Kadena Eco Office Hours Transcript, July 15th 2022
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Jeffrey Ou: Hey everyone. Welcome to Kadena Eco’s first Office Hours. We’ve heard the community and wanted to give everyone an update about Kadena Eco’s inception earlier this year. These spaces will kind of provide the community with a chance to ask any questions they want about what Kadena Eco has been doing in terms of grants, hiring, and developer improving the developer experience like Kadena.js.
Joining us today is myself, Jeff as the community lead, Tyler Benster, Joel Woodman, and Jacquin Mininger from the team. And so I’ll let them introduce themselves now.
Tyler Benster: Hey folks. My name is Tyler Benster and I’m the tech adoption lead here at Kadena Eco, and really stoked to have our inaugural office hours here. Something we’ll hope to do a few times and thanks in advance to the community for all the great questions that you’ve asked, and we’ll also get some live ones at the end. So I’ll let Joel and Jakequin introduce themselves briefly and am really excited to get into it.
Joel Woodman: Hey, Tyler, what’s up, everybody. Super happy to be here. My name is Joel. I am from Vancouver, Canada, and I’m part of the BD in partnerships team at Kadena and Kadena Eco. I’m excited to be here and share with you guys some exciting updates and hopefully drop some alpha for you on what’s to come.
Jacquin Mininger: Hey guys, I’m Jacquin. I’m an engineer at Kadena Core where I work on wallets, developer tooling, and developer experience.
Before Kadena, I worked for a Haskell consulting firm where I worked on a variety of Web3 and Web2 projects, which is actually how I met Doug Beardsley. We were geeking out at a Haskell meetup that he had organized. So I’m looking forward to talking about various Kadena Eco projects that we have cooking.
Jeffrey Ou: Awesome. To kick it off, you know I just wanted to ask the people who are just joining or are new to Kadena: “What is Kadena Eco, and, you know, how does it differentiate itself from Kadena?”
Tyler Benster: Kadena Eco is an initiative that we launched earlier this year and it’s everything about the ecosystem. Our sole mandate is to support, accelerate, nurture, and do everything we can to help builders on Kadena create the biggest, most badass most successful projects possible.
In order to do that, we have a few different arms and efforts that are underway. One of the more prominent ones that imagine most folks in this call have heard of is we’ve announced our hundred million dollar grants program which is well underway. I have a few updates on that front in particular as there’s been a lot of community questions around: “what types and why projects are being selected for grants? How are announcements going out about grants?” Et cetera, et cetera. First of all, we’ve had way more applicants than anticipated. We’ve had literally hundreds and hundreds of people apply. A majority of applications have a really high quality. We are absolutely swamped and overwhelmed with applicants, which is a good problem to have.
But you are in the audience and you’ve applied for a grant and you haven’t heard back from us yet. Please know that you are still under consideration. Just a couple of updates on how the process is going so far. We have about six or seven grants that have gone out or are being inked and we expect to announce the first cohort of grants sometime in the next couple of weeks.
We expect it’ll be six or seven or maybe a couple more if we can get them across the finish line in the next week or two. Most of these initial cohorts of grants are focused on infrastructure. So, our core focus for the first cohort has been on helping flesh out the core infrastructure for Kadena that is going to allow for a really vibrant blockchain ecosystem.
While we’ve been setting up these processes on grants. We’ve been hyper due diligence. We’ve been going through fairly extensive conversations with each project, technical due diligence, KYC, looking intensely at developer roadmaps, and iterating on milestones that would be hit as part of a grant. We’ve been very considerate and careful to try and make sure that the first cohort of grants really knocks it out of the park and shows the community that this grants program is going to help bring Kadena and the Kadena ecosystem to the next level. So, this first cohort is focused on infrastructure. Soon after this first cohort is announced we’re going to be switching our focus all onto the second cohort that will be coming soon.
And so if you haven’t been having in-depth conversations with us yet on the grants program that means that we’re probably looking at your application regards to the second cohort. We’re going to take these learnings and these new processes that we’ve developed for this first cohort, and we’ll hopefully be able to get through the second cohort a little bit faster.
We’re really, really excited about all the momentum that I think this is going to bring. Yes, you can expect some big announcements about this first cohort of grants in the next couple of weeks. You’re going to see a lot of grants given out to companies that are developing infrastructure. Then the second cohort will start expanding that focus area outward to many of the other amazing aspects of projects that people are working on.
Now, the second thing I want to tease out a little bit is in addition to this grants program, we’re starting to spin up an arm to actually execute investments into projects and companies that are building on Kadena. These will be sizable investments in companies that are either kind of at an IDO or post-IDO stage or a venture stage.
The idea being that we would be one among several other parties that might be making an investment into a team that might be gearing up for a large seed round or a series A that sort of thing. I think a typical story around a project coming through kind of some of the Kadena Eco of arms would be perhaps a company or a project starts off applying for a grant, gets a small grant.
If that gets them to kind of proof of concept, some kind of MVP maybe gets some across the line to deploying some stuff on the blockchain and starting to build a community. At that point, perhaps they’re ready to raise a bit more money and build out the team and start really accelerating, catalyzing that growth. And that might be an appropriate time for an investment. We expect to make more grants than we do investments. But I think that’ll be exciting as we start to spin up that process. So just wanted, to tease that out a little bit and that’s it for me. I’m going to queue up Joel now to talk about hiring advisors and more.
Joel Woodman: Thanks, Tyler. I think one of the things I’m super pumped about is how much hiring we’re doing right now. If you guys head over to angel.co, you can see all of our JDs that we’ve put out. There are probably a few more to come as well. There’s a good chance we’re going to double our BD team by the end of the year which is very exciting.
That’ll obviously help us move quicker through grants and a whole slew of things as well. We have some really exciting advisors that are coming on board as well. To tease one of them, he’s a good friend of mine and a business mentor as well. He was part of building one of the largest SaaS sales media companies globally.
He now sits on part of the leadership team of the company that I ended up acquiring that business. He also manages a rather unique VC fund from a traditional VC fund. He and his partner are actually operators, so they’re not traditional finance guys. And they leverage their existing network in the SaaS Web2 world to garner investment from the likes of some of the top executives at some household-named companies like Slack DocuSign, Zoom, and Salesforce to name a few.
He’s bringing in a pretty elite Rolodex of connections. Tyler and I are speaking with one of his connections after this with, I won’t name names, but with a company that you definitely all would be familiar with. Super excited about that and that’s just one of a handful of advisors that we’re super pumped on.
A couple ofother things I wanted to touch on that are definitely coming down the pipe is Oracle solutions. We’re circling with some big players in this space. I have a meeting tonight, which is actually in person, which is always nice in this day and age. To talk to a group. We’re circling with another large group on Monday.
Know that some Oracle solutions are coming to Kadena very, very soon. And also, zero-knowledge. I think this has been teased in some of the developer chats on Discord if I’m not mistaken, but we should be making some announcements in the coming weeks about bringing zero-knowledge to Kadena which is super exciting.
The last thing I want to touch on, I’m going to let Jacquin take over on this, but we put out a medium blog from Randy talking about overhauling the dev UX with Kadena Eco, and obviously, that’s going to make things awesome. We’re super pumped about it. We’ve got the community involved as well in that. A lot of exciting things happening. I’ll let Jacquin take it from there.
Jacquin Mininger: That zero knowledge stuff will definitely be super awesome for the ecosystem. As you said yesterday, we announced the launch of Kadena.js, which represents a new one-stop shop for front-end development on Pact or for using Pact on Chainweb.
It’s the first step in building a comprehensive suite of tools for developers at the moment. The alpha represents just a port of the current pact-lang-API, which will be sunsetting in the future from JavaScript to type script. We’ve listened to feedback from the community, and we plan to make much better abstractions and build to top this current foundation for dealing with the blockchain and other components of the ecosystem such as Chainweb data and the Chainweb node itself. Kadena Eco is going to be stewarding this development along with the help of some community members and community teams who have committed to pitching in with developments. That’s awesome. Check out the medium article if you haven’t already.
So, I think with that being said, Jeff, you have some questions for us.
(@Mr. Metcalfe on Twitter): “How many grant applications have you received accepted so far?”
Tyler Benster: As I said, in my intro we’ve accepted six or seven grant applications. There’s a couple more, there’s another two or three that are kind of being, being worked through some of the contracts. We expect the first cohort of grants that’ll be at least six or seven projects that are announced.
There might be a couple more as well. And that said for the second cohort there have been some rejection notices sent out. We do anticipate that there are still well over a hundred applications that are still pending that we’re working through to review.
If you have not heard from us yet with your grant, please sit tight. We are going to review every application thoroughly and appreciate your patience with that.
(@Blabee on Twitter): “Who ultimately decides which projects receive grants and technical expertise from Kadena Eco?”
Joel Woodman: I can take that one. It’s a team effort and what we’re looking for in these projects is obviously does the team have existing experience working with blockchain? Is that an existing dev team? What’s the caliber of the team? Does the project fit what Kadena needs right now?
Right now we’re focused primarily on key infrastructure. As far as who has the final say we have kind of a committee here and it goes through that as a proper channel. If it’s me or Dan from our team or Tyler that has the initial reach out and, and discussion with the grantee, we move them through the pipe.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, we present it to the team and there’s kind of a vote on it. The important thing to know too is if we’re going to reject a grantee, that’s not like a no, never. It’s often like we are excited to see them build and come back and we just want to see them improve upon the application itself. I hope that answers that question.
(@Kadeniak on Twitter): Where does the hundred million Eco fund come from?
Tyler Benster: That’s a good question. So like most cripto projects Kadena funds, ecosystem initiatives using the platform share of tokens.
That means that our job at Kadena Eco is to ensure that the grants program is net accretive to the value of the ecosystem. This is why Kadena Eco employs folks like myself and others that have a strong venture capital or business development background. While Kadena Eco does not receive equity or tokens in exchange for the grants, we absolutely are thinking about these grants in terms of return on investment.
That’s because we take this role of stewards for Kadena Eco very seriously. This is why we have rigorous processes in place around KYC, around due diligence in terms of having conversations with founders and doing these technical assessments of projects. Our key focus is to make sure that the grant program drives value to all stakeholders of the ecosystem. That’s projects, that’s builders and KDA bag holders alike.
(@DonsofDons on Twitter): “Kadena needs a simpler UI and UX for mass adoption. Is there anything that we can comment on that?”
Jacquin Mininger: Absolutely. I don’t know if anyone saw, but I think a week or two ago, our director of engineering Doug Beardsley dropped a sneak peek, a teaser with, I don’t think he commented on what it was of our new wallet sort of dApp called Intellisend.
What it does is it prevents the user from having to think about the different chains. So it loads balances, all transactions across all the chains. You don’t have to think about the chains. It also is set up so that it allows you to send multiple transactions across the network at the same time and sign multiple transactions at the same time and prevents a very nice sleek interface for interacting across Kadena’s currently 20 chains but in the future, that’ll be who knows of possibly a thousand, 10,000 chains.
(@Altbranch on Twitter): “Can you please explain how Kadena Eco qualifies and evaluate projects to grant them namespaces?”
Jacquin Mininger: At the moment Kadena is in charge of giving name spaces out to community projects.
In the next month or basically the next pact release, we have a solution that will allow anyone to launch their own hashed namespace, a hash of the keyset. This circumvents some of the minor security things that people were concerned about. In the more near term, we have a couple of different projects committed to basically being stewards of certain contract appointments.
Basically what this will end up looking like is a couple of different projects that we’ve communicated with we will give them the community namespace or something of that sort. They will deploy contracts and the project will apply through them to lighten the load and make this a bit more of a decentralized process at the moment.
Jeffrey Ou: Yeah, definitely. It’s important to scale up our efforts in order to allow more community projects and projects in general in the Kadena ecosystem to access namespaces. Tyler, do you have anything to add to that?
Tyler Benster: I think that broadly speaking with namespaces, it’s an interesting challenge, right? With a multi-blockchain architecture. On the one hand, there’s this element of wanting the system to be completely decentralized and that is the most trustless form and that implementation requires you to have some way of ensuring that the actual code matches the namespace.
Something like a hashing-based mechanism or something that’s relatively hard to forge and act maliciously and preempt. If someone submits a smart contract to one blockchain, you have to be able to sort of avoid a scenario where someone submits a malicious contract to the blockchain to chain three, or chain four or tries to front run it.
That’s a difficult problem and it can be solved with hashing-based mechanisms, but that doesn’t have the pretty names that many of us like, just in terms of being able to take advantage of how human-readable Pact is. For more human-readable name spaces as Jacquin was talking about this is where a centralized solution seems to make the most sense for the time being. I think this process of saying, look right now, this centralized solution is mostly going through Kadena, and let’s start to have key community leaders run this process instead. Here’s a step in the right direction towards empowering the community. I think we’re, you know, pursuing multiple solutions to the namespace problem. We know it’s important and it’s also the new territory where we’re innovating here at the forefront of how to solve some of these problems in a multi-blockchain architecture.
Jeffrey Ou: Great! Speaking of community, I know since this is the office hours, we need community questions, and we can’t just ask pre-asked community questions and allow live questions from the community!
Speaking of human-readable or just human in general, who has a better foosball shot Tyler or Joel?
Joel Woodman: Hundred percent me.
Tyler Benster: Oh man, Joel, I’m going to take you on in Chicago.
Jacquin Mininger: Are you forgetting that I destroyed you the last time we saw each other?
Joel Woodman: None of you have seen me play foosball and you won’t want after you do.
Tyler Benster: Yeah. I’ll tell you. I had a foosball table growing up and my friends no longer play with me.
So that’s a warning to Joel.
Joel Woodman: Amazing. I can’t wait.
(@KadenaUK on Twitter): “When is ledger going to support KDA?”
Jacquin Mininger: Yep. We’ve put a good amount of time working into this. It’s quite challenging given Pact’s sort of structure and fitting that on the very tiny memory-constrained device, like the ledger, but we’ve settled on a model finally that will allow people to see arbitrary capabilities and sign those capabilities, which means you’ll be able to sign.
Not just transfers, but swaps as well, and maybe Marmalade transactions. So we’re working on finishing that up and then when that’s ready, we’ll submit it to ledger and that process could take a month or two. And we’ll let you know when we do.
Jeffrey Ou: Great. Awesome. Md Asif has been waiting a while to speak, so I’ll bring you up.
Md Asif: You just answered my one question and the second one is Why do people want to build on Kadena and not on other blockchains?
Tyler Benster: I imagine your first question must have been about the foosball shot. So glad we got that sorted. But for your second question, I think the reason why people go on Kadena does vary from project to project, but there area few themes.
One theme of the course is around scalability. So wanting to be able to build a project on a blockchain, especially as the project scales as transaction volume raises knowing that the underlying technology isn’t going to hold them back or force the project to, later on,adopt a layer two fewer gas fees or transaction to put in the network fails to scale. So that’s a key reason.
Two, I think people are drawn to Pact and to making smart contracts that are safe and secure that eliminate an entire class of exploits in other projects. You’re building key infrastructure or projects in DeFi or even gaming projects. You don’t want to be exposed to a 600 million dollar hack.
You don’t want to be exposed to some of these swaps in terms of what contract is ultimately the oracle that says a transaction can go through. You don’t want to be exposed to integer overflows, so you don’t want to be exposed to classes of exploits that can be solved by formal verification.
I think these are all great reasons to use Pact. And then finally, I think that there’s also an acknowledgment for some projects that because Kadena as a layer one ecosystem has been absolutely exploding over the last six to nine months that there’s this unique opportunity right now to come in and start building and become a key player in this ecosystem.
I expect that the people that are backing some of these initial projects and the initial builders themselves are going to reap the rewards of sort of being in at the ground floor of a key layer one ecosystem. And so I’m really excited to see what the next 12 months bring. I think there are huge technical advantages to building on Kadena both due to the underlying blockchain technology due to Pact due to proof of work and also due to the community and the ecosystem that we have here. It’s an amazing group of people that we’re very collaborative and I think that we’re all going to make it.
Jeffrey Ou: Yes, sir. We are going to make it. Kadefi.money I’m going to add you up as a speaker. Are you able to speak seems like you’re muted? Can you hear us?
Joel Woodman: I think your microphone is muted there Kadefi?
Kadefi.money: Oh, sorry. I got cut in the, in the middle and didn’t realize you guys are talking to me. Hi guys. We are Kadefi.money. We are a project building on Kadena. We aim to be the one-stop dashboard for everything Kadena-related. You can track your defi investments, staking NFTs, and something like a board and Debank of and much more than that. And coming and we’ve been building for a few months now and Pact was just lovely when we got into it, it’s just super easy and gets simple to get started with. And we’re really excited for Kadena.js. Enough about us, but our question is that we are really looking forward to applying for the grant.
Mainly because we don’t really have any ideas or anything like that to raise money because we are a free platform. So the question is:
“For cohort two which you guys mentioned, what are the few things you’re looking for in a project to approve for a grant?”
Tyler Benster: Right on well, first of all, thanks so much for building with us. We’re really happy to have you in the ecosystem and community. You know, I think Debank and other aggregators are really key infrastructure and so that’s really, really cool to see excited to see and follow your progress. In terms of the grant, you’re definitely like the type of project in that we look for. I think what it comes down to are a few things.
First of all, we do care quite a bit about the dev roadmap. We care a lot about the team. We care about the grant itself, the proposed grants, and milestones. What is it that’s being developed? An issue that we have occasionally seen is, we have gotten some applications that are fairly copy-pasted of people trying to do the same thing on different ecosystems.
Doesn’t seem like that’s the case for you folks but I think that obviously a project that really understands Kadena, understands the community, and understands where the opportunities and spaces lie are important. What I’d say here is that kind of that the key aspects are for the grant milestones and applications themselves that we really want to support particularly development and work that is going into things that are hyperfocused and relevant to Kadena to the Kadena ecosystem and to people that are part of the Kadena army. So I hope that’s at least a little bit helpful and we’re all happy to give sort of more project-specific feedback offline.
So you can feel free to DM on Twitter or reach out the email or whatever.
Jeffrey Ou: Great. I’ll invite you up. KadenaLifeSale. Well, I think you’re connected now KadenaLifeSale. I think you’re muted. Let me add up another person, its_TKD. I’ll add you up too, to get as many questions from the community. Can you hear us?
Tyler Benster: Anyone that step here as a speaker, please feel free to ask a question. I’d love to have it.
Jeffrey Ou: I think you guys are muted.
KadenaLifeSale: My name is Damien. I just did a Kadena talk down here in Argentina. I’m not sure. I think I’m having technical difficulties here.
Tyler Benster: Yeah, we can hear you just fine now.
KadenaLifeSale: Basically, my question is I’m talking to a lot of people down here about Kadena I’m going to meet with the mayor of Rosario on the 20th. And my biggest question:
“How long do you guys project the grant to last for? “
I know that you guys are hopefully choosing the best projects, I know you are, you’re choosing the top projects. How long do you foresee this process to continue? Is it going to last a year? Less than that, it would be good to know that because the government here moves really slowly. That would be good information to have. Can anyone fill me in on that?
Tyler Benster: Yeah, totally. First of all thanks so much for organizing what I hear was a great event in Argentina.
Amazing to see that kind of community initiative really awesome. And also, if you haven’t seen some of KadenaLifeSale’s NFT artwork, you definitely go check out the website. Super, super cool stuff. So for the grants themselves, there aresort of two aspects to that question. At least as I’m interpreting it.
One is how long is the process of applying or receiving grants? How long is that going to take? And the second question is once you’ve gotten a grant sort of that disbursement what kind of period of development does that grant intended to cover? So for the first question you know, our, our ideal is very much, we would like grants as a process to be something that, you know, takes no longer than four to six weeks.
We’re not there right now. I think part of this is with the announcement of the grants program, there havebeen people that’ve been building on Kadena in some cases for years. Basically like everyone applied all at once, which is fricking awesome because there area lot of applications. But that’s an element of not only are we spinning up Kadena Eco as an organization, but we’re also spinning up the grants program.
So we’re streamlining processes and trying to figure out how to as fast as possible without sacrificing the quality of the process and the rigor of the process. So right now we’ve been airing on the side of caution and saying: “look we want to be as rigorous as possible and start off with grants that we have very high confidence are going to meet all the milestones and absolutely crush it.
As we sort of develop and go through we’re going to learn and we’re going to gain more comfort and be able to move a little bit quicker. Expect that today we’re not hitting four to six weeks we’re hitting a couple ofmonths and we’re going to try and make that, make that fast in the future.
For the second interpretation of your question, which is over what period might a grant, be intended to support or be dispersed over? We kind of think about this as being almost like a pre-seed type of chunk of money. It’s something that should help a small team develop and work over say six months, maybe a year, maybe three months.
It depends on the project. It depends on the milestones. Depends on what’s being done. We have people indulging grants that are doing everything from, DeFi to fricking hardware. So there aredifferent needs depending on different projects. It’s a really amazing diverse array. And you’ll see some of that in the first cohort as well.
I think that part is very company specific. It’s fine with us if you need a size of a grant that spans over a longer period. The grants program is very much intended to be something that helps a project get to that next level, helps them get to proof of concept, helps them, you know, deploy something on the blockchain.
In some cases, adjacent technology and infrastructure that helps projects on Kadena or in some cases it areyou know, folks that are going to be really developing some amazing community resources writing some fantastic documentation and showing people, this is how you do XYZ on Kadena.
A lot of things that are adjacent to the smart contract themselves. I think that the key thing here is that the grants program is not intended to finance an operation indefinitely. The grants program is intended to help a project get to that point where they can either raise additional capital that they need, or they can find a way to become self-sustaining and self-sufficient so the grants program is really intended to help build big projects that are going to be able to then have these fires in their engine of growth and carry Kadena and ecosystems in the next big billion-dollar projects and opportunities.
Jeffrey Ou: Great answer, Tyler. We have WS who has been waiting a while and the luck the lucky one I’ll invite you guys up next.
WS: Hey guys, can you hear me?
Jeffrey Ou: Hey yeah, we could hear you. Great. I’ll let you go first.
WS: Oh, okay. Thanks. Yeah, so, I really look forward to seeing the projects that come out. I have a more kind of finance-related question and think it was just interesting the way you guys framed Kadena Eco as sort of an internal VC fund kind of, you know, capital allocator.
So if I think about the situation you guys are in versus VC funds VC funds would be deploying from a fiat-based capital assets, and center management, whereas you guys would be deploying from kind of KDA coins. And we know that those have come down like the rest of cripto.
“Has [the market] impacted your view on how quickly you moved to deploy to projects and just given that your cost of capital has basically changed or had you secured the funds in US dollars kind of before the market decline?“
I’d just be curious as to how to sort of think about that because like the, everybody says in cripto it’s the best time to build during the bear market, but I guess this would be one dynamic that would be a little bit different from a capital allocation standpoint and in this landscape.
Joel Woodman: Do you want to take that Tyler or do you want me to take it?
Tyler Benster: Sure. I’ll start and Joel, maybe you can finish it off. First of all, I think it’s a great question. I’ll answer a little bit from the VC side. It’s also a bit of a delicate question, right?
Because we don’t want to signal anything about sort of how Kadena uses platform share tokens to fund the ecosystem. What I will say is that there’s a plenty of fiat and other reserves such that Kadena is going to have absolutely Kadena Eco, going to have no problem funding all of our initiatives in the next many years to come.
So very, very secure position. And we aren’t actually contingent on the price of the token right now at all in terms of funding, a lot of these initiatives and growths. So we’re very fortunate to be in a stronger position than some other projects. You know, that said. I think that we all recognize that there are changes and resources available that are dependent on the price of things and that’s just a reality. That’s true for any public company as it is true for any cripto company. So there’s a reality to that too. But I do think that there areplaces where we do things in terms of tokens, places where things are done in terms of Fiat. But the area that I think your question didn’t hit on that is very different from a VC fund.
And maybe I’ll pass over Joel to hit on this point, in particular, that we are doing a lot of services and support in addition to just an investment as part of the grants program. Those kinds of in-kind services are going to be, as in as valuable, if not more valuable to a lot of the grantees.
Joel Woodman: Yeah, exactly. I think it layers in a really fun portion of it too, is, helping these projects grow, whether that be connecting them with relevant parties in the space or making suggestions for people they should hire, et cetera. I think you nailed all the other, all the other buttons there for me.
It just depends it’s not always a token investment or a token grant and like Tyler said the reserves are there. It’s not a concern at Kadena or Kadena Eco right now, which is a pretty cool space to be. The industry’s in a bit state of flux, there are a lot of layoffs happening, but we’re both, we’re full steam ahead with hiring. So it’s an exciting time to be at Kadena for sure.
Jeffrey Ou: Awesome. I’ll add up The lucky One and Owais.
The lucky One: Guys, one question.
“Do we have an overview of projects building right now on Kadena? And second of all, we have also the information that Lago Finance got a grant. And when do we get the other information about the other grantees?”
Tyler Benster: I can probably answer briefly. No worries. As I alluded to in earlier comments, we anticipate an announcement about the first grant cohort of grants coming out in the next couple of weeks. There have been clearly some rumors or leaks about who may be included in that sort of first cohort. That’s all well and fun. There’s also some, some folks in there that I think the community will be familiar with and there’ll be some folks that maybe are going to be newer projects but I think it’s going to be really, really exciting first cohort. And that sort of who is building on Kadena I mean, you can look at the kadena.io/ecosystem webpage. There are also somelike amazing third-party webpages, like kadenaecosystem.com that you can check out that have a lot of great lists as to who’s building, but, you know, there’s, there’s well, more than 50 projects at this point.
Joel Woodman: Those guys are great. kadenaecosystem.com is a good one. You can check out.
Jeffrey Ou: Awesome. I think you could speak now, Owais.
Owais Ahmed: Hey! I want to ask:
“How can Kadena ecosystem will compete with huge projects Ethereum, and BNB coin in terms of scalability? And my second question is what are the main goals Kadena has in the near future and what are the circumstances? What are the factors on which you will compete for the huge projects in the cryptocurrency industry?”
Jeffrey Ou: Thank you. So, your two questions are how is Kadena scalable compared to other kinds of projects like Ethereum? And your second question is how can we compete with the other industries? Does anyone want to take that Joel?
Joel Woodman: I mean, we’re inherently the only scalable proof of work network. And this is done through something. We call Chainweb, which scales chains latterly.
We’ve done this live on mainnet. We launched with 10 chains, we scaled to 20. And as far as competing with other networks, you know, we have not had an exploit to date. We’re the only blockchain that has solved the blockchain trilemma and we have not seen another chain do that.
I think right now, especially with the initiative of Kadena eco that we launched in February, we’re starting to see this snowball pickup, and it’s starting to get larger, and the more and more quality developers and builders that come build on Kadena the faster that snowball is growing. I think that’s, what’s really exciting and I think the next year, the next couple years here are going to be really exciting. I do not doubt that we’re going to become, I already think we are, but I have no doubt we’re going to become one of the top players in this space and compete with the biggest of them.
Jacquin Mininger: Just to add to that as to what makes us stand out. I think that we are really the only platform out there that I would describe as sanity driven. We have a sanity-driven approach to smart contract development where like millions and billions are on the line and It’s such a different feeling to build on a platform that was built from the ground up with these principles of safety in mind and making things easier to read and understand, and also having atomics that are our principles that are like fundamentally safety driven and sort of atomics to build like the tools that Pact provides as natives to build on are so much easier, they are make developing safe dApps so much easier than in other ecosystems.
Jeffrey Ou: Definitely. KDAMiner, you’ve been waiting a while. I’ll invite you up. Think you’re muted.
Tyler Benster: Hey, we hear you now.
KDAMiner: Hey, sorry. My phone’s been cutting in and out. Hey, a quick question:
“As far as monetary value with the grants is each grant the same, like monetary value, or are some weighted differently than others based on what you think they bring?”
Joel Woodman: Yeah, it depends, right? It’s on a project-by-project basis. It depends on the project. Depends on the size of the team. It depends on the development roadmap. The monetary value is going to be based on the work that’s being done. This is a developer grant program. We look very carefully and want to make sure that each dollar is going to something that’s being built on the network.
Tyler Benster: There’s a risk-reward thing here too. Right? If you’re proposing something that’s quite risky or technically quite difficult to pull off, then there ought to be like a really big payoff for the ecosystem and for growth, if you do succeed in pulling it off. That’s what can justify some, some larger amounts.
On the other hand, if you’re doing something that is this really low risk in terms of technical stuff, but has more like market and marketing type of risk than, you know, maybe something that’s a smaller grant might be more manageable and reasonable. So I think a big part of grants is also just sort of tailoring the ask for what you’re proposing and being reasonable and realistic.
We take a hard look at someone that proposes, something with a reasonable dollar amount and they have a very credible application, but when even if an application’s very credible, if the dollar amount requested is sort of otherworldly, then it becomes like harder to take it seriously.
So I think that’s sort of calibrating ask for the development roadmap is something that we do take into consideration as well.
Jeffrey Ou: I think that’s it for the round of community questions. If no one else has any others. I guess what, where do you guys each individually kind of most excited about what the development of Kadena Eco, and what is one key takeaway you want to give to the community? Before our next Kadena Eco Office Hours.
Joel Woodman: I think for me, maybe I have mentioned this, but I started at Kadena earlier this year and I actually came from the community. So, you know, I brought my first tokens last year, sometime, maybe a year ago. As a retail investor, I remember, waiting, you’re waiting on announcements and blah, blah, blah. And I totally, I get what that’s like and I think if I could leave everyone listening with a takeaway today, it’s that I couldn’t be more bullish now that I’m on the inside and working here. And with the team, the people are amazing. The projects coming through are amazing. I couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come. That’s what I would leave everybody with.
Jacquin Mininger: Yeah, I’m super excited about what we have in the pipeline for developer experience coming up. Kadena.js is just the first step. We have a complete overhaul of our docs coming. That includes stuff like interacting with Marmalade and we’re going to also build out the tooling at a GraphQL interface at some point for interacting with Chainweb data. Tons of really cool stuff for making it super simple for new builders to just come in and just instantly get up and running in the ecosystem. Looking forward to that immensely.
Tyler Benster: Those that I’ve talked to know that I’m sort of most excited and happiest when I’m talking to builders in the ecosystem. And to me, something I’m most excited about is honestly just looking out at all the names of folks in the audience here.
If you haven’t been scrolling through that list, like check it out. You’re seeing a lot of really cool and upcoming projects out there. I think as we see this ecosystem continue to grow, continue to develop. There’s just going to be so many opportunities to get involved, whether that’s in terms of projects or DAOs or staking or in NFTs and other infrastructure, there’s just so much cool stuff going on just a very quick glance here in the audience, I see Docushield and KDABet and Kaddex and KadenaLifeSale and Miners of Kadena and KDA Mining Club and a bunch more. I mean, it’s just, so cool. Hypercent this community’s so involved people are really friendly. I’d really encourage you if you’re in the community and you’re interested in another project or see an area for collaboration, just reach out directly. People are so, so friendly. And if you’re having trouble connecting with another project, you know, feel free to reach out to us. We’re always happy to help facilitate an intro. But I think one of the best parts of working with Kadena Eco is honestly just the community and just knowing that we’re surrounded by people that are so kind and gracious and just super smart and driven and passionate. That’s what keeps me going.
Jeffrey Ou: Super glad to hear. I think the community will be ecstatic to hear to wait on these upcoming grant announcements and further development of the ecosystem.
Before we end here, let’s take two more questions for the road.
Owais, let me add you back up again.
Owais Ahmed: I want to ask:
“Will there be any burning concept in the Kadena ecosystem?”
Jeffrey Ou: The question was will there be any burning in the ecosystem?
Tyler Benster: So I think you mean in terms of like burning tokens like as part of transactions or gas fees, that’s sort of my interpretation.
Kadena is proof of work and follows the same playbook as Bitcoin in terms of some of the tokens model thereof having a fixed economy. Effectively what this means is that Kadena doesn’t need to drive growth based on transaction fees that people mine, and they receive, blocks, and they, they mine blocks and receive coins as part of that activity.
That should sort of ensure for the long run, that there is low transaction cost for the network. I think what’s going to be driving utility and value in KDA is going to be all these amazing projects that are building on Kadena and the utility that KDA will bring in terms of interfacing with these projects, using them, being able to swap to different tokens that sort of thing.
This is why I think I’m so emphasizing this collaborative aspect of what we’re doing here, right? Is that we’re all building out this economy together. And so it’s a very collaborative endeavor and, and that’s why it’s fairly easy to kind of be befriended to everyone because we all are contributing something different, all have some value to add.
And ultimately we’re all collaborating in this ecosystem and showing the rest of the world that there are ways to build projects that are truly decentralized in the proof of work sense that is truly scalable in the Chainweb sense and that truly solve security and censorship resistance in the Satoshi Nakamoto sense.
Jeffrey Ou: two_pack_of_sugar, I’ll invite you up next as the last speaker.
two_pack_of_sugar: Hey. I was late. I might have missed this.
“What is the ETA on Marmalade?”
Because I feel like the easiest barrier to entry on metaverse or Web3 or whatever you want to call it is just purchasing an NFT. I’m a 42-year-old father of three. I’m and I’m entrepreneurial-minded. So like, I feel like I’m savvy, but like, it can be so hard and frustrating to break through into any type of NFT environment to just purchase one. I looked at Marmalade, I looked at a lot of the NFTs that are out there already on Kadena and it’s kind of awkward. You have to search by website. I guess ETA on Marmalade and as an NFT place, like OpenSea or Magic Eden or something like that.
Jacquin Mininger: Yeah. So Marmalade is live and has been since I think May or back in April, I think the first NFT was actually minted back in April and people are using it.
What Marmalade is, is infrastructure. So it is the contract in place for other people to go mint their own marketplaces. It is not going to be an actual marketplace. That being said, I think there are definitely different projects working on marketplaces where you can go buy, sell something OpenSea-like but I think it’s a new tool and, and there is going to be some experimentation time involved in terms of getting best practices with deploying and building out the tools for interacting with Marmalade.
Jeffrey Ou: Yeah and if you haven’t checked out our medium site yet, Randy the head of the developer experience had released an article about the Marmalade roadmap. Be sure to check that out. We’re closing in on the hour and so just wanted to thank everyone for joining in today’s AMA or not AMA, Office Hours.
Thank you, Jacquin, Joel, and Tyler. And thank you for giving the community an update. If you guys have anything else to say.
Joel Woodman: Not at all. No, Jeff, thank you. And thanks to everyone for listening today. That was fun. I hope to be back soon and am excited to see everyone build.
Jacquin Mininger: Yeah. Super fun. See you guys again soon.
Tyler Benster: Great chatting all. Thanks for the questions. And for showing up community [folks], come to build with us. Keep building, come collaborate. Let us know how we can help cheer.
