After the announcement of a 50 basis point interest rate cut today, the cryptocurrency market finally saw a surge, with Bitcoin rising to 62,000, and other small currencies generally rising by 10%-20%. Today we continue to review projects in the 200-300 range. The two fastest-growing projects in this range are KDA, which rebounded 25% in 24 hours, and TAIKO, which rebounded 25% in 24 hours. Then let's analyze what is unique about these two projects?

1.KDA

The rise of KDA this time is mainly because in the official announcement on September 18, Binance announced the launch of KDAUSDT USD-based perpetual contract, with a maximum leverage of 75 times. KDA is also a veteran public chain, which came out in 2020. The current market value of KDA is 180 million US dollars, ranking 230+, with a total of 1 billion tokens, and 280 million tokens have been unlocked. It is also a POW public chain, most of which are obtained by mining, and it can be mined in about 200 years. It is also a high-speed public chain, and the specific approach is to use multiple chains to complete it, which is somewhat similar to the three chains running in parallel with Avax. At this point in time, it is not a very novel approach.

Introduction

Kadena is a layer 1 blockchain that runs on a Proof of Work (PoW) consensus, just like Bitcoin (BTC). It differs from Bitcoin in that while Bitcoin runs on a single blockchain, Kadena combines multiple parallel blockchains to achieve PoW consensus, thereby increasing throughput and solving scalability issues without compromising decentralization and security.

This multi-PoW chain architecture, called the “Chainweb,” allows Kadena to scale to 480,000 transactions per second (TPS) with 20 chains running simultaneously; if the network reaches capacity, new chains can begin to expand the network, allowing it to scale to infinity.

Each parallel chain includes the block hashes (Merkle roots) from other chains in its block headers. By referencing the block hashes of other chains, each chain can verify the consistency of its peer chain and provide a trustless oracle for cross-chain fund transfers. Through this mechanism, the chains are woven into a single standard chain, whose effective hash power is the sum of the hash power of each independent chain.

Each chain in the network issues its own coin, but all chains use the same cryptocurrency. Since these chains share the same currency, coins can be transferred across chains through a trustless two-step simple payment verification (SPV) mechanism at the smart contract level.

Smart contract language Pact

Kadena also launched the smart contract language Pact, which is a very readable smart contract language. The features of the Pact language include:

Security: Pact is an immutable, deterministic, Turing-incomplete language. While providing high-level language features, it also assists in bug and vulnerability fixes. Atomic transactions ensure that all instructions in a transaction are executed correctly, thereby ensuring that data can be properly processed.

Fast: Pact is fast to parse and execute, and the code written in Pact will not be modified when stored on the ledger.

Flexible: Developers can easily learn and use the Pact language and develop more applications based on Pact. At the same time, smart contracts can be flexibly upgraded to meet changing business needs.

The Kadena team stated that the smart contract language Pact is an important technology for achieving interoperability between the Kadena public chain and the consortium chain, but this part was not described in detail.

Token Allocation

The total amount of tokens is 1 billion, and currently 290 million are in circulation, with a circulation rate of 29%. 70% of the tokens are allocated to mining, 20% to the platform, 7% to investors, and 3% to contributors. Therefore, the bulk of this coin is still allocated to mining. Its mining machines were quite popular before.

2.TAIKO

The project was launched in June 2024. The overall performance of the project is actually quite poor. It is still below the issue price at present. Although it has increased by 20% in one day, it has not increased much from the bottom of 1.1. This is also a rollup project.

The current market value is 140 million US dollars, ranking 270+. The current unlocking rate is very low, only 7%, so this wave of shares fell just because the market rose, and it just happened to fall more.

Introduction

Taiko is a solution based on Rollup, with the following core features:

- Based on Contestable Rollup: a configurable Rollup for reducing transaction fees on Ethereum.

- Based on Booster Rollup: an innovative approach to native L1 expansion.

Taiko is a highly configurable, fully open source, permissionless (based on Ethereum's features) and Ethereum-equivalent Rollup.

It can be easily configured as a full ZK Rollup, Optimistic Rollup, or anything in between. The network has no centralized participants and all operations are run by the community without permission.

Technical features

1. Based on the underlying rollup, its sorting is driven by the underlying L1. On Taiko, there is no centralized sorter. The role of the sorter is assumed by the Ethereum L1 validator.

2. Contestable Rollup is a Rollup that includes a dispute mechanism and uses underlying sorting. This mainly involves fraud proof. The more times it is verified, the safer it is, but the more times it is verified, the higher the cost. Therefore, there is no optimal solution here, but it is the most suitable under certain procedures.

3. Booster Rollup is an innovative concept designed to directly scale L1 dapps

team

Taiko's core team is almost the original team of Ethereum's L2 ZK-Rollup project Loopring, which is the first ZK-Rollup deployed on Ethereum. In 2020, Loopring was listed on Coinbase, becoming the first Chinese project to be listed on Coinbase. Taiko co-founder and CEO Daniel Wang was not only the founder of Loopring, but also has rich experience in Web2. He has served as the technical director of JD.com, the technical director and senior software engineer of Google, and other important positions. With the dual experience of Web2 + Web3, Taiko has attracted much attention since its birth, and the project has a solid technical foundation from product design to specific implementation.

Financing

In March 2024, Taiko announced that it had received US$15 million in Series A financing. Together with the US$22 million raised in the previous two rounds of financing, Taiko's cumulative financing amount reached US$37 million. Participating institutions include Sequoia China, Generative Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Hashed, Generative Ventures, Token Bay Capital, Ethereum Foundation, etc.

Token Allocation

The project will be launched in June 2024. The total number of tokens is 1 billion. Currently, 76 million have been unlocked, which is 7.6%. The current exchange rate is 1.88 US dollars. The launch price should be 2.2 US dollars, so it is still below the issue price.

In terms of token distribution, the DAO Foundation holds 20%, the team 20%, airdrops 10%, investors 11.6%, Taiko Foundation 16.8%, Grants 5%, liquidity 5%, and the rest are small pieces, but the project parties take too much.

Finally, let's summarize these two projects. The first one is a high-speed public chain. From a technical point of view, it is relatively ordinary, and the current TVL on the chain is only 340,000 US dollars. There were 8 million when it was first launched, but now it has run away, so this kind of TVL public chain is basically useless. The second project is an L2. Although he said a lot of small new highlights, it is actually useless. The project has a large VC disk and the project party has a lot of coins, so retail investors can't play. At present, if there is no VC disk for more than 1 year, don't touch it. There is at least a 1-year unlocking period. No matter how good the project is, it is possible to play it if the unlocking period is at least more than 50%.