Blockchain Startup Kadena Raises $12 Million in SAFT Sale

Blockchain platform provider Kadena has raised $12 million through a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) sale.

Announcing the successful round on Thursday, the startup said that participants included Devonshire Investors, the private investment arm of the owners of Fidelity Investments, as well as SIG, Asimov Investments, Multicoin Capital and SV Angel.

Based on the SAFT framework – a kind of investment contract that acts as promise for the delivery of tokens at a future date – the round was limited to accredited investors, and comes on the heels of a previous $2.25 million SAFT sale that was announced in January.

The funds will go toward the development of the company's Chainweb platform, Kadena co-founder Stuart Popejoy told CoinDesk – specifically, to help build out its technical ecosystem.

The firm's Chainweb protocol aims to use parallel blockchains with shared Merkle roots to tackle scaling and security issues, as previously reported. The different chains can be dedicated to different use cases without congesting the whole network.

However, there are “a bunch of things that have to be in place” before the public protocol will be ready for launch later this year, said Popejoy, who was previously a blockchain developer at JPMorgan Chase.

To that end, Kadena intends to begin releasing tools for the broader community to test, including a formal verification toolkit to help identify bugs, he said.

“Formal verification is something that’s come up at various times in the blockchain discussion, usually after a huge ethereum bug,” he said, noting that smart contracts, in particular, often involve the handling of large sums of money.

Popejoy explained:

“As we can see bugs can have significant impacts. The Parity bug was just a bug … but it allowed people to lose millions of dollars. So what we have is formal verification, and what that does is the computer proves to you mathematically that the network has no bugs.”

Kadena demonstrated a working prototype of the formal verification tool in 2017, but is now preparing to release it to the public for developers to use, Popejoy said.

The Chainweb testnet is set for launch in August, while the full network is slated for release in December, he added.

Miniatures network image via Shutterstock