What a year it has been for Kadena!

To say that 2022 has been a wild roller coaster ride for the Web3 and crypto industry as a whole is an understatement. Kadena has been pushing forward and growing beyond our expectations from hiring to engineering to business development. With our actively expanding team, Kadena strives to deliver a robust foundation of resources, content, and environment to support our expanding ecosystem of builders, projects, and users.

Now that we’ve reached the end of 2022, we want to wrap up all that Kadena and its community has achieved within the past year, everything from Pact upgrades, Kadena Eco grants, community developments, and new project launches.

We’ll also be giving a sneak peek at what Kadena has in store for 2023, with more info to come at the beginning of the year. Let’s dive into it!

The year 2022 began with the launch of Kadena Eco, an innovation network designed to fuel mainstream adoption of Web3, Defi, and NFT projects by bringing vital expertise and resources to the Kadena ecosystem. Our Kadena Eco advisory board, which is led by its CEO, Francesco Melpignano, has welcomed and inaugurated Brooke Skinner Ricketts, Zack Seward, and Scott Barker as Kadena Eco’s strategic advisors. All three amazing individuals are seasoned strategic consultants and leaders in their respective fields, primed to help fuel mass adoption and hypergrowth of our ecosystem.

Kadena Eco’s $100 million Grants Program launched in April 2022 with the goal of assisting entrepreneurs, developers, and builders in accelerating the development of their projects on Kadena. The Grants program received overwhelming amounts of interest, with hundreds of applications pouring in.

Through **careful consideration and selection, the first inaugural cohort featured 9 grantee recipients, each exhibiting and embodying Web3 innovation. We are excited to point out that some of the grantees have already accomplished extraordinary feats. We can’t wait to see what kind of groundbreaking innovation our 2nd cohort of grantees will bring in early 2023!

Curious and want to know more about our grant program? Be sure to visit https://kadena.io/grants/.

The Pact team has been hard at work in 2022, expanding and improving its processes, as well as providing innovative solutions and bug fixes for the network, furthering Pact’s status as a best-in-class smart contract language for the crypto ecosystem. We’ve expanded from just 1 developer to 4 developers in the span of a little over a year, and in that time, we’ve begun to make the Pact Core dream into a reality. We have improved the performance and security of the language and its built-in functionality, while introducing a handful of exciting new features into the language like Principal account primitives and anonymous functions (lambdas).

As we begin to spin up our newest members, 2023 is shaping up to be a high benchmark for new features and project development. Pact Core is slated for release in the summer of 2023, with huge quality of life improvements coming to the Pact API in Chainweb in March of 2023. All in all, we are extremely excited for what’s coming next!

Chainweb saw some impressive accomplishments in 2022 and achieved major upgrades, new features, and releases. There are now two full-time developers dedicated to building Chainweb, with support from an ever-growing team of talented and visionary dev-op engineers. As of December 2022, our mainnet network has more than 600 nodes, 55 mining nodes, approximately 35 rosetta nodes, and nodes in 28 different countries on 4 different continents.

2023 will be a jam-packed year for Chainweb. The team will narrow their focus on continuing to improve the blockchain’s reliability and security, which includes performance improvements for node catchup, faster node set up (in particular database initialization), P2P network resilience, and more DoS protection and node stability. For more details, please check out our 2023 Live Technical Roadmap. We look forward to what this year will bring to our developer community.

Over the course of the year, the Kadena team has been working to make Marmalade the best NFT standard in the industry. Specifically, the team has been laser-focused on building and improving the Marmalade NFT Smart Contracts and creating policies, which are customized standards with different rules for creating, minting, burning, and transferring NFTs.

Earlier in 2022, the team released the main Marmalade Ledger contract on mainnet along with three Marmalade policies: Guard Token Policy, Fixed Quote Policy, and Fixed Quote Royalty Policy. Notably, the Fixed Quote Royalty Policy pays the creator royalty from every sale with fungible on-chain tokens. The team will soon be releasing a new basic Collection Policy with an accompanying tutorial which will allow for the implementation of lazy minting.

Heading into 2023, we have exciting plans to release more Marmalade tutorial content, roll out ledger-v2 with improved features, and support for marmalade-client in Kadena.js.

In mid-2022, the Dev Experience team was founded with the purpose of improving and providing a smooth front-end development experience for our community of builders who are building on our blockchain in order to drive adoption. The Kadena Dev Experience team took Kadena’s development experience to new heights in 2022!

In June 2022, the team migrated all the old libraries we had to a new Monorepo, which was named **Kadena.js **as the team wanted to add TypeScript support in addition to migrating pact-lang-api. The overall result was the delightful creation of a whole new JavaScript experience that allows our builders to interact with our smart contracts with the assistance of @kadena/client and @kadena/pactjs-cli and without the need to learn Pact. In addition, the team created Cookbook, @kadena/chainweb-node-client, @kadena/cryptography-utils, test project, @kadena/types for TypeScript support, to name a few. See a full list of the magic that the Dev Experience team has created on Github.

As of December 2022, the Dev Experience team is 12 developers strong and continuous to grow. 2022 is the year where the Kadena Dev Experience team laid the groundwork for an even better 2023 as the best is yet to come!

There were some very exciting collaborations and advancement for Kadena on the mining front this year. Our network hash rate has more than doubled in 2022, and our overall network hash rate as of December 2022 is at about 180 PH/s.

In September 2022, Bitmain, the world’s leading manufacturer of crypto mining hardware and one of the largest designers of ASIC miner chips for Bitcoin mining, entered the Kadena ecosystem with the launch of the ANTMINER KA3. The KA3 possesses a hash rate of 166 T, turbocharging KDA’s mining security and energy efficiency to a new level. Bitmain’s collaboration represents a very significant investment of capital and faith in the Kadena ecosystem, and to say that we are beyond thrilled is an understatement!

In addition to the above, the engineering team has updated the chainweb-mining-client which allows for solo mining with the new KA3. This means that our mining community would achieve similar performance to what they would receive if they were mining through a pool but with zero fees — the first of its kind possible only with Kadena’s braided chains.

Kadena is taking mining to a deeper level never imagined by other proof-of-work networks before. If you are interested in mining or have any questions, join our Discord community and we will be more than happy to assist.

What an incredibly eventful year it has been for our community of Kadenians!

2022 saw an expansive growth in our community and a dramatic increase in the number of on-chain activities compared to the prior year. There was a 125% increase in distinct user modules, 406% increase in token transfers, and 182% increase in distinct accounts that performed token transfers.

2022 saw an expansive growth in our community, with the majority of our social media channels seeing tremendous inflow of new community members. Our Twitter follower count has increased by approximately 109% and our Reddit community has grown by approximately 65%. Most notably, we started the year with 29 projects to now having over 225 projects building on the Kadena blockchain! That’s a staggering 675% increase of brilliant entrepreneurs and companies innovating right within our ecosystem.

Additionally, the Kadena team has also made a concerted effort to attend a wide variety of Web3 conferences and speaking engagements, namely ETH Denver, BTC Miami, DCENTRAL Austin, and DCENTRAL Miami to name a few. Our team was successful in disseminating knowledge and educating the Web3 industry of Kadena’s groundbreaking technology and vision, attracting the interest of many talented builders to our exponentially growing community. Be sure to let us know which conferences the Kadena team should attend next year!

We expect this momentum of community growth to carry over in 2023 and look forward to Kadena becoming the leading layer-1 blockchain in the industry.

This year has also been exceptionally busy for Kadena’s Operations team, the company’s backbone.

The Kadena team has rapidly grown throughout 2022, adding 26 new and brilliant recruits over the course of the year, representing a staggering 50% increase in the number of team members! The hiring has been centered on experienced and motivated individuals in marketing, business development, and engineering.

Anastasia Bez and John Wiegley were both promoted to Chief Operations Officer and Chief Technology Officer, respectively.

With their operational capabilities, technical expertise, and strategic direction, both visionary leaders have the capability and experience to push the boundaries of Kadena’s technical edge.

Despite unstable market trends and uncertainties, Kadena continues to grow at an exponential pace and will continue to employ well into 2023. If you or someone you know is interested in being part of an extraordinary and innovative team in the blockchain industry, please keep an eye on Kadena’s job board as we continue to expand our team.

At Kadena, we are committed more than ever to fostering and nurturing a strong ecosystem with projects that deliver superior experience and innovation. With our Developer Experience team compiling fundamental tools, tutorials, and resources for builders, coupled with Kadena Eco’s $100 million Grants program, we expect to see a surge of developers from both Web2 and Web3 building innovative DeFi, NFT, and other exciting and groundbreaking projects within our ecosystem in 2023.

Finally, we also want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our community for their support in Kadena — we are stronger than ever and wouldn’t be able to do it without you. Our doors are always open and we would love to hear our community’s feedback and suggestions. Join our ever-growing Discord community or kindly email us at info@kadena.com with your ideas on how to make Kadena even better.

The Kadena Team wishes you a festive holiday and a happy new year!

See you all in 2023!