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.

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Author: Oluwapelumi Adejumo