Kadena Shuts Down Operations, Token Crashes 60% as Founders Exit Citing “Market Conditions”

The layer-1 blockchain’s founding team is ceasing all business and network maintenance, marking one of the most dramatic collapses in the current bear market.

Kadena Calls It Quits After Eight Years

The Kadena blockchain, once touted as a high-throughput “blockchain for business,” has announced an immediate shutdown of its operations due to what it called adverse “market conditions.”

The news sent the project’s native token, KDA, plunging by 60% within 90 minutes on Tuesday, wiping out millions in market value and sparking panic among holders.

“We are no longer able to continue business operations and will be ceasing all business activity and active maintenance of the Kadena blockchain immediately,” the team posted on X (formerly Twitter).

KADENA PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT

We regret to announce that the Kadena organization is no longer able to continue business operations and will be ceasing all business activity and active maintenance of the Kadena blockchain immediately.

We are tremendously grateful to everybody who…

— Kadena (@kadena_io) October 21, 2025

Kadena expressed gratitude to its community but admitted it could no longer promote or support its ecosystem, ending an eight-year run that began with ambitions to bring scalable, enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure to the mainstream.

Founders Step Back After Industry Struggles

Kadena was co-founded in 2016 by Stuart Popejoy, former head of JPMorgan’s Blockchain Center of Excellence, and Will Martino, who previously worked as a tech lead for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s crypto steering committee.

Despite its strong technical foundation and corporate pedigree, Kadena struggled to attract users and developers in an increasingly competitive landscape dominated by Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche.

The project’s valuation peaked near $4 billion in November 2021, during the bull market, but has since collapsed to around $30.9 million, according to CoinGecko.

Network to Remain Online — Without Its Founders

While Kadena Inc. is shutting down, the blockchain itself will remain operational, as it runs on a decentralized proof-of-work model maintained by independent miners and node operators.

“The Kadena blockchain is not owned or operated by the company,” the team clarified. “It will continue to process transactions and mine blocks independently.”

A small transition team will remain to assist with the wind-down and to release a new binary update ensuring that nodes can operate without the company’s involvement.

What Happens to KDA Tokens?

The Kadena Foundation still holds around 83.7 million KDA tokens scheduled for release in November 2029, and has pledged to consult the community on how those should be managed or redistributed.

Another 566 million KDA are expected to be distributed to miners as block rewards through the year 2139, suggesting the network itself could persist, even without a corporate sponsor.

Kadena’s collapse underscores the growing challenge for smaller Layer-1 chains to survive in a market increasingly consolidated around major ecosystems.

Once seen as a hybrid solution bridging public and private blockchains, Kadena now joins a growing list of once-hyped projects unable to sustain momentum beyond the speculative cycle.

For investors and early supporters, the shutdown represents not just a business failure — but the quiet end of one of crypto’s most ambitious enterprise blockchain experiments.

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