Best of WILL
I wouldn't have the founders constantly trying to piggyback off their resume and offer financial returns.
I'm with you on this a bit -- its disingenuous to say that our backgrounds at the SEC/JPM/Google/etc aren't very relevant to the project. We literally built JPMCoin v0, then left our very cushy jobs to build what we knew the industry would need in the 2020's (both at the smart contract level and the actually scaling layer-1 level). That said, the media tends to gravitate towards our backgrounds because we have a superstar team (like chainlink does) so that tends to get us a lot of press. I wish the media would care more about the core tech because if it did then there would have been an industry spanning PR cycle of holy crap kadena solved the now 10 year old, near impossible problem of decentralized scaling of layer-1 ... but alas it's not to be. the community gets it, but there's so much FUD the media get's fed that at this point the headline "no really they actually for real solved layer-1 scaling" just doesn't work... so our resumes are still the easiest to understand pay attention 2-word bits for a headline
offer financial returns.
We very much don't say this about KDA. We believe that layer-1 scaling is a monumental advancement in crypto that will dramatically increase the capacity for the sector to grow... but it may be that crypto is basically full of crap and doesn't actually need scaling because it'll always be just hype. I don't believe it's just hype, I believe crypto is the start of something truly massive and global in scope... but I could be wrong.
KDA will become one of this immortal projects that sees exponential growth in 2021/22. It literally has every damn feature that crypto has asked for in a base protocol for the past 10 years... so once we're listed on a top exchange, this thing is here to stay. And the long Pact has to gain traction, the better everything will be. Moreover I expect Pact to be put on multiple other protocols in the next 2-3 years... it's designed to be a standard and it's just unparalleled in its safety and ease of use.
ETH is going to be around forever, much like BTC. It's the scaling and the limits of solidity that will hold it back from real "change". That doesn't mean it can't be a great showroom for the early phase of defi. See gas costs of defi on ETH, wider spread adoption just makes things worse. Moreover, solidity is just a monster to develop in so when we're talking big money dapps they can't advance too much too fast, it's just not safe. All that said, the ecosystem is in a weird place right now where decentralization is forgotten in the pursuit of profits and things like binance chain and layer 2 solutions are accepted without much consideration. Blockchains being decentralized is core to resiliency, but decentralization is slower. All in all, I'm a bit concerned that crypto is opening itself up to a black swan event. It could be regulators, it could be a crash that dominos into the staking needs of POS, but being a black swan it's hard to say. its possible for a blackswan in Defi to crash into the consensus layer with POS. Kinda like a market crash taking out a bank in addition to collapsing a market. POW sandboxes any collapse pretty cleanly in the application layer.
Until we see defi volume on a platform that can scale without limits, so that gas costs can be kept down, crypto and defi will be more of an "epcot like showroom" than the "future". (Epcot is a park at Disney World built in the 70s or 80s that was intended to showcase what the future could look like, kinda like a world's fair, but now it's an amusement park. A profitable one, no doubt)
if you believe that crypto is about more than speculation and a quick buck, if you believe an open+ownerless+programmable+scalable currency is important to the future... well then this is the place for you.
If you don't... if you think a huge budget to paper over a lack of real product with marketing hype matters most, if you think huge ostentatious "community events" are all that matter (and yet nothing new can ever be built because the product has the same limitations as the projects it was supposed to surpass), if you think that POW was so last decade and that POS's march towards digital feudalism is for the best because the feudal lords will treat us well... well then this isn't the place for you.
KDA is the place for people that believe that trustlessness and openness are the future; that smart contracts are the future... that scaling layer-1 without sacrificing the heart of bitcoin's promise of decentralization is the future; and that technology fundamentals will define the future. KDA is about delivering something bigger than any foundation could ever hope to be.
Aergo is just an off-brand Nervos... and Nervos is itself an off-brand Cosmos that's backed by the PBOC. KDA is the first sharded-state layer-1 to ever exist; built by the founding members of JPMCoin and the SEC's Crypto group; with hybrid/side-chains/hub+spoke scaling thrown in for extra zest.
We're gonna be the only sharded state protocol for basically ever (I doubt decentralized POS state sharding is even possible) so low-to-free gas dapps will prove too enticing to avoid
20-chains, US Listing, stable coin, 1-2 projects to switch to KDA, and generically to #SaveBlockchain... the people have been fed this lie by the big VCs that "POW is outdated and POS is the only future". Well, Chainweb lays this lie out for all to see. You want actually scalability which requires state-sharding, then we're it and you need POW
any platform that doesn't innovate at the smart contract level -- see: does something other than the EVM -- is doomed to irrelevance. EVM/Solidity is just not safe enough for anything more complicated than the simplest of structured products (e.g. loans, simple governance models, tokens, etc).
Could KDA replace ETH? Absolutely. Will it? Unlikely as it's more likely that ETH, like BTC before it, are permenant fixtures of the crypto ecosystem.
Will KDA usurp ETH2.0? Yeah, I think it will. ETH2.0's feature wish list is a good one... which is why we built KDA to have all the features and then a bunch more...
Except for POS. We could only get internet zoning rights to build KDA in the feudalism-free zone.
As for the questions about Elrond/Quarkchain/Avalanche, they each have their own pretty well known drawbacks. It's best not to waste too much time digging into the why here. We beat every other project to shipping decentralized state sharding, and a few days ago we beat everyone again by scaling up our decentralized sharded mainnet.
Our challenge is that Kadena doesn't agree with the mantra that crypto's current religious leaders have been selling to their flocks for years... POS is the only future, POS is the only way to scale. More or less everyone thought that POW could never scale, let alone beat the industry to shipping sharding in production, so it's hard for people to get their heads around because it's not supposed to be possible.
But don't forget about Pact, the contract language that runs on top off Kadena's stack. It's an unparalleled advancement in safety and security, and is likely the only tech that can move DeFi beyond the products it's developed so far... Yam etc are features of the first-mover-yet-unprincipled approach ETH took to contracts.
DAGs have the fatal flaw of the "small world" problem in that a killer dapp actually constricts the overall network performance. It's why a DAG's should come with a warning label that posts both their "Best-Case Performance" AND "Worst-Case Performance" numbers. This is why DAGs are not used for scaling in HFT/finance, even though the industry tried them out in the 90s... DAGs suck at scaling in production BUT they make for fantastic performance demos and POCs... which is why finance bothered to try them in the first place (this was in the era before the senior leadership at funds were tech/eng types and didn't know better)