After years of mining Kadena and believing in its promise to solve blockchain's greatest challenges, the sudden shutdown announcement has left the community reeling. This is the story of what drew miners like me to KDA, what went wrong, and whether there's any hope for what comes next.
On October 22, 2025, the Kadena team dropped a bombshell that sent shockwaves through the Kadena community: they were shutting down operations immediately. No warning. No gradual wind-down. No real explanation. After years of attending conferences, announcing partnerships, and promoting their new EVM chain narrative, Stuart Popejoy and William Martino simply walked away, leaving miners and investors holding worthless tokens and unanswered questions.
As someone who invested significant capital in Kadena mining equipment and believed deeply in the project's mission, this collapse feels personal. This isn't just about financial losses—though those are substantial. It's about broken trust, abandoned technology, and the harsh reality that even the most promising blockchain projects can fail their communities.
When I first discovered Kadena in 2021, it stood out for several compelling reasons. Kadena appeared to have solved the crypto trilemma—achieving security, scalability, and decentralization simultaneously. The braided chain design ran multiple parallel chains that could scale horizontally while maintaining Bitcoin-style proof-of-work security. Where Ethereum struggled with high gas fees and Bitcoin faced throughput limitations, Kadena promised near-zero transaction costs across 20 chains.
Unlike most blockchains that adopted Ethereum's Solidity, Kadena developed Pact—a purpose-built smart contract language designed specifically for blockchain security and usability. Pact featured human-readable syntax, built-in formal verification, and guards against common vulnerabilities that plagued other platforms.
The language's focus on safety and auditability made sense for the enterprise adoption thesis. If Kadena was going to onboard traditional businesses, having a smart contract language that non-developers could read and audit was a genuine advantage. It reinforced the impression that this team understood what real-world adoption required.
In an industry plagued by anonymous teams and regulatory uncertainty, Kadena's US-based leadership provided crucial legitimacy. Stuart Popejoy and William Martino were former JPMorgan blockchain engineers who had worked on the bank's Juno project. They understood enterprise needs and regulatory frameworks. While competitors faced SEC enforcement actions, Kadena operated transparently from New York, seemingly positioned to navigate whatever regulatory landscape emerged. For miners making multi-year capital commitments, this positioning offered critical risk mitigation.
While Ethereum users paid $50-$200 in gas fees during peak periods, Kadena transactions cost fractions of a cent. This fundamental reimagining of blockchain economics made micropayments, high-frequency DeFi, gaming applications, and IoT integrations economically feasible where they remained impossible on other chains. For developers, near-zero fees meant building applications without constantly worrying about gas optimization. This was supposed to be blockchain's killer feature—actually usable, affordable infrastructure.
I was mining KDA pretty early on after buying a few KD boxes. I made the decision to invest significantly in the Bitmain KA3 after it became clear other manufacturers were unable to improve on its efficiency. The Goldshell KD6 and KD5 models were popular choices in the early KDA mining but were quickly made obsolete by Bitmain. This also left some miners with a sour taste as the Goldshell models were going for astronomical amounts at the peak. The Bitmain KA3 ended up being the only profitable ASIC on the Kadena Blake2s algorithm.
The investment thesis was straightforward: with Kadena's 120-year emission schedule designed to reward miners gradually and predictably, premium ASICs like the KA3 would theoretically remain profitable for an extended operational lifespan. Unlike Bitcoin's aggressive four-year halving cycles that could obsolete mining equipment quickly, Kadena's gentle emission reduction meant the same hardware could potentially generate returns for 5-10+ years. This long-term mining viability was a key selling point that differentiated KDA from other mineable chains.
The mining economics looked solid through 2023. With KDA trading between $1-$2 and reasonable network difficulty, operations generated consistent returns. However, 2024-2025 proved challenging for all proof-of-work altcoins. Market conditions deteriorated across the board, with many POW coins struggling as investor attention shifted to other narratives. There were extended periods where even the flagship KA3 operated at breakeven or negative profitability depending on electricity rates. Miners with rates above $0.08/kWh faced difficult decisions about whether to continue operations or shut down temporarily. These challenging conditions weren't unique to Kadena—they reflected broader market dynamics affecting the entire POW altcoin sector.
The shutdown announcement came without warning. On October 22, 2025, the Kadena team published a post stating they were ceasing all business operations immediately due to running out of funds. Apparently there was no advance warning even to the employees. Just a sudden declaration that the company behind Kadena was done.
The market reaction was immediate and devastating. KDA, which had been trading around $0.23 before the announcement, crashed more than 50% within minutes. The token that had reached $27.64 in 2021 with a nearly $4 billion market cap was now effectively worthless, down more than 99% from its peak. For miners who had invested thousands in specialized ASIC equipment, the hardware became instantly obsolete—expensive paperweights that couldn't even be repurposed for other coins or algorithms.
What makes the shutdown particularly troubling is the timeline. In the weeks before October 22, the team maintained usual activities with no indication of impending collapse. They attended conferences, announced partnerships, promoted their EVM chain integration, and engaged with the community. As recently as the previous day, team members were posting about attending conferences to push the EVM narrative. Technical updates were pushed just days before the shutdown. Either they concealed their financial situation until the last moment, or they made the decision to abandon with shocking suddenness.
The lack of transparency is particularly galling given Kadena's positioning as a regulated, responsible blockchain project. The same team that emphasized their JPMorgan credentials and US regulatory compliance simply walked away when things got difficult, offering no real explanation for what went wrong or why they couldn't continue. The Kadena founders rugged their project—plain and simple.
As I write this on October 24, 2025, there has not been any statement from the founders. The Kadena network hashrate continues declining as miners shut down. Community forums show anger, frustration and sadness. Major exchanges began delisting KDA trading pairs, accelerating the price collapse to under 7 cents.
Like many in the Kadena mining community, I've suffered substantial financial losses. The ASIC equipment purchased for thousands is now worthless. The KDA tokens have lost 99% of their value. The electricity costs, infrastructure time, opportunity costs—all represent unrecoverable losses. I personally ramped up my mining operations this year, expanding to 25 KA3s, and KDA was by far my largest crypto holding. A few days prior to the announcement, I had mined over 100,000 KDA.
Beyond finances, there's an emotional toll. I genuinely believed in Kadena's mission to make blockchain scalable, affordable, and accessible. The sudden abandonment by the founders feels like a betrayal of that vision. While I haven't lost faith in cryptocurrency entirely, this experience has fundamentally changed my approach to evaluating projects and committing resources. Team credentials aren't enough. Even seemingly strong fundamentals aren't enough if the business execution and adoption strategy fail.
For now, I have turned off my miners until the dust settles. I am unsure if I will ever turn them back on, but I have a glimmer of hope that the community can revive the project. There are so many talented developers in the Kadena ecosystem that a truly decentralized Kadena just might work. Without the corporate structure making questionable decisions, perhaps the community can finally focus on what actually matters—building useful applications and growing organic adoption. I plan on closely watching the community takeover and will try to help anywhere I can.
To my fellow Kadena miners: we took a risk on promising technology, and it didn't work out. The losses are real, the disappointment justified, and anger at the founders' abandonment understandable. But we move forward, hopefully wiser and better equipped to evaluate the next opportunity. The cryptocurrency industry will continue evolving, and somewhere in the chaos, real innovation and sustainable value will emerge. Just maybe not where we expected to find it.