Enterprise-level Blockchain Dream Shattered! Kadena Announces Cease of Operations, KDA Token Plummets 60% Overnight

Founded by former JPMorgan engineers and once shining with the glow of enterprise-level Blockchain, Kadena has officially announced its cessation of operations. The official statement claims that due to the deteriorating market environment, it can no longer support business operations. Even though the Mainnet will continue to operate with the help of Miners, the team has fully withdrawn. Following the news, the KDA Token fell nearly sixty percent, almost dropping to zero from its historical high in 2021.

Kadena team announced immediate shutdown: market environment is harsh.

The Kadena team announced today on X that they can no longer continue their business operations and will immediately cease all activities and maintenance work:

We are very grateful to everyone who has joined us on this journey. Unfortunately, due to market conditions, we can no longer promote and support this unique decentralized product.

The team stated that the Kadena blockchain is not owned or operated by the company: “As a fully decentralized Proof of Work (PoW) smart contract blockchain, the network is operated by independent miners, while the on-chain smart contracts and protocols are independently managed by their maintainers.”

Therefore, the official emphasized that the Kadena network will continue to operate until the miners and node operators exit, and the remaining approximately 566 million $KDA mining rewards will continue to be distributed until the year 2139.

In the future, they will also release new node programs to ensure that the network can operate stably without official participation.

Coin price collapse: KDA price drops by over 50%

Affected by the news, the native Token of Kadena, KDA, once experienced a big dump of over 60% on that day, dropping to 0.08 dollars at one point. The current price has clearly fallen over 99% compared to the historical high of 27 dollars in 2021.

Source: CoinGecko

According to CoinGecko data, in such events, the 24-hour trading volume of KDA is only 105 million USD, which is still far behind mainstream cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH, which stand at 95.6 billion USD and 429 billion USD respectively.

Started from JPMorgan: Once hoped to become a “new star in enterprise-level blockchain”

Kadena was founded in 2019 by Stuart Popejoy and William Martino, both of whom come from JPMorgan and the (SEC), and they also participated in JPMorgan's early blockchain project Kinexys.

(JPMorgan Kinexys plans to launch a pilot for “carbon rights tokenization” to address three major issues in the green energy market)

Kadena focuses on an efficient, secure, and scalable enterprise-level public blockchain. In the Pre-A and B funding rounds of 2018, it secured an investment of $14.25 million from institutions such as Multicoin and CoinFund, and raised $20 million in a public sale in 2019.

Subsequently, the $KDA Token was also launched and listed on multiple exchanges, and the mainnet went live in 2020.

In 2022, the team also announced the launch of a $100 million Web3 developer grant program, hoping to attract developers to build the ecosystem. However, after experiencing the bear market and the dominance of Proof of Stake (PoS), Kadena's visibility gradually faded.

From ambition to inability to continue, enterprise-level blockchain dreams shattered.

The end of Kadena highlights the survival dilemma of enterprise-oriented Blockchain when launched too early and during a bear market. Despite the founding team having a background in traditional finance and technical strength, along with support from several well-known venture capital firms, they ultimately struggled to escape the fate of depleted funds and insufficient adoption.

The usage rate of Kadena's blockchain applications is significantly sluggish and continues to decline.

Today, a generation of star projects has entered history and has become another regrettable failure case in the market of 2025.

This article: Enterprise-level Blockchain Dream Shattered! Kadena announces cessation of operations, KDA token falls 60% overnight, first appearing on Chain News ABMedia.