Francesco Melpignano on Kadena’s layer 1 protocol and ecosystem

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media in the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have francesco mel pinano ceo of kadana eco francesco welcome to the show thank you so much for taking the time i really appreciate you coming on today hey ashton no thanks so much for having me thank you for taking the time really

0:21excited to be here likewise so much to cover in the kadana ecosystem uh and canada eco itself helping out with that ecosystem so let's get started can you first please give a little bit of an explanation about cadana eco how it's helping kadana and then we'll dive into the intricacies of the cadena blockchain and everything that's going on in the ecosystem

0:43yeah of course so um we just spun up cadena eco a few months ago i'm william therefore the ceo we brought on paul sue a ciio chief investment innovation officer to co-lead the effort uh we're here to sort of propel the hyper growth of the cadena ecosystem right now builders on cadena and application dapps use cases in general are at a huge inflection point

1:09and we're here ready to provide people with the capital resources and anything that they need to build their use cases applications and anything you can dream of on the cadena blockchain incredible and let's dive into kadana itself you know i only heard of it and late last year the beginning of this year um and but i know that it has huge power and potential and i'd love to

1:34learn more if you could explain a little bit about the layer one how it works what makes it special i would love that yeah of course i always like love giving a bit of background on cadena for you know all the new members joining us and just learning about us and also you know giving a quick refresh with potentially a different perspective for mayan so

1:54cadena is the only next-gen layer one that's innovating on proof-of-work we've managed to scale proof-of-work infinitely this is because kadena we started off with 10 blockchains running concurrently and we can scale this base layer as we demonstrated by scaling that up from 10 chains to 20 chains in the summer of 2020. so that means that we've also tested

2:18this up to hundreds of thousands of chains and you can think of each one of these chains uh sort of the cadena chain web algorithm with the same throughput as an ethereum uh so right now we're about 20 times uh you know more can process 20 times more throughput than ethereum and can go to you know thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times more than

2:40that um and cadena has solved this scalability and sort of the trilemma by innovating purely on the math side uh so now everything that we do is secured by sort of hashing and proof of work um so you know that's we figured the last missing piece of what was missing down sort of scaling the blockchain which was you know how do you get more throughput with the same

3:07amount of hash power coming in and then in our system as you keep on adding blockchains to the underlying system um that means that the block space goes up proportionally there so we've tested this system to be able to handle any future throughput load that will come our way because we can keep on adding chains to this system um and building this innovation from the

3:27ground up was obviously a lot of work on our end we're one of the lg's in the space in terms of having building and innovating on the layer one on the one side of things we've also built our own smart contract language called pact uh which is awesome for builders not only that know the blockchain space but are new to the blockchain space because it's very easy to pick up

3:47um it's you know it approaches being human readable so anyone with some coding is up in weeks we saw uh from a couple of the companies launching our ecosystem that devs that didn't necessarily have a blockchain background picked up the language very fast and are now innovating uh you know key components and core stuff like d5 uh how to implement amms so like models

4:11like uni swap and things like dexes et cetera et cetera great that's very interesting background and it's hard to visualize when you're like yeah it's 10 20 blockchains all in one using proof of work but i i understand and i trust the math when when it's backed by the right cryptography and the smartest mathematicians in the world building the most innovative blockchains um i'd

4:38rather trust the math than trust humans so yeah maybe i can give like a more simplified example on how we've scaled the blockchain uh so like you can think of it as you know like what's happening in ethereum today is basically like uh there's a bunch of people waiting in line to order from a counter at mcdonald's or something like that and the more people that are in line

5:02the more you potentially have to pay to get to the front of the line and put in your order to do that so basically how kadena has scaled this is we just open multiple counters so then the line can spread out evenly across those counters and that and the queue for each of those individual orders becomes shorter therefore that translates to having low gas fees

5:21forever very cool i like that example um less the mcdonald's part i can i get to get mixed up but the cashier uh line makes sense and the other important part that you mentioned there was about the development ecosystem having a programming language that's easy to use get developers easily either ones that are already working in blockchain and ethereum over to working on kadana or

5:44just people that know programming but aren't yet in blockchain right and obviously the scalability is super important when you have decentralized applications that thousands or millions of people are going to use but the first step is to have those applications built and actually have people coming to the applications to use them and i would love to get a little bit

6:05more insight on that development ecosystem in terms of how far it is and are there already dapps running on kadana yeah of course so i think today we're around 100 community-led projects that have run on cadena and this has been you know without the support of you know the cadena eco or other sort of initiatives of this forum because we just formed so we're right at an inflection point of

6:32growth for companies building on cadena all the core infrastructure is coming out uh cadets innovating uh and providing a default hub for all cadena there's you know a handful of launch pads coming up making it easier for builders on cadena to launch their ideas and do ideos and fundraise from community which i want to give a shout out to because you

6:52know we have one of the strongest and most passionate communities out there so thanks for all the continued support and then yeah just in general you know we're just at the tip of the iceberg for what's possible with pact it's a totally new programming language um and you know the possibilities with it are endless because on cadena there's also a concept of uh smart contracts being able

7:15to pay for your gas fees which means gas stations so that translates to translates to end users not having to pay their own gas which is very important on both dfi and nft and any other vertical because it actually totally increases the the number of applications that are possible um on a blockchain uh like for example and then if yeah like in the nfd space it means that

7:40whilst keeping everything decentralized you can totally abstract away from a user the ux problem of you know having to download a wallet having to connect that wallet but even before that the ux problems being someone who's maybe not crypto native at all to an exchange having to pass kyc buying this token potentially sending it to the wrong network right because the

8:01addresses look the same so you know i'm assuming that just at that phase you've lost like good 90 to 99 percent of mainstream users and what cadenna and specification eco is trying to do is you know propel us for mainstream adoption blockchain for the builders um and you know really get to these builders to build these mainstream use cases that will bring everyone over

8:26on rn you know our tech isn't limited to people are crypto native uh you know our idea is to bring on not only builders from web to want to transition to web 3 but also companies that are established in the web 2 space that may want to have a web3 product as part of their offering and today with evm blockchains and comparables that's not possible because it means that

8:47people have to totally re-architect sort of how their app works so you have a game that runs as an ios app on a mobile device um and you want to all of a sudden add nfts or crypto payments it means that you need to totally restructure your app and that's why there's so much there's decent amount of friction for these companies to move over to web3 even

9:09though the utility of these you know sort of digital assets is quite obvious especially to that space that kind of gave birth to them right so what we're trying to do is close that gap between giving people something that's easy to use scalable and decentralised yeah that's great francesco and i completely understand about the setting up a wallet and having gas for your

9:29first transaction or receiving an ether token and realizing you actually need ether to move it out and it's stuck in the wallet and it's your first coin ever and and you're like ah i'm giving up on crypto because it's too confusing um i've had to explain that a hundred times to people so that's great to hear uh about that ux and just getting new people in

9:48especially with nfts i found so many people that weren't in finance or cryptocurrencies are now getting involved in the blockchain ecosystem through nfts and getting their first nfts is super important and i'd love to know more about the nft side on kadana as well besides having those functionalities is there anything special or amazing about the nft

10:10ecosystem as it continues to grow on kadana yeah of course um so actually we're putting a we're just about to launch marmalade which is our nft tooling platform the whole team's been working very hard at this on this and will actually one of the co-founders has been spearheading this effort so barmlide is uh it takes advantage of cadena's novel nft standard

10:36uh which you know takes what's possible in the theorem today and opens it up to all sorts of use cases that people still haven't thought of right now you know like people kind of have a frame of reference and what's possible to nfts by what's being sold on nfts and things that are generating revenue right now but what we're going to go with nft is in the future if you know the word holds

10:56up to what it means non-fungible pretty much means everything else on the planet because very few things are fungible uh so you know what we're trying to do is actually make that a reality so with cadena within an f within an nft you can actually customize it to do anything that you need um it really does approach um having a digital receipt for something that's happening

11:17on a blockchain and doing all sorts of things following them so like one practical use case uh so like just just as a primer here you know one of the roles of cadena eco is to take all this theoretical and sort of amazing back-end innovation that's happening on cadena and build use cases for it to make it practical and real for users out there to then

11:37copy and use so that one practical use case of this novel to enforce things like royalties uh price floors uh rights to resale et cetera et cetera because in an nft on cadena using marmalide you can actually ingrain all these market conditions uh and like sort of market decisions of how you resell your nft into the nft itself so then you know ex

12:06marketplaces and nft exchanges on cadena are actually going to follow a totally decentralized model where you know all these royalties price floors rise to buy back and things along those lines are not enforced in a centralized way by an exchange but enforced by the original author of this nft so like we're really really looking forward to pushing the space

12:29forward and building really wep three native um applications on top of cadena that are truly decentralized and don't need to ever use some sort of centralized service or api or anything like that to guarantee sort of the promise of what blockchain was amazing that's great to hear and yeah i've definitely seen a few stories come out recently where this decentralized

12:51application is all of a sudden blocking people in a centralized way and uh people don't really know you know is the whole thing decentralized or just part of it and most of the time it's a semi-decentralized so great to see moving in that direction and yes very exciting about tokenizing essentially everything in the real world and real world assets that are non-fungible um

13:12looking forward to getting past just digital items and and physical collectibles to uh real world tangible items so looking forward to that and as you mentioned you're helping build out the ecosystem and this is part of it is making it a real thing and so with cadena eco are you funding or looking for startups that are looking to build on cadena or you also

13:36incubating new projects how does that work with growing out the ecosystem yeah of course so with cadena eco we're providing infrastructure funding and help for builders whatever their background may be where they're already in crypto or whether they're starting out with programming or whether it's their first idea or people who are you know down the rabbit hole

13:59of what's in the web 3 world or coming over from web 2. you know we're seeing lots of interest from very talented engineers that are not in blockchain yet don't want to come over uh so the kadena eco actually has five main initiatives to make this happen uh the first one is an accelerator that looks a lot like uh you know techstars slash y combinator model uh then we're also

14:20gonna have an incubator that's gonna be a lot more hands-on where we can actually sort of come in there as a co-founder and help you build your idea provided with all the resources you need and just get get hands-on with your project you know as much as you need us to be and then there's also going to be a grants program where we're going to incentivize smaller community-oriented

14:43projects you know to also uh look out for those who are maybe just diving into the crypto space or have a new idea and may not be ready to go into an accelerator or an incubator or something along those lines um then we also are going to have an r d arm which is main purpose is going to be to showcase to the world everything that's happening on the sort of theoretical back end

15:01innovation academia and building into practical use cases that they will look at and start to iterate on and make these things a reality um and the last portion is a traditional venture capital fund where we'll be providing a significant amount of capital uh that are needed to scale uh companies into the mainstream and you know the fund is going to be focused on

15:26investing on the cadena ecosystem on companies around you know cadena infrastructure um and things along those lines um but really like with these five initiatives we'd be covering builders that want to come to cadena you know in whichever stage they may be out with their idea of projects amazing francesco covering all the bases um and now for startups that are already in

15:52crypto or just any startups or people that want to help contribute to the ecosystem what is the best way to reach out and to get involved in kadana eco yeah i mean as a first place uh headed over to the cadena medium one of the latest articles is eco it will give you a great primer on what i've been talking about today and more you can follow the links in there to get

16:17in contact with us uh also feel free to follow caden on twitter uh you know we've got some fun community members supporting us out there so it's not just about information there's a lot more and yeah we're looking forward to keep on building this team on cadena eco and bringing on more and more partners and team members incredible thank you so much francesco i

16:41will leave those links for the startups and for people just interested in learning more about kadana and kidaniko in the description box below all the best with everything going on there's so many different faucets of of growing and i know it's going quickly so props to your team for keeping up on all of that and all the best with cadena eco moving forward and let's follow up in the near

17:01future thank you ashley i really appreciate your time thanks for having me on