Kadena LLC, the first blockchain technology company to come out of J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Center for Excellence, today open-sourced its private blockchain Kadena Kuro and upgraded its scalable public blockchain from 10 to 20 chains.

Kadena’s Chainweb public protocol now enables its public blockchain to reach up to 480,000 transactions per second by working through multiple parallelized chains to boost speed while preserving the security of a Proof of Work consensus algorithm. This is the same consensus protocol used by the Bitcoin blockchain network, which is the world’s largest operating public blockchain.

“With the open-sourcing of Kuro, our high-performance permissioned blockchain, smart contract developers working in Pact can now effortlessly leverage our hybrid platform to scale to unmatched transactional performance and throughput,” said Stuart Popejoy, Kadena’s co-founder and president. “We’re giving blockchain engineers the freedom to customize their architecture to achieve their specific requirements.”

Kadena Kuro is the platform’s next-generation private, permissioned blockchain distributed ledger. It can use the smart contract language Pact to allow developers to write distributed applications. Originally, Kuro’s Community Edition could be trialed on AWS Marketplace and Microsoft Azure with some limitations, but now it’s generally available as an open-source project.

“With Kuro, developers can take a hub-and-spoke approach, where Kuro nodes service the public chains uniformly,” said Popejoy. “However, the unique nature of Chainweb also allows an extremely high-throughput multi-cluster of Kuro nodes to service individual public chains, an entirely new architecture in blockchain that greatly magnifies the throughput of our sharded base layer.”

By making Kuro open source, Kadena is making its permissioned blockchain as accessible as possible. This also puts its high-scalability and speed into the hands of developers looking to make dapps, which are “trustless” distributed applications that execute without the need for a centralized server to manage them.

Using Pact, developers can create dapps that maintain two-way verification between parties, consensus proofs and multisignature cryptographic capability. This means that every user of a dapp who commits to a transaction retains the ability to sign that transaction with their own key and events only trigger once certain criteria are met – such as enough participants signing transactions to meet a threshold.

Furthermore, Kadena hopes that Kuro will give developers the tools they need to enter into the blockchain ecosystem without worrying about being trapped in a single interchain communication method.

Kadena has also announced that it is scaling up its enterprise-scale public blockchain offering from 10 chains to 20 using its Chainweb protocol. The company claims this makes it blockchain the fastest in the world, capable of completing over 480,000 transactions per second. This is the most significant upgrade to its network and technology to date.

“Growing from 10 to 20 chains means that the infrastructure now exists to service the needs of the digital economy,” said Will Martino, co-founder and chief executive of Kadena. “Kadena has solved the previously longstanding problem of how to securely scale a public blockchain — we’re the only project that has been able to do it.”

Image: Kadena