Since Kadena’s mainnet launch in January 2020, our team and community have grown tremendously. Our ecosystem experienced exponential growth with several hundred projects now building on the Kadena blockchain. Kadena’s massive growth could only be accomplished with the help of our amazing community, ecosystem of partners, builders, and ambassadors! Thank you everyone for accompanying us through this journey!

As we enter 2023, Kadena will narrow our focus on developing our ecosystem through technical developments such as refining the builder onboarding process and improving our blockchain’s efficiency. As a result, we have updated our live roadmap to define constant iterations in key areas of engineering and technical development that will greatly benefit our community of builders and our entire ecosystem as a whole. The upgraded roadmap will consist of:

1. Kadena.js — New tools, resources, tutorials, and learning platform to increase and enhance the developer onboarding experience.
2. Pact — Upgrades to Kadena’s smart contract language to improve user and builder experience
3. Chainweb — Upgrades to Chainweb to enhance the blockchain’s efficiency, scalability, and decentralization.

The Kadena 2023 Live Roadmap is meant to fuel user and ecosystem growth and will continually evolve over the course of the year. We invite our community and anyone else to chime in and provide feedback and/or suggestions to make Kadena better as we head into the new year.

Kadena.js

Kadena.js is a library that makes it easier for builders to interact with the Kadena blockchain using JavaScript/TypeScript. It includes but is not limited to libraries, tooling, dApps, tutorials, and more. The Kadena.js team has massively expanded in 2022 and now has intricate plans in 2023 to launch new tools and resources to increase and enhance the developer onboarding experience.

Libs

Libs are a collection of pre-written, modular code components that can easily be integrated into a builder’s project, without having to write all the necessary code from scratch. Builders will be able to quickly iterate and spin up their applications more efficiently and securely. Currently, we have curated a collection of reusable codes targeted to address specific issues as listed below:

• @kadena/cryptography-utils
• @kadena/types
• @kadena/cookbook
• @kadena/pactjs
• @kadena/chainweb-node-client — blockchain wrapper around chainweb-node p2p api endpoints
• @kadena/client — Github link here
• @kadena/pactjs-cli
• @kadena/pactjs-generator

We will be adding the following to our Libs in 2023:

• @kadena/chainweb-node-client — Pact js wrapper with fetch to call the Pact API REST endpoints.
• @kadena/wallet-client — client for wallet to sign, connect, retrieve account info, etc
• @kadena/marmalade-client specific client for marmalade/NFTs
• @kadena/transaction-templates, which is a supportive library for transactions. Transaction-templates provide the community with a way to “publish” templates. These templates can be used by @kadena/pactjs-cli to generate the necessary TypeScript functions
• @Kadena/chainwebjs
• @kadena/sse-client
• @kadena/react

Tools

Kadena.js tools are designed to assist developers achieve a specific function or goal with their application. At Kadena, our team is designing the following to help our community of developers build with efficiency and ease through better environments for coding and testing:

• IDE support for VSCode
• IDE Support for Intelij
• Tool for deployments
• Tools for code generation
• WalletConnect multi-tx signing API specification

Apps

The Kadena.js team has also dedicated their time to creating dynamic and interactive apps to help users and developers interact with and/or retrieve information from the Kadena blockchain. In 2023, the Kadena.js team aims to launch the following apps:

• Multi-tx signing tools
• Balance Checker
• Rebuild of the Transfer Tool
• Tx-Tester
• Rebuild of the Faucet
• Event streaming Server
• GraphQL interface
• Ledger support

Tutorials

The Kadena.js team curated a number of tutorials to provide our community of developers guidance for a wide range of topics. The tutorials are designed specifically with practicality in mind to ensure our developers learn the necessary tools to help them build in the most efficient and simple manner. In 2023, we plan to launch the following tutorials:

• Todo App
• Wallet
• Voting
• ZK rollup
• ZK identification
• Payment
• eCommerce
• DeFi
• Gaming
• Oracle integration
• Storage
• NFT

Kadena Tutorials Learning Platform

The “Kadena Tutorials Learning Platform” is a new comprehensive educational program developed by the Developer Experience team specifically designed for the curious and the aspiring developers/builders. The Kadena Tutorials Learning Platform provides users an introduction to Pact and Kadena.js. Users will participate in coding challenges for building and deploying blockchain applications on Kadena.

To engage users, the Kadena Tutorials Learning Platform is structured to be a token-based platform where developers can earn tokens for completing challenges. Users are also able to earn shareable certificates and NFT certificates upon course completion. Currently, the developer experience team is also entertaining the option of creating leaderboards to ensure a fun and lighthearted competitive experience. The team will be running a first test of the Kadena Tutorial Platform with beta users in the beginning of 2023 — stay tuned to find out more!

Pact

Pact is an open-source, Turing-incomplete smart contract language that has been purpose-built with blockchains first in mind. It was designed to make building safer smart contracts effortless as it is readable by non-developers and can automatically detect certain classes of bugs.

Over the course of the next year, Pact developers will see feature releases with the goal of improving user and builder experience by improving error handling and implementing standards to help builders code safer. Some of the releases in 2023 will include:

• Autonomous namespace definition
• Enhanced dry-run transaction simulation via /local on Pact service
• Gas model improvements
• Zero-knowledge primitives
• Reintroduction of on-chain Pact user error messages
• Database compaction
• Improved module caching — Allow Pact to operate at a faster speed in different scenarios
• Work toward Pact Core — Includes gradual change of the Pact language in order to improve the consistency of its semantics and enable builders to code in a safer, cleaner, and more efficient manner

Chainweb

Chainweb is Kadena’s blockchain consensus mechanism and continues today to be the only sharded and scalable layer-1 PoW network in production since its release in 2019. In the coming year, the Kadena team will set technical milestones to improve Chainweb’s reliability and performance for miners, developers, and, ultimately, users of our network. We expect the team to focus on the following in 2023:

• Performance improvements, including during catchup and replay
• Specialized devnets for different usage scenarios
• Bootstrap reliability (covered by payload query performance improvements, catchup performance improvements, and P2P topology adjustments; all of which will also contribute to DOS protection)
• Uptime/node reliability (esp. bootstraps)

CONCLUSION

The 2023 Kadena roadmap is designed to push Kadena to build the most cutting-edge blockchain technology that can scale to global demand without compromising security and decentralization. All of the features outlined in Kadena’s 2023 live roadmap are meant to empower our community to build without limits.

If you are as excited as we are for the new road ahead, kindly join our efforts in making Kadena better. Whether that’s building on our platform as a developer, creating a new dApp learning to code with Pact, or simply providing suggestions and feedback, the Kadena community becomes stronger with each and every one of you.

We are excited to have you as part of our journey and look forward to building the future of the blockchain together!