Kadena’s new Chainweb EVM testnet is live, promising Solidity developers true horizontal scaling on a proof-of-work base layer. With five parallel EVM chains at launch and $50 million in grant funding, the question is whether these incentives and Kadena’s architecture can drive sustained usage once the money runs out.

— Macauley Peterson

Battle of the Tokenized Stocks

Tokenized equities are having a moment. Three big announcements are circling today, each with its own twist on putting TradFi shares onchain.

Robinhood is going hard in Europe, rolling out over 200 US stocks and ETFs as tokens on Arbitrum with zero commission (although other fees may apply) and dividend payments built right into the app. For now, these are Robinhood-walled, but they promise self-custody and 24/7 onchain trading on their own layer-2 soon, using the Arbitrum tech stack. They're also adding crypto perpetual futures in the EU and proof-of-stake token staking (ETH, SOL) in the US.

It looks like Robinhood wants to be the one-stop shop, and the market seems to like it — its stock price is ripping (up 5%).

Gemini’s launch is modest by comparison, with just MicroStrategy (MSTR) to start for EU customers. But it’s fully onchain from day one. Through Dinari, Gemini offers 1:1-backed stocks that users can move freely across wallets, with more assets coming.

Kraken is leaning in too, pitching Backed xStocks as a way to truly own equities onchain. Its customers can trade over 60 tokenized stocks 24/5 on Kraken’s interface and withdraw them to self-custodial wallets for use in DeFi. Kraken says this isn’t just about access, but about “shifting power back to the individual,” letting anyone move, hold, or borrow against tokenized stocks without intermediaries or borders. It’s the widest ranging launch, to be available worldwide “over the next several days.”

ERC-20 and SPL tokens (cross-chain thanks to Chainlink CCIP) should work on DEXs like Raydium and Jupiter, and as collateral for borrowing on the likes of Kamino. It's the most permissionless and composable vision of them all. Backed is gunning for the DeFi power user.

Blockchain is shaping a radically different economy, with 10% of global GDP predicted to be tokenized onchain by 2027. The technology is disrupting key industries worldwide — upending the conventional way of doing business while transforming customer experiences.

How might this evolution play out over the next quarter century? A new special report from Blockworks Research and OKX answers this question, drawing from interviews and research conducted across the leaders of finance, technology, retail, and entertainment. 

Kadena launches Chainweb EVM testnet

Kadena announced at EthCC in Cannes that its long-planned Chainweb EVM testnet is live. Unlike Ethereum L2s that promise scaling via rollups, Chainweb EVM runs on Kadena’s braided proof-of-work architecture, designed to scale horizontally without fragmentation from discrete sequencers or bridges.

The result, according to Stuart Popejoy, Kadena co-founder and CEO, is “seamless EVM compatibility without compromising decentralization or throughput.”

“This is vanilla EVM with Pectra, so you can deploy today right now onto our chains,” Popejoy told the audience in Cannes at EthCC today.

Chainweb EVM initially runs five parallel EVM chains on testnet, with Kadena's architecture allowing this number to grow with demand, while still maintaining sub-cent transaction fees. As Popejoy explained:

“Every time we add chains, the throughput goes up linearly for that amount,” Popejoy said. “So for instance, when we went from 10 to 20 chains, our throughput doubled.”

Kadena’s existing chains run Pact, the network’s native smart contract language, designed to prioritize security, auditability, and formal verification. Unlike Solidity (which is Turing-complete and can express anything at the cost of complexity), Pact is intentionally Turing-incomplete.

But like so many L1s and former L1s which have adopted the EVM, the network effects of Ethereum’s virtual machine — especially for things like tooling and wallets — are hard to disrupt. Just today, there were additional EVM launches from heavyweights Ripple and TON, using the Cosmos stack.

Kadena is pitching its proof-of-work roots as a feature, not a bug:

“Proof-of-work is still the most secure and the most decentralized consensus technology out there,” Popejoy said, although this is debated. “It eliminates the need for sequencers... and it's a far more secure architecture.”

But the real question is whether developers and users will come. Kadena knows that onboarding Solidity developers will require overcoming significant UX complexity across multiple chains. Asked how they plan to abstract this complexity away, Popejoy said:

“Since its launch in 2020, Kadena’s multichain architecture has uniquely allowed dApps to scale linearly with demand... With our upcoming Chainweb EVM launch, we’re bringing this technology to Solidity developers, both by adapting techniques from Pact as well as working with builder partners to leverage advanced account abstraction and gas station functionality arriving with the Pectra EVM upgrade.”

To help bootstrap the ecosystem, Kadena is putting up real money: a $50 million grant program, half of it earmarked for Solidity-based dapps, AI integrations, and half for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.

On the RWA side, Kadena is trying to differentiate with a compliance-first approach, according to chief business officer Annelise Osborne.

"From the outset, we have taken a deliberate and thoughtful approach in designing our Real World Assets (RWA) Token Standard to meet the complex needs of regulated entities seeking to tokenize assets on a public blockchain," Osborne told Blockworks. "Our standard draws on the widely recognized ERC-3643 (T-REX) protocol and integrates ONCHAINID, enabling compliance features directly within token contracts."

Even with grants and ambitious claims, Kadena's challenge is clear: can they attract enough developers and users to sustain real activity once those incentives dry up? 

“The goal isn't just to be another EVM option,” Popejoy told Blockworks, but rather “the place where DeFi developers go when they're tired of dealing with high fees, slow transactions, and complex bridging.”

Although Popejoy touts “an unparalleled EVM user experience,” Kadena’s 30-second block times may feel slow compared to most L2s or the UX on, say, Solana or Sui.

The next few months on the road to mainnet should be telling.

“If we can nail that developer experience, where you get all the familiarity of Ethereum but with our performance and security, that's when we know we've succeeded,” Popejoy said.