The little-known Ethereum (ETH) competitor Kadena’s native KDA token has surged higher in the crypto market this month, while also outperforming all other coins in the top 100 by market capitalization over the past 7 days after a series of bullish developments for the protocol.
At 11:06 UTC, KDA is up 20% over the past 24 hours and 194% for the past 7 days. The token is currently trading at USD 20.7, after having experienced a parabolic rise from under USD 7 since November 1.
Created by Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino, two former blockchain developers at investment banking giant JP Morgan, Kadena is described as a smart contract platform that aims to compete with Ethereum. However, the protocol has also made use of certain aspects of Bitcoin (BTC)’s design, such as the proof-of-work consensus model.
Further, the protocol’s programming language, known as Pact, is designed to simplify the way smart contracts are created, and is described in its documentation as “the first truly human-readable smart contract language.”
The soaring price for the protocol’s token throughout much of both October and November follows Kadena’s launch of wKDA, a wrapped version of its token for the Ethereum network.
Among other things, the wrapped version of KDA would allow the token to be utilized on the many decentralized finance (DeFi) applications that exist on the Ethereum network. Moreover, it would also allow for trading of KDA tokens on Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges (DEXes) like Uniswap (UNI), which would make the token much more accessible for a larger user base.
In addition to the wrapped version for Ethereum, a tweet from the Kadena team last weekend also said that bridges to other layer-1 protocols are planned, with Terra (LUNA), Polkadot (DOT), Celo (CELO) and Cosmos (ATOM) listed as potential candidates.
Meanwhile, another reason for the increased popularity of the KDA token in recent weeks may also be the addition of non-fungible token (NFT) capabilities to the protocol.
According to the team behind Kadena, an NFT gaming platform from the UFO Gaming project will be built on Kadena, with the transaction throughout of the protocol being key for a successful implementation, according to UFO Gaming.
“Not having to worry about throughput was a key selling point for us since UFO Gaming dynamic NFT system needs to perform tens of thousands transactions daily to update our players’ NFT ratings and attributes,” the team behind UFO Gaming wrote in an announcement about the new partnership.
NFT-themed games is an area of crypto that has received a lot of attention as of late, with the trend catching on in a big way after the launch of the much-discussed Loot NFTs and the related adventure gold (AGLD) token.
For now, options are still quite limited for investors looking to acquire KDA, with KuCoin and Bittrex being the only two well-known centralized exchanges where the token is listed.
The KDA token first reached a market capitalization of USD 3bn on Monday this week, and has since then continued to climb higher. It currently has a market capitalization of USD 3.3bn, and is ranked as the 64th most valuable cryptocurrency, per CoinGecko’s ranking.
The token has seen trading volumes of just over USD 198m for the past 24 hours.
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