Blockchain Startup Kadena Raises $12 Million in SAFT Sale

Blockchain platform provider Kadena has raised $12 million through a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens sale.

Announcing the successful round on Thursday, the startup said that participants included Devonshire Investors, the private investment arm of the owners of Fidelity Investments, as well as SIG, Asimov Investments, Multicoin Capital and SV Angel.

Based on the SAFT framework - a kind of investment contract tht acts as promise for the delivery of tokens at a future date - the round was limited to accredited investors, and comes on the heels of a previous $2.25 million SAFT sale that was announced in January.

The funds will go toward the development of the company's Chainweb platform, Kadena co-founder Stuart Popejoy told CoinDesk - specifically, to help build out its technical ecosystem.

There are "a bunch of things that have to be in place" before the public protocol will be ready for launch later this year, said Popejoy, who was previously a blockchain developer at JPMorgan Chase.

"Formal verification is something that's come up at various times in the blockchain discussion, usually after a huge ethereum bug," he said, noting that smart contracts, in particular, often involve the handling of large sums of money.

"As we can see bugs can have significant impacts. The Parity bug was just a bug ... but it allowed people to lose millions of dollars. So what we have is formal verification, and what that does is the computer proves to you mathematically that the network has no bugs."

Kadena demonstrated a working prototype of the formal verification tool in 2017, but is now preparing to release it to the public for developers to use, Popejoy said.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies.

CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.