Kadena is a private blockchain that has successfully addressed scalability and privacy issues in blockchain systems.
A new Turing incomplete language, called Pact, has also been introduced with Kadena that allows the development of smart contracts.
A High-Throughput Network for Enterprise and DeFi
A key innovation in Kadena is its Scalable BFT consensus algorithm, which has the potential to scale to thousands of nodes without performance degradation.
Scalable BFT is based on the original Raft algorithm and is a successor of Tangaroa and Juno.
Tangaroa, which is a name given to an implementation of Raft with fault tolerance (a BFT Raft), was developed to address the availability and safety issues that arose from the behavior of Byzantine nodes in the Raft algorithm, and Juno was a fork of Tangaroa that was developed by JPMorgan.
Consensus algorithms are discussed in , Blockchain 101 in more detail.
Both of these proposals have a fundamental limitation—they cannot scale while maintaining a high level of high performance.
Private blockchains have the more desirable property of maintaining high performance as the number of nodes increase, but the aforementioned proposals lack this feature.
Why This Matters for Blockchain Technology
Kadena solves this issue with its proprietary Scalable BFT algorithm, which is expected to scale up to thousands of nodes without any performance degradation.
Moreover, confidentiality is another significant aspect of Kadena that enables privacy of transactions on the blockchain.
This security service is achieved by using a combination of key rotation, symmetric on-chain encryption, incremental hashing, and Double Ratchet protocol.
Key rotation is used as a standard mechanism to ensure the security of the private blockchain.
Key Points to Remember
- Kadena Kadena is a private blockchain that has successfully addressed scalability and privacy issues in blockchain systems.
- A new Turing incomplete language, called Pact, has also been introduced with Kadena that allows the development of smart contracts.
- A key innovation in Kadena is its Scalable BFT consensus algorithm, which has the potential to scale to thousands of nodes without performance degradation.
- Scalable BFT is based on the original Raft algorithm and is a successor of Tangaroa and Juno.
Going Deeper: Advanced Concepts
It is used as a best practice to thwart any attacks if the keys have been compromised, by periodically changing the encryption keys.
There is native support for key rotation in Pact smart contract language.
Symmetric on-chain encryption allows encryption of transaction data on the blockchain.
These transactions can be automatically decrypted by the participants of a particular private transaction.
Conclusion
Kadena represents one of the many innovative layers that make blockchain technology so powerful and transformative. As distributed systems continue to evolve, a solid understanding of these core concepts becomes increasingly valuable — not just for developers, but for anyone building, investing in, or working alongside blockchain-powered systems.
Whether you are just starting your blockchain journey or deepening existing expertise, mastering these fundamentals gives you the tools to think clearly about decentralized systems and make smarter decisions in this rapidly evolving space.