'We're still here, we're still building': Kadena chief business officer discusses revitalizing a once-hot blockchain

“What I've heard is we've got a great reputation, but people were surprised we're still around,” Kadena Chief Business Officer Annelise Osborne told The Block in an interview. “We launched to a lot of news, and then we went quiet. So really, what I'm trying to do is show momentum.”

Osborne, a former executive at Arca Labs who left that company in June, was hired before the summer to help reform the company and turn it into an operational business. So far, she has helped establish an innovation lab focused on asset tokenization, hired tech and Wall Street veterans to a board of directors, and has begun filling roles, including 10 new business development staff.

“We have great tech, which doesn't always win. The hardest part, I feel, is already done,” Osborne said. "So then it's building the business around that.”

Indeed, the crypto industry is littered with so-called “zombie projects,” which at one time stood at the cutting edge and, for one reason or another, were unceremoniously abandoned. Osborne’s role, as she explains, is to breathe life into a project with a great brand name and tech by nudging it back on course.

Great fanfare

Kadena was launched by two U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and JPMorgan alums, Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, “to great fanfare” in 2019, in part because of their previous experience founding the bank’s first innovation lab and work on the predecessor to Chase’s Onyx blockchain.

The two co-founders wanted to offer a more scalable version of Bitcoin while still using the proof-of-work algorithm. In part because of the founders’ pedigree, the fact that it came out of JPMorgan's Blockchain Center for Excellence and some of its permissioned settings, Kadena quickly gained a reputation as an enterprise-friendly chain.

This appears to be a reputation Osborne wants to lean into as she doubles down on the firm’s commitment to real-world assets and tokenization. According to Osborne, the firm is “in talks with major asset managers to launch a wide range of institutional tokenized products.”

In addition to these potential financial offerings, Kadena’s engineering team has also been working on a suite of new tools including two bridges: one to connect to Ethereum and Cosmos and the other zero-knowledge focused. Other tools are in the offing, Osborne said.

“[Popejoy and Martino] recognized that if they wanna grow and stick around and really make a difference, they’d need to focus on Kadena as a business,” Osborne said.

The project has a $150 million market cap and previously raised over $15 million in funding over three rounds. Osborne said the company is not looking to raise more capital but would consider it if it “made strategic sense.”

“We’re still here, we’re still building,” Osborne said.