TL;DR
- Kadena Organization announced the permanent shutdown of its operations and ended all affiliation with the blockchain it founded in 2020.
- The KDA token dropped nearly 60% in a single day, now trading at $0.097 after losing 99% from its all-time high of $27.64 in 2021.
- The company attributed the decision to deteriorating market conditions and will leave the network’s future to decentralized validators and developers.
Kadena Organization has officially announced the complete shutdown of its operations and the end of its relationship with the blockchain it launched in 2020.
The Kadena team will no longer provide technical support or maintenance, although the network will remain active through miners and independent node operators. The announcement triggered an immediate collapse of the KDA token, which lost almost 60% of its value in a single day. It now trades at $0.097 and is down 85% over the past year. Its market capitalization stands at around $32 million, far below the $27 billion it reached in 2021, when it ranked among the 15 largest cryptocurrencies by fully diluted valuation.
What Led to Kadena’s Demise?
The company explained the decision as a response to worsening market conditions and confirmed that its internal structure will be reduced to a minimum to complete the shutdown and technical transition. The team also stated that it will engage with the community to determine what to do with the locked and unmined tokens. Following the dissolution of the central entity, the network’s maintenance and development will depend entirely on its decentralized base of validators and external developers.
The KDA token has fallen 99% from its all-time high of $27.64. Data from DeFiLlama shows the network had already been in decline: total value locked peaked at only $9 million in March 2022, and the last notable trading volume spike occurred in December 2024 during a brief altseason. Since then, Kadena’s ecosystem has steadily lost activity and liquidity.
A Hybrid Project That Failed to Take Hold
In July, founder and CEO Stuart Popejoy introduced the Leap Grant Program, a $50 million fund aimed at financing projects built on Kadena, though it remains unclear whether those funds were ever distributed. The shutdown ends an attempt to build a hybrid blockchain based on proof of work, designed for enterprise applications, and structured around a mixed model of centralization and decentralization.
Kadena was founded by Popejoy and William Martino, both former JP Morgan blockchain developers, with the goal of combining Bitcoin’s mining security with the functionality of smart contracts. However, it never managed to sustain its growth or establish a stable user base. The end of its operations marks the definitive closure of a project that once aimed to compete with leading general-purpose blockchains
