From $4B peak to shutdown: What Kadena’s fall teaches other L1 blockchains

When Kadena Organization, the company behind the Kadena blockchain, announced it was shutting down operations on Oct. 21, the message was formal, quiet, and devastatingly simple.

The company thanked its community, cited “market conditions,” and confirmed that it would cease all business activity and maintenance of the blockchain immediately.

In a final note on X, the team reminded users that the blockchain would live on as miners would still secure it, and the code would remain open-source.

Yet beneath that technical continuity lies a harder truth that Kadena’s economic and social lifeblood was gone.

The project’s demise is not an isolated failure. Instead, it is part of a deeper structural correction in crypto, where the market will witness a slow extinction of infrastructure layers that never found product–market fit, never specialized, and never built compelling applications to sustain them.

The highway to nowhere

Kadena began with pedigree and ambition.

Founded by former JPMorgan engineers, Stuart Popejoy and William Martino, the network promised to deliver features that Ethereum could not in 2018. including high-throughput, proof-of-work smart contracts through a system called “braided chains.”

Its proprietary language, Pact, emphasized human-readable code and formal verification, positioning Kadena as both secure and scalable.

However, innovation without adoption is an unfinished story.

Kadena launched its mainnet in 2019, built a modest developer ecosystem, and watched its token’s valuation at nearly $4 billion in 2021, according to CoinMarketCap data, before collapsing more than 99% from its highs.

Kadena’s Token Market Cap (Source: CoinMarketCap)

During this period, only a few mainstream decentralized applications like Babena, whose total value locked peaked at just $8 million, emerged on Kadena.

Instead, liquidity drifted toward ecosystems with denser user gravity, like Ethereum and Solana, and later, the Layer-2 rollups like Base that were built directly atop them.

Crypto researcher Noveleader pointed out that Kadena has struggled to match Ethereum’s Virtual Machine (EVM) dominance over the years and has always struggled with the price action of its token, KDA, and the ecosystem projects.

This shows that Kadena’s shutdown exposes a fundamental mismatch in today’s crypto economy. Since 2021, venture capital has poured billions into “modular” Layer-1s, Layer-2s, and rollups that promise to fix scaling, decentralization, or transaction costs. Yet the market for actual users has barely grown.

According to L2Beat and DeFiLlama, over 100 rollups and more than 200 sovereign chains are operating across various ecosystems, from Ethereum clones to Cosmos-based appchains. However, most of them attract fewer than 2,000 daily active users.

Sample Blockchain Networks With Sparse Adoption (Source: DeFiLlama)

The reason is simple: they are all chasing the same pool of participants, including traders, yield farmers, and liquidity providers, without offering new value.

Greg Tomaselli, a startup builder, perfectly summarized the situation by pointing out that blockchain networks with no “value proposition and widespread use” would eventually fail.

The illusion of differentiation

Kadena’s collapse exposes a truth the industry prefers to ignore: technical novelty does not equal product-market fit.

Every new blockchain claims to solve scalability, latency, or gas efficiency problems. Yet few can explain who actually needs another chain when most users are already embedded within the Ethereum, Solana, or Binance ecosystems.

Like many Layer-1 hopefuls, Kadena tried to stand apart through performance metrics. Its braided chain architecture offered high throughput while maintaining proof-of-work security.

However, performance is a commodity in crypto. Once networks can process thousands of transactions per second, differentiation shifts from how fast you run to what you run for.

Ethereum thrived not because it was the fastest, but because it became the default environment for tokens, DAOs, and DeFi protocols. Solana’s success stems from cultivating high-frequency trading activities and social applications.

Like EOS, Kadena never defined its purpose beyond being “a better blockchain” to these ones.

However, such moves are the heart of the infrastructure bubble of chains chasing imaginary demand. Each new rollout repeats the logic of building first and hoping the market follows, while users consolidate around ecosystems with liquidity and culture.

This results in a slow extinction event of several hundred technically sound but economically irrelevant networks running on inertia.

The era of specialization

Moreover, the rise of layer-2 networks built on Ethereum and the blockchain’s expanding dominance have completely rewritten the playbook for infrastructure design.

AminCad, a major player within the Ethereum ecosystem, pointed out that nearly all major alternative Layer-1 networks with substantial market capitalizations were launched before Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade, which improved the network’s scalability and lowered transaction fees for Layer-2 solutions.

According to him, the upgrade has made their “so-called Layer-1 premium” obsolete and “largely a relic of the pre-Ethereum-Layer-2 scalability era.”

He said:

“Today, there is no scalability-based argument for opting to launch a chain as an alt-L1 instead of a dual-layer chain that uses Ethereum as its settlement ledger (i.e. an L2), so there’s no evidence newly launched chains will derive a premium from launching as a single layer chain.”

AminCad also noted that a layer-2 blockchain leveraging Ethereum as its long-term settlement ledger operates with roughly 99% lower costs than an independent alt-L1.

At the same time, the market is rewarding specialization over generalization. Successful blockchains are no longer positioning themselves as universal platforms but as focused digital economies serving clear verticals.

For instance, layer-1 networks such as Plasma and TRON are optimized for global stablecoin payments, offering instant transfers, minimal fees, and full EVM compatibility.

TRON’s Stablecoin Market Cap and Dominance (Source: Presto Research)

These chains compete not on generic throughput but on the purpose of owning a niche. Their differentiation lies in utility and story, not just architecture. Kadena, by contrast, had neither.

This shift marks a broader maturation of the industry and a move away from engineering vanity toward economic gravity.

As a result, the chains that endure the coming consolidation will be those that attract genuine, recurring demand of real users, consistent transactions, and value loops that justify their block space.

The coming consolidation

The failure of Kadena is a preview of what’s next for crypto’s overbuilt infrastructure stack. The market can’t sustain hundreds of chains competing for the same liquidity pools and developer attention.

In previous cycles, exuberant capital masked inefficiency. Venture funds seeded dozens of Layer-1 experiments, assuming that each would find its niche. But liquidity is not infinite, and users gravitate toward convenience.

Over the next few years, consolidation will replace proliferation. Some networks will merge or interoperate through shared sequencers or modular frameworks; others will simply fade into GitHub archives.

However, only those with strong vertical identities, gaming, social, real-world assets (RWA), or institutional finance, will survive as standalone ecosystems.

The logic mirrors the early internet, where dozens of protocols once competed for dominance, but only a few, like HTTP and DNS, became universal. The rest were quietly deprecated. Crypto is now entering its own deprecation phase.

For developers, this will mean fewer vanity blockchains and more composable infrastructure built atop proven ecosystems.

For investors, it’s a reminder that Layer-1 exposure is no longer a broad bet on innovation but a selective bet on network gravity — the ability to attract and retain capital, not just compute it.

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