founder Annelise Osborne.
“Early adopters like MPact Capital and CurveBlock have chosen Kadenas’s RWA standard because it solves several critical challenges faced by institutions: regulatory compliance through our ONCHAINID framework, operational efficiency via programmable dividend distribution (with compliance updates), and institutional-grade security without sacrificing transaction speed or affordability,” Osborn told Blockworks.
Even with grants and ambitious claims, Kadena’s challenge is clear: can they attract enough developers and users to sustain real activity once those incentives dry up?
“The goal isn’t just to be another EVM option,” Popejoy told Blockworks, but rather “the place where DeFi developers go when they’re tired of dealing with high fees, slow transactions, and complex bridging.”
Although Popejoy touts “an unparalleled EVM user experience,” Kadena’s 30-second block times may feel slow compared to most L2s or the UX on, say, Solana or Sui.
The next few months on the road to mainnet should be telling.
“If we can nail that developer experience, where you get all the familiarity of Ethereum but with our performance and security, that’s when we know we’ve succeeded,” Popejoy said.
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