Stuart Popejoy Explains How Kadena Provides Unlimited Scalability on the Blockchain (Episode 150)
Stuart Popejoy joins us to discuss how Kadena is providing unlimited scalability to the blockchain.
Stuart is the Founder and CEO of Kadena and the author of the Pact smart contract language. Stuart has over 15 years experience building trading and exchange systems in the financial industry and over 27 years in software. Previously, Stuart built the JP Morgan Blockchain Center of Excellence engineering team, where he and co-founder Will Martino developed the high-performance private blockchain Juno which was used in the pilot of JPMCoin.
Previous episode: http://crypto-current.co/how-anyone-write-directly-safely-onto-blockchain/
Website: https://kadena.io
Medium: https://medium.com/kadena-io
Learn about Kadenaswap: https://medium.com/kadena-io/introducing-kadenaswap-bountyswap-live-beta-ecde4cf014dc
Twitter: @SirLensALot / @Kadena_io
Telegram: https://t.me/kadena_io
*Disclaimer. None of this information is financial advice.
The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below.
00:00:03:05 – 00:00:19:09
Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon and today I got a special guest. Now, we have a team that has previously been on our show, we have Kadena. And today we have the Co-Founder, Stewart, who is going to be joining us today. So, how are you doing today, Stewart?
00:00:20:00 – 00:00:22:18
Stewart Popejoy: Doing great, Richard. Thanks for having me.
00:00:22:20 – 00:00:32:18
Richard Carthon: Of course. Well, a lot has happened from a year ago when we had Will on the show and excited to get some updates. So please, before we get started, give us a little bit of background about yourself.
00:00:34:20 – 00:01:14:18
Stewart Popejoy: My name is Stewart Popejoy and before Kadena, I’ve been working in software since 1995, so over 25 years. I started at Apple and ended up in New York doing a lot of work in financial really in trading systems and exchange backgrounds, did that for about 15 years, ended up at JP Morgan and then pivoted to start working on Blockchain systems for JP Morgan and headed up their Blockchain group. That’s where I actually met my co-founder. I hired him, he was the lead engineer on a Blockchain pilot we did there that would eventually become JPM coin,
00:01:15:06 – 00:01:15:24
Richard Carthon: Wow.
00:01:15:26 – 00:01:16:11
Stewart Popejoy: And now Link.
00:01:17:18 – 00:01:18:03
Richard Carthon: Wow.
00:01:18:18 – 00:01:46:18
Stewart Popejoy: And we founded Kadena in 2016 because we had a pretty good idea about how to make Blockchain robust and scalable and ready for, you know, big use cases like enterprise. But, you know, one of the things that’s one of the really interesting evolution of Blockchain, since we found it, is now Blockchain needs to be big enough for enterprise because, you know, Blockchain is bursting at the seams, so.
00:01:46:20 – 00:01:47:05
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:01:48:18 – 00:02:12:16
Stewart Popejoy: A year ago, right around the time you talked to Will last, we launched our public network, the Kadena Public Blockchain, which is a scalable, sharded proof-of-work network. And it’s interesting in that regard, because it essentially has something that is somewhat rare in engineering, which is unlimited scalability.
00:02:13:10 – 00:02:13:25
Richard Carthon: Wow.
00:02:14:05 – 00:02:33:08
Stewart Popejoy: This network can grow to any size. Right now, we launched it on 10 chains. One thing we did in August was scale that to 20 chains, which doubled throughput. And now that we’ve proven that, we can scale to 50, 100, 1,000, 5,000, we’re actually only limited by bandwidth.
00:02:33:10 – 00:02:33:28
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:02:34:00 – 00:02:34:15
Stewart Popejoy: At that point, so.
00:02:34:27 – 00:02:48:28
Richard Carthon: So, really quickly on that, just for anyone who’s not familiar with this, for your typical Blockchain or for other companies out there that are building right now, like what is the typical, like size that you would see?
00:02:51:13 – 00:02:55:08
Stewart Popejoy: Size in terms of like how many transactions they need to do?
00:02:55:28 – 00:03:00:22
Richard Carthon: Correct, or like you’re saying, that change that could go from anywhere from 10 to 20 to 50 to 100. Like what?
00:03:00:29 – 00:03:12:20
Stewart Popejoy: Oh, yeah. No, no, no. I mean, we’re up. I mean, think of us like Ethereum or Bitcoin in the sense that network of 20 chains now appears as a single network to you.
00:03:13:09 – 00:03:13:24
Richard Carthon: Wow.
00:03:13:26 – 00:03:56:25
Stewart Popejoy: As a user, it’s not something you should really have to think about. The main thing, in fact, the main thing users can think about is that not only do we have dirt cheap, practically free gas costs, not only do we have gas stations which make it possible for an app developer to you know, subsidize your gas costs so you don’t even have to think about gas, it also means that once a dApp gets you know, hammered, like, you know, like we’re launching a dex this month called Kadenaswap. And you know, one day, that’s going to get, you know, pretty busy and.
00:03:56:27 – 00:03:57:12
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:03:57:24 – 00:04:01:25
Stewart Popejoy: What you see on Ethereum is as things get busy, gas prices go up.
00:04:02:10 – 00:04:02:25
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:04:02:27 – 00:04:09:27
Stewart Popejoy: And that’s why scalability is so important because one of our chains is the equivalent of Ethereum today.
00:04:11:00 – 00:04:11:15
Richard Carthon: Wow.
00:04:11:17 – 00:04:30:04
Stewart Popejoy: So, we already have 20 times that throughput and we could scale out as needed. You know, dApps can actually independently scale out as needed to take advantage of as many chains as they need. And the idea is that if we ever get to a place where gas prices are spiking again, add more chains.
00:04:30:06 – 00:04:51:29
Richard Carthon: Right. No, I think that’s really practical because I think it’s everyone’s experiencing the gas problem of Ethereum right now and how expensive one minor transaction can truly be. And even, I don’t want to say like, a speed standpoint, but like everyone, if you want it to go faster, you’ve got to end up spending a lot more money and it’s like this shouldn’t be a problem.
00:04:52:01 – 00:04:52:16
Stewart Popejoy: Right.
00:04:52:18 – 00:05:22:22
Richard Carthon: Like we’ve been here long enough to where this should not be a reoccurring thing. And the fact that you’re saying from the jump that Kadena has 20 times the amount of what Ethereum is currently doing and it can scale up from there, I think that is very powerful. You know, how are you able to, One, create it and get it to a point where it’s ready for this and then, Two, expand a little bit more on the decks, because that’s a hot topic right now. You know, a lot of things out there that allow for kind of trading and getting into a lot of these different dex’s. So, can you expand on that as well?
00:05:23:18 – 00:05:55:15
Stewart Popejoy: Well, sure. And the dex actually relates to the multichannel architecture in a very interesting way. So, they end up being kind of related topics. So, one of the things about the dex is that, of course, we want you know, we want trading to essentially be free for users, you know, like somebody’s got to pay for gas. Gas is an important feature to make sure that people don’t grief, you know, they don’t doss, you know, overwhelm the network.
00:05:55:17 – 00:05:56:02
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:05:56:04 – 00:06:43:17
Stewart Popejoy: With frivolous transactions as a way of causing problems. Gas is very effective to stop that, so it’s an important function. But, you know, one of the interesting things about the way we were able to do that is we did it using a design that actually had been floating around even for Bitcoin in 2014, which is that in a trustless network, you should be able to prove to another trustless network that, you know, a certain thing happened. If you kind of make both networks an oracle of each other, if you make them watch each other and make it that watching each other as part of what they do, you can turn one chain into two chains and then they’re just kind of you know, they’re kind of swapping things back and forth, kind of the way you see tokens being wrapped from one platform to another.
00:06:43:27 – 00:06:44:12
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:06:44:14 – 00:07:35:14
Stewart Popejoy: Except that since the chains are involved with each other, they don’t need to you know, they can trust the stuff that’s coming from one chain to the next. The big innovation that we did was just in how you organize that so that you can have enough because if you did it where everything is just looking at every other chain, that doesn’t scale. So, that was the main thing is figuring out how to organize. You know, a graph is what it’s called. You know, organize a graph in such a way that you can continue to build more, add more, change the network and not slow it down. Interestingly enough, from the proof-of-work point of view, adding chains does not require more hash power and in fact is more efficient and you get more security for your hash power dollar. So, you know, because a concern and an understandable concern about work is the energy consumption.
00:07:35:23 – 00:07:36:08
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:07:36:10 – 00:08:02:24
Stewart Popejoy: But the argument we like to make is that the problem with something like Bitcoin is not that it consumes energy, is that it does so, so inefficiently and wastefully. You know, we’ve been putting more energy into Bitcoin in the last 10 years for security that it just doesn’t need you. You know, like it was secured like 10 years ago or at least like seven years ago. And ever since then, it’s just been more and more and more and more energy to get the exact same result.
00:08:03:03 – 00:08:03:18
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:08:03:20 – 00:08:27:06
Stewart Popejoy: Well, Chainweb, it keeps horizontally scaling for the same energy consumption. So, you know, the idea being that proof-of-work is still the most secure and decentralized algorithm out there and nobody really disputes that. Nobody disputes that proof-of-work is more decentralized and more secure. But I think sometimes people think it’s too secure, like for the money.
00:08:27:08 – 00:08:32:08
Richard Carthon: Right. For the cost analysis and just the energy consumption because just like you said, everyone always goes.
00:08:32:10 – 00:09:26:02
Stewart Popejoy: And the slowness, right? Because that’s the other thing you look at like Bitcoin and Ethereum and you’re like, Okay, great, it’s definitely secure. But, you know, Bitcoin too, I mean when Bitcoin gets congested, the fees skyrocket, it’s really no different. So, but an interesting thing about that, you know, just on the technical side, which ends up impacting, you know, real world things, is that because we are independent kind of Satoshi style chains in this larger network, it does mean that each chain operates independently. So, even though you have the same coin on every chain and a coin can’t be in two places at once, it does mean that if you took a Uniswap and you put it on two chains, all of a sudden excuse me, your pairs are actually on two chains.
00:09:26:13 – 00:09:26:28
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:09:27:00 – 00:10:05:03
Stewart Popejoy: And that would mean that if you have, you know, say it’s not like one of the most happening pairs, like it doesn’t have a ton of liquidity, now you’re splitting that in two. And, you know, it’s a matter of time before they sync up, but that’s important. So, that’s a problem we’re going to solve with a Kadenaswap. We’re going to launch Kadena Swap like Uniswap, it’s going to be on one chain just because that way people, you know, that way all the liquidity will be in one place. But it’s going to be ready to scale to multiple chains and that’s where we’re going to get into an interesting incentive and fee structure to incentivize market makers to lock up tokens in a balanced fashion.
00:10:05:22 – 00:10:06:07
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:10:06:09 – 00:10:50:10
Stewart Popejoy: So, that’s a little wonky, but where it goes in the consumer experience and what it’s going to be like to trade is two things. One is that it’s really focused on being a multi protocol dex. So, what does that mean? It means that we’re not hyper focused on liquidity. If you look at most of the dex’s that are happening off of Ethereum, they’re like, I don’t know, I think it was, I can’t remember what movie it was, might have, a Spinal Tap where somebody’s like, you know. Yeah, you can come on our station, we have both Country and Western. And like most of these dex’s have both BTC and Ethereum.
00:10:50:14 – 00:10:50:29
Richard Carthon: Yeah,.
00:10:51:01 – 00:11:14:12
Stewart Popejoy: That’s like all they have and with good reason because since they’re an off chain, so-called off chain, off Ethereum dex, they can’t do anything if they don’t have sufficient liquidity. So, they’re going to be bringing the most liquid coins over. We’re in a different situation. We’re all about interop, we’re all about protocols, we’re all about kind of diversity and we’re all about decentralization.
00:11:14:14 – 00:11:48:12
Stewart Popejoy: So, a lot of the protocols we’re going to be working with right from the start are the ones that, you know, it meshes naturally with kind of decentralization. That includes Dye, that includes Celo and includes really forward looking, stable clients like LUNA. It includes, you know, decentralized platforms like, you know, Kusama and Polkadot, Cosmos, you know, these are the kinds of things you’re going to see coming on to our dex. So, right off the bat, it’s going to offer a different experience because you’re going to see a different mix. And then, of course, you know, BTC and Ethereum.
00:11:49:02 – 00:11:49:17
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:11:49:19 – 00:12:23:12
Stewart Popejoy: And you’re going to see a different mix. And the future of that, since we have to solve scaling attacks and we’re already about multi protocol, well, our smart contract language already runs on Cosmos, and we’ve got a proposal that’s, you know, it’s interesting design problem, but getting it on to Polkadot and Kusama. So, once we have it working on our network, it’s a natural leap to put it on Cosmos and on Polkadot, and you’re going to get to this future where you’re not even going to think about what platform you’re on.
00:12:23:26 – 00:12:24:11
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:12:24:13 – 00:13:04:05
Stewart Popejoy: And of course, you know, we see some of that today, right? I mean, you see these dex aggregators, you see these people who are trying to give the users this experience, and that’s great, but they’re doing it in an off chain way. And I don’t know, you know, the debates about layer two, it’s not even layer two, these things that are, just you know, they’re just acting like centralized exchanges, they’re giving you market access and in exchange for centralization. And it makes sense. I don’t, you know, I don’t fault that, but we’re going to be able to chart a course towards a dex, a decentralized exchange on a decentralized platform that actually reaches out to all of the other decentralized platforms.
00:13:04:21 – 00:13:38:08
Stewart Popejoy: And so, in other words, you’ll be able to enjoy all the security that you have today with a Uniswap and all the transparency, but you won’t have to worry about, you know, you won’t have to get into these discussions about like, Oh, but I got to decide which platform I’m trading on. Who cares, right? And we want to get to the point. The exciting thing that’s happening in Crypto today is the explosion of all these different ideas about value and about how these currencies are going to solve different problems. And that’s the multi protocol future that we’re, you know, that we’re tracking. That’s what we’re really passionate about.
00:13:38:27 – 00:13:58:27
Richard Carthon: For sure. And, you know, you gave a lot of great topics and I kind of want to just retrace a couple of them to make sure that the audience doesn’t miss out on all of them because, you know, you gave a ton of great info. So, just for a couple of highlights there, you know, you’re creating a dex that is going to allow for a lot more freedom with the types of coins that you’re going to be able to exchange with.
00:13:58:29 – 00:14:23:06
Richard Carthon: So like, for example, you know Uniswap’s one of the ones that are out there, but usually the pair that you always have to use is either Ethereum or Bitcoin because it has the most liquidity. Instead, you’re saying that you’re going to have other options, like a Polkadot or a Cosmo, or a Celo and others that are out there. So, it gives you a lot more flexibility with what you decide you want to use as a liquidity measure to get a different token that is out there and possible. Is that about right?
00:14:23:08 – 00:14:56:08
Stewart Popejoy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s the multi protocol thing is that, you know, one and it’s true, you know, I’m not trying to say the liquidity isn’t going to be important and those pairs are going to be important, right? And, you know, like we’re going to have wrapped Ethereum and wrapped BTC and all those things, but it’s really this idea that right now the multiple protocol world really is on Ethereum. But, you know, it’s interesting that you point out that even in Uniswap, these that you like, which pair you go to is often dictated by you know, these kinds of more highly liquid coins.
00:14:57:20 – 00:14:58:05
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:14:58:07 – 00:15:20:25
Stewart Popejoy: But that, you know, so that’s true. But you know, so that’s interesting. But it’s really true in the off Ethereum dex world that if it’s an issue on Uniswap, it becomes overwhelming in the off chain dex world. And that’s something that we’re tackling head on with a multi protocol approach because just because that’s kind of what we live and breathe.
00:15:20:27 – 00:15:21:12
Richard Carthon: Yeah.
00:15:21:14 – 00:15:43:04
Stewart Popejoy: You know, like the way we’re bringing tokens onto our platform is with something very similar to, like, Rainbow Bridge, but even more kind of generalized. So, anybody is going to be able to wrap tokens onto our platform, it’s not just going to, you know, it’s not just us. It’s you know, it’s anybody who wants to, because the bridge is already going to be there.
00:15:43:06 – 00:15:43:21
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:15:43:23 – 00:15:50:15
Stewart Popejoy: So, you’re going to be able to say, “Oh, you know what, I want to bring this exciting new NFT token over to Kadena.”
00:15:51:05 – 00:15:51:20
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:15:51:22 – 00:15:59:15
Stewart Popejoy: And nobody, you know, and now there’s not going to be like big economic barriers. It’s not going to be one of these things where you have to, like, shell out.
00:15:59:17 – 00:16:09:16
Richard Carthon: It’s not a super high barrier to entry. But something I want you to touch on real quick, just because for a lot of our newer listeners that are going to be checking this out, can you explain what wrapped tokens are? Because I think that.
00:16:09:19 – 00:16:10:04
Stewart Popejoy: Oh, sure.
00:16:10:06 – 00:16:14:26
Richard Carthon: I think that’s something that’s been coming up a lot lately and I just want to make sure I get a really good definition for everyone that’s listening.
00:16:15:18 – 00:16:34:02
Stewart Popejoy: Sure. So, the way to think of wrapped tokens is to think about Ethereum right now as the center of DeFi, because it is. Like, you know, technically we’re a competitor to Ethereum, but we don’t really see ourselves that way. We see ourselves as kind of taking the Ethereum model and scaling it.
00:16:34:23 – 00:16:35:08
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:16:35:10 – 00:17:09:28
Stewart Popejoy: And it’s going to and, you know, first off, it’s going to be working with Ethereum. We’re not going to be, you know, Ethereum needs help frankly. It needs, you know, Ethereum concepts are powerful. Amazing things are happening on Ethereum right now and we want to take, we’re fundamentally the same architecture, even though we have, you know, a different much easier to use smart contract language. Still the basic same idea as solidity. And we’re proof-of-work just like Ethereum, even Ethereum doesn’t want to be proof-of-work. You know, we’re the same. You know, we have the same kind of gas structure, all that kind of stuff, it’s just we have the scalable thing.
00:17:10:00 – 00:18:04:25
Stewart Popejoy: So, but if you look at Ethereum, you know, where’s Bitcoin, because Bitcoin’s been running forever, Bitcoin’s the most liquid, Bitcoin’s got the most value. So, how do you trade Bitcoin on Ethereum? Well, what you do is you employ either centralized or decentralized technology to basically be able to lock up a coin on Bitcoin and then issue a token that represents that locked up coin with a one to one peg. So, the idea is it’s sitting over in a UTXO on Bitcoin and a wallet on Bitcoin that it can’t get out of and once this token gets issued and now you can trade this token and there’s more than one of these, there’s WBTC, there’s TBTC. TBTC represents a more decentralized option, because the way you do it in centralizes, you just say, you act like a bank. You just say, “Yeah, give it to me and I’ll issue you a token and you’re good to go.”
00:18:05:07 – 00:18:05:22
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:18:05:24 – 00:18:59:27
Stewart Popejoy: And then you might point to a ton of collateralization you have where you’re like, and don’t worry, if there’s some problem, we got you. You know, like the FDIC, you act like a bank and it’s almost like a synthetic. Whereas something like TBTC uses more Crypto, offers a more, you know, a more secure premise that doesn’t require tons of money to back it up. And, but it’s still the same thing, you’re going to put this Bitcoin somewhere where nobody can get to it, and then you’re going to be able to trade the Bitcoin on Ethereum. And then say you want to go back to pure Bitcoin, you destroy these coins, people call it burning. You burn the coins and then that flows back to Bitcoin and it releases back to, actually that’s a good question, who owns that? Oh, you get it back, of course, because you are the person who locked up the Bitcoin in the first place.
00:18:59:29 – 00:19:00:14
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:19:00:16 – 00:19:39:19
Stewart Popejoy: So, you locked it up, you traded a bunch of stuff. Maybe you have a smaller position now, bigger position. You know, you take it back and you transfer it back to yourself and now you’ve got the real Bitcoin. But increasingly what you’re going to see is that wrapped Bitcoin, TBTC, when you’re using those things on Uniswap, there’s really not a lot of slippage. They really kind of track each other, you know, they don’t trade independently. There’s little bits of arbitrage, but so, as, you know, as an owner, as somebody who’s holding this, you’re holding Bitcoin because you can go and exchange it for Bitcoin.
00:19:39:21 – 00:20:31:23
Stewart Popejoy: So, it’s really a way of bringing these markets together. And then, the confusing thing with Ethereum is that on Ethereum, Ethereum has this weird thing where ether is not the same standard as all the other tokens on Ethereum. So, they had to do this thing called wrapped Ethereum that’s a lot more confusing So, just don’t worry about wrapped Ethereum. It’s a one to one peg to Ethereum. Don’t worry why that’s the case. Don’t worry about wrapped Ethereum. But that’s not the wrapping we’re talking about, we’re talking about like the way Bitcoin gets wrapped. And so we’re going to wrap Ethereum and bring it on the platform. Also, we’re going to wrap our token KDA and bring it onto Ethereum and Uniswap. So, that’s another important development is that, that’s how this is a two way game.
00:20:31:25 – 00:20:32:10
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:20:32:12 – 00:21:07:09
Stewart Popejoy: It’s not like, we’re not trying to kill Ethereum. We’re called an Ethereum killer, but you know, that’s kind of like a category of Blockchain’s with smart contract language. They’re trying to do something similar to Ethereum, but that’s really not what we’re doing here. We’re extending the Ethereum world, so we’re going to be able to also have our token be on Ethereum and be in Uniswap. So, that’s good for the KDA ecosystem because now there are more things to do with KDA. And there are more and, you know, Uniwap is I mean, it’s definitely been the biggest exchange in Crypto, I don’t know if it still is. I don’t know where those numbers line up.
00:21:07:11 – 00:21:07:26
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:21:07:28 – 00:21:12:10
Stewart Popejoy: But you know, know Uniswap’s become a massive, really important venue. So, we’re very excited about that.
00:21:13:01 – 00:21:44:28
Richard Carthon: Definitely. And thank you for explaining that. I think you’ve done a really good job of explaining BTC wrapping and then like how it’s going to coordinate with what KDA’s doing and how y’all are going to be able to do that with Ethereum and a bunch of other types of coins and tokens on y’alls platform. I think another cool thing to kind of bring up is, you know, all of these things that you’re talking about, you know, are users able to go do that today? Is it releasing soon? Like, give us a timeline of like when you think a lot of this will be able to start being executed.
00:21:45:02 – 00:22:29:15
Stewart Popejoy: Sure, sure. So, where we are today is Kadena Swap itself just finished a run in test net, which was really great and pretty fast, you know, like it got out in the test net in, I want to say the second week of January of this year and community really came through, found all sorts of issues. Like it was like, you know, Crypto’s amazing this way in the sense that, I mean, it’s open source, but Crypto’s like open source on steroids because, you know, open source is great if there’s kind of a natural motivator and that’s where Crypto steps in. Crypto makes people owners and makes people feel like they’ve got, I mean, they really do have skin in the game, of course.
00:22:29:23 – 00:22:30:08
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:22:30:10 – 00:23:06:10
Stewart Popejoy: So, they step in and this is really what I think this is what Crypto is really about in, you know, 2020 and 2021. In this decade is where that part of Crypto that we’ve all known, we’ve all seen it there, we all know it exists is really what’s driving Crypto now. And so, that’s what turned you know, what could have been a kind of moribund, you know, test net launch into something that you know, was way faster than something that at like Enterprise or something where you have to hire a bunch of QA people and they kind of show up for work and sleepily click on the thing.
00:23:06:21 – 00:23:53:24
Stewart Popejoy: So, that was amazing. Now we’re doing a live beta that we call Bountyswap and it’s an interesting program because we don’t want people risking funds until we feel really secure about the dex. So, what we’re going to do is a different kind of bounty. What we are doing is we are issuing what we call K Penny, and it’s something that you have to reserve using KDA. And it sat at like a millionth of KDA, so, the idea is that, that’s why it’s K Penny and what you do, it’s that the only pairs are going to be against this K Penny. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to act as market maker for these companies versus subtests tokens with some serious funds. We’re going to be using like, the equivalent of like, you know, 100,000 KDA in a pair or something like that.
00:23:54:08 – 00:23:54:23
Richard Carthon: Okay.
00:23:54:25 – 00:24:30:23
Stewart Popejoy: And the idea being is that it’s a really nice bounty for hackers. It’s like, come on and try to steal this key. If you can steal it, you can keep it. And since we’re the main market makers because we’re the only people who can issue the test tokens, the only person you’re going to be significantly stealing from is us, and if you can do it, you can keep it. So, we’re going to run that as long as we need. It’s in test net right now, so we’re hoping to get that launched in a week and then Bountyswap runs. And that’s also a chance for people to start using the wallet in a production setting.
00:24:31:11 – 00:25:33:15
Stewart Popejoy: We have a really nice integration with the cell core wallet so that it’s a completely seamless experience in terms of coming in and being able to swap, you know, like even the K Penny. You know, reserving the K Penny’s is going to be achieved with the wallet integration and all that. So then at that point, it’s all about the wrapping. It’s all about bringing these wrapped tokens to market and so, we’re iterating on that as well. We rolled out the technology that underpins the bridge last month. So, now we’re rolling out the bridge relay system and that’s a really interesting, that’s another one of these Crypto things where Crypto, we had a really successful experience, one of the reasons why I’m talking like a, you know, true believer noob about all this stuff is because partnering with Selcom Fux, they launched a node operator program for Chainweb and it was just absurdly successful. It took us from 60 nodes to 550. And remember, Chainweb nodes are big.
00:25:33:17 – 00:25:34:02
Richard Carthon: Yeah.
00:25:34:04 – 00:26:22:01
Stewart Popejoy: Because Chainweb nodes run every single chain. So, you know, in terms of like, comparing it to other networks, you can multiply that by 20. So, we’re, you know, we’re running an operation that has nodes well into the thousands and it’s all through the same kind of thing, you know, people getting incentivized to run the nodes. You know, they stake a little, you know, they’ve got, it’s that skin in the game kind of thing. So, we’re going to extend that program or you know, something very similar to that program to power these oracles that are going to be making it possible for you know, the average developer, the average user, to be able to move things across chains. So, that’s what’s happening this month, that’s when we stand up the wrapped tokens and that’s when we launch Kadenaswap because there’s no point in launching Kadenaswap without the tokens.
00:26:22:03 – 00:26:22:18
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:26:22:20 – 00:26:52:23
Stewart Popejoy: Like we’re not going to launch Kadenaswap and say, “Hey, come on over,” Nothing going on. We’re going to launch it with really serious protocols already in place, already with mark makers and you know, already with wallets, already with the whole experience so that you can just come over. And then, of course, KDA’s going to be there too. I mean, you know, the nice thing about the gas stories, you don’t have to hold KDA to trade and get Uniswap, but since it’s the natural coin, there’s going to be a lot of liquidity provision in KDA.
00:26:52:29 – 00:26:53:14
Richard Carthon: Right.
00:26:53:16 – 00:26:57:10
Stewart Popejoy: So, it’s going to be a very liquid market and it’s going to be a fun place to trade.
00:26:58:07 – 00:27:07:29
Richard Carthon: That’s awesome. Well, I mean, that roadmap sounds like, very exciting, I’m sure a lot of people that are listening right now are going to go and check that out. I highly recommend everyone do that. One more question.
00:27:08:01 – 00:27:18:25
Stewart Popejoy: Please. Please get involved in Bountyswap because there’s, you know, like there’s, especially if you’re like a developer or someone who likes to, you know, like dig in there because there’s money there.
00:27:18:27 – 00:27:52:26
Richard Carthon: Yeah. For sure. And if you’re a hacker, go check that out, see how you can crack their code and get to keep some stuff. And I’m sure that does nothing but help make sure that KDA’s going to be as secure as possible. I mean, that’s one of the most unique ways I’ve ever heard of someone making sure that they’re as secure as possible, having an open market basically for hackers to come and say, “Hey, come try us and to test and see how secure you are.” But anyway, Stuart, thank you so much for sharing all this information. You dropped a lot of great knowledge on us today. What is a final thought that you want to leave with all of our listeners here today?
00:27:54:05 – 00:28:29:17
Stewart Popejoy: Oh, you know, just keep an eye on us, because 2021 is going to be a huge year. We’re, you know, we’re really, this is all we do now is like focus on making these things happen that really kind of bring in the community, bring in market makers. You know, the time is now for this ecosystem to grow for this. You know, it’s not just DeFi it’s NFT, it’s all the other things that are happening where, you know, users and holdilers and builders, all these people are what, you know, the pace of innovation is just so fast right now.
00:28:30:00 – 00:29:02:26
Stewart Popejoy: And, you know, what we’re doing is we’re showing that, you know, like we’re tech and you know, we love our tech and we love all the tech that’s out there, but you know, we want to show that the value’s there. And, you know, and then it’s going to be something where developers are going to be really psyched once they realize how easy it is to use our platform, but we’re making it so that you don’t just have to believe us. They’ll actually be tokens there and you can work with that and you can make a business happen. So, this is the year, you know, last year, we launched this enabling technology, this year we’re using it. And really exciting things are on the way.
00:29:03:16 – 00:29:21:24
Richard Carthon: That’s awesome. And for everyone listening, of course, you can go back to episode 72 to go listen to Will’s interview, see what they were working on a year ago, and then see how much further they’ve come a year later. I’m excited for the launch in all of this. Everyone definitely go check that out. Stuart, what are some ways that people can connect with you and learn more about KDA?
00:29:22:26 – 00:29:50:01
Stewart Popejoy: Well, there’s of course, our website, Kadena.io. There’s our Telegram and our Discord channels, which is a great place to get involved and start learning about the kind of details. We have a great community, a lot of really knowledgeable people on there, really passionate. We do have a newsletter. Our medium is actually really good, we’ve been pushing on a lot of things. And then, of course, our Twitter is something that we’ve been focusing on, like, Crypto Twitter is this like, strangely friendly place.
00:29:50:09 – 00:29:50:24
Richard Carthon: Yes.
00:29:50:26 – 00:30:11:22
Stewart Popejoy: Sounds weird, right? But it’s like it’s actually happening. Like it’s a place where you can really find things out and you know, really get like, get the latest story. So, you know, it’s the same story as everyone else, it’s Twitter, it’s Medium, it’s Telegram, it’s Discord. We do have a newsletter if you want to sign up for that. And yeah, just check it out.
00:30:12:08 – 00:30:23:08
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Yeah, Crypto Twitter’s amazing. Definitely recommend everyone that is listening definitely get more involved in that. And if you’re not on Telegram, definitely do that as well. That’s where a lot of communications are taken care of as well as Discord.
00:30:23:17 – 00:30:38:09
Stewart Popejoy: We just did an AMA actually on Medium we put up that. We did a really great AMA on Telegraph on Friday. We’re going to be doing a lot more of those and we just put up the transcript yesterday. So, there’s some really, really good questions in there.
00:30:38:28 – 00:30:43:16
Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well, again, thank you so much for joining us today. And for everyone listening, Stay Crypto Current.
Crypto Current will be guiding all of you who are new to the cryptocurrency world to becoming a cryptocurrency and blockchain expert. Crypto Current was founded to give access to information to everyone on current events occurring in cryptocurrency and blockchain in a digestible way. Since its creation, we have created content that impacted thousands of people through its podcast, blog, and social media.