Powering Global Financial Systems with Tyler Benst

Hey, what's going on everybody? Nick Sapanaro here for another episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. Today I have two guests, not one, but two, count them. I got Tyler Benster, technology adoption lead and Dan Wiggins head of gaming at Kedena. What's going on guys? Hey, I'm excited to talk to you guys because Kedena is a really interesting project and it's around from around the same time.

You know, a lot of people got into the space. So I'm really I'm really interested to see where you guys are heading and all of that. But before we do that, I want to get to know you guys a little bit better. Maybe Tyler, if you want to start it off, just let us know who you are, how you got it to crypto and what led

you to Kedena. Hey folks, my name is Tyler Benster. I'm here at Kedena Eco, Ben and crypto for a while. I actually got to know the Kedena team through my venture capital fund, Asmol Ventures back in 2017. We were looking at all the layer ones, seeing all the issues with the theory and congestion and sort of seeing some of the issues around security and hacks. And

when we met the Kedena folks, we were just super excited about their background coming from JP Morgan. And I'm a technical guy. I'm a software programmer. And so I did a deep dive on their code and went into the details and just wowed by them. I was like, gosh, these guys are so frickin' brilliant and smart. So I've been a Kedena enthusiast from the beginning and

Nick. So for listeners, my name is Dan Wiggins and I head up games partnerships at Kedena. And I help support game companies who want to build that Kedena. The quick thumbnail in my professional background, I actually started as an investment banker and then I transitioned to investing and then ultimately corporate development, which is the group that acquires smaller companies at gaming companies. So I spent the

last two years 12 years working in game companies. Maybe I'll go back in time a little bit because I think there's some fun sort of threads. I've heard the expression that history rhymes. But so when I started my career in finance, I was working with internet companies and media companies. So I got to work with some of the first social media companies. So companies like Myspace,

I helped sell Intermix Media, which was the parent company of Myspace to news, corporate Fox, work with SGM. Then I started working with some video game companies. In part, I did my personal proclivities. I'm a hardcore gamer. And then there was also, and this is circa 2005 to 2009, there's these group of companies that were called virtual worlds. So companies like Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, Lyndon

Labs, these would all now probably be referred to as metaverses. And one of the things that I find interesting about crypto and how I got into crypto is I sort of parallel path. I was interested in crypto, but I was interested in video games. And so there's this very fun convergence that's happening right now. Some people are like, there's this new idea of metaverses. But people

are like, there's a persistent world on where people are interacting in highly social environments, using in-game marketplaces to transact things they have real or value. A lot of these things are actually things that we've seen in games before, which is one of the reasons that I got very excited about crypto. I've had about Kadehna because I think that the Kadehna folks had some really cool tech

that allowed these sort of these experiences that you see in web 2 to be brought into sort of web 3. Yeah, that's awesome. Definitely a lot of parallels between gaming and especially what's going on in web 3 right now. And I'm looking forward to talking about that more. But before we dive into the ecosystem aspect of Kadehna, I want to understand how the tech works. So

maybe Tyler, tell me a little bit about like the high level elevator pitch of what Kadehna does and how it does it. Absolutely. So Kadehna is a proof of work blockchain and uniquely Kadehna figured out how to scale proof of work and bring smart contracts to it in a safe, secure fashion. So today Kadehna has 20 parallel blockchains that are running in production. We scaled live

on the blockchain on Maynet from 10 to 20 previously. And if we need to scale to 50 or 100 or 1000 tomorrow to meet the demand, we can do that. So something that's unique. Kadehna actually has a scalability story for how we can keep gas fees low and how we can keep transaction throughput increasing indefinitely. So I think that's pretty unique and pretty badass. Second, when

it comes to smart contracts, Kadehna has packed, which is really a next generation programming language and blockchain smart contract language that brings all sorts of amazing, you know, best in class research from the academic world, like formal verification. Two smart contracts is language level features so that the code that compiles can guarantee stuff that eliminates entire classes of security exploits. So I think what's really excited

about Kadehna technically is one, it scales proof of work in a way that solves the ball, the blockchain, trit lemma. And two, it brings really amazing, safe, secure smart contracts to blockchain that are readable and writable by everyone. That's pretty cool. I mean, I think one of the biggest issues or challenges that a lot of the proof of work chains and even the proof of state

chains face is that high throughput. And I know that's kind of one of the big selling points for Kadehna. What, what TPS are you guys doing right now? What's your at least theoretical TPS? Great question. So you can think about it as just being however many chains times, you know, Bitcoin or 3 and 1.0 is TPS. So today we're about 20 times Bitcoin's TPS actually a

bit more considering that our block times are faster. So it may be better to say 20 times of theorems. And tomorrow, for a 50 chains, we'd be 50 times. And when we scale to 100 or 1000 or 100,000 chains, we'd be, you know, correspondingly up to 100,000 or more chains faster. And I think beyond that is even possible too. But that's what we've tested. You talked

about like writing smart contracts and packed. That sounds really awesome. What if I'm an Ethereum developer and I want to bring my EVM depth to Kadehna. Is that possible right now? No, it's not possible. And it's section intentional decision. It's something that does slow the ability of developers to just immediately port code as you say. But the upside of that is it also means that you

can't port EVM exploits over to Kadehna's blockchain. And so we'd rather have people spend a little bit more time and write the code and packed, which will eliminate, you know, entire class of exploits that happened on EVM. This is awesome website where you can check out, you know, all these projects that are getting wrecked and how packed solves all these effects of exploits. And, you know,

I think that, you know, ultimately, if you're a developer working on like a pretty intense play, that the blockchain code is critical, that is worth spending a little bit of time to make sure that it's done right. And we've seen the perils of, you know, projects that enter existential crises because they have some very, very small mistake and like an integer overflow or an ability to

change, you know, the Oracle contract that says you can create 100 million coins or things like this. You know, it's a tradeoff for sure, but an intentional one. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've seen literal like individual lines of syntax cause major malfunctions in this, in this ecosystem. And I'm a developer as well. You know, sometimes you're having an error in your, in your desk environment and

it literally comes down to a semicolon or a comma somewhere. So I know that pain, that's, that's a cool, that's an interesting approach. So I don't want to leave Tyler behind the scenes. Sorry, Dan, the scenes too much since we're talking about DApps. Let's talk about the ecosystem a little bit. You, you head up, what's called cadena, eco is that right? Can tell me a little

bit about that. Yeah. So the, I'm involved in cadena eco. I split my time between, sort of, two initiatives. So one, it's working with game developers to help them that build on cadena. The second area that spent my time is with our grants program. So we announced our grants program a couple weeks ago, but we set aside $100 million to support people building new projects on

cadena. So how the grants program works is, you know, there's a lot of documentation on our website, but we're trying to encourage folks to build on on cadena. And, you know, we're, we're helping sort of de-risk that by providing dollars to builders. And I think that when we look at the grants program, there's a couple of different folks that we are supporting. My, my favorite is,

you know, we have, teams that sort of recognize how, how awesome cadena's tech is and they are launching new projects exclusively on, on cadenas. We have projects in, in DeFi and NFT, the NFT space that are, they're building on cadena. And then, you know, there's sort of a second group of projects, which, you know, I think is important, where, you know, people are, have successful projects

in other ecosystems. And they're trying to sort of connect or build bridges bridges. I'm using as a conceptual of not necessarily, bridge between, you know, cadena and other folks. And we've been, you know, just floored by the response to our grants program. And we're excited to continue to support, support builders as they work with us. That's pretty cool. Is there any, is there any dApps you

can tell us about yet? Or is it still too early? Yeah, maybe I'll jump in. So, huge number of dApps is amazing. So, when I came on to cadena eco and started to have conversations back in, you know, December. So, I was tracking about 20 or 30 projects and since then now, time recording in May, we're now tracking, you know, 60 plus projects. So, in terms

of ones that are live and you can interact with them right now, you know, there's some dexes that are in the build up phase. So, there's cadets, there's a swap. There's other dexes that are, you know, announced, but are still in development, like night decks that bring some really creative energy. In terms of NFT projects, you know, there's been probably 30 NFT projects of pretty interesting

pedigrees that have announced and a couple are live. Everything from art to some really interesting utility back stuff. So, cadena being proof of work, there's several mining, back, NFTs that give you like a share of a hash rate of a pool so that they give an income stream associated with it. So, we're starting to see some incredible innovation. All sorts of ideas from, you know, ticketing,

number of ships to, you know, building wheels to, you know, reimagining how you can sort of take advantage of these different smart contracts and NFT standards. Today is NFT standard Marmalade is, I think, going to be a groundbreaking moment for what NFTs can and will be. We like to say cadena that with Marmalade, you mint a marketplace, not just an NFT, not just the token. What

we mean by that is that you can create rules or around how these things exchange, like say you're doing real estate and you want to represent some real estate property with, you know, NFT shares. You could restrict sale of those NFTs on the blockchain to a white list of people that had been KYC or, you know, on and on and on. I think when we look

at the verticals in NF in DeFi and NFTs and I'll pass it back to Dan to talk a bit more about gaming, but, you know, we're seeing this incredibly explosive, vibrant, you know, S curve like growth where we've just started to look at NFT. We've already had that inflection point where, you know, previously we were approaching people trying to commit some build on cadena and now

suddenly we're like inundated with grant applications and builders organically starting to build. And let me just tell you, it's the most exciting place this project has ever been in the five years I've been following it. That's awesome. And I'm glad that's on that. Yeah, I don't tell what Tyler talking about with Marmalade. You know, the, I think it's not frequently understood, you know, like NFT, NFT,

it's a, it's a terrible acronym like you say it and you have a couple of different reactions, right? Some people think Jay pig art, you know, but you know, it's a bucket. It's a bucket that has metadata with a with a signature. And I think we're just really now starting to explore what you can do with with NFTs, especially utility NFTs. And, you know, how what

fits in with with gaming, if you're a traditional game developer, right? And, you know, in game marketplaces of virtual items are not not a new thing. Actually, that's actually how most free to play or service-based games, you know, currently operate. But if you look at, you know, something like an ER721, you know, the Royal Tees with an ER721 token, and I apologize if I'm, if I'm

saying it's not perfectly, are not necessarily enforced by the NFT, they're generally NF enforced by a third party marketplace, something like an open sea. And as a developer, right, imagine you're making a game, right? And you're making a game and you want to have somebody, you'll be able to buy and sell on the NFT. It's a it's a terrible user experience, right? To be like, okay,

so actually to buy that NFT, to actually start playing the game, you have to go to a third party marketplace. Actually, if you want to buy a secondary or some sort of additional item, you have to go to a third party marketplace. And so we see a lot of interest from game developers and actually other types of developers, actually, especially in the B2B space, where the

existing NFT standards don't actually work for the use case that they're building. Yeah, that's interesting. I feel like there, there is a lot of fragmentation and we're still in the very early days, in my opinion, as far as, you know, Web 3 gaming is concerned. Where do you see that in the future? Are we going to see AAA level games on your PS5, like, where you're

able to play to earn or implement your NFTs in the game? Like, where do you see this, this space going? Yeah, so the, I think Web 3 gaming or blockchain based gaming is a little bit misunderstood right now. You know, I think that the, you know, everybody got very excited last year with, you know, games like Axi Infinity, which I think has done amazing things for

pushing this space forward. When I look at it as a gamer, I understand the game design, but it's rough, right? It's rough as a player. The other day I was trying to, you know, to demonstrate sort of, you know, the flow for a fraction. So I created a new account and I was like, what? Like, this is so hard and I have to go spend $700

on an NFT. Before I can actually play the game, right? And that, that to me, isn't, isn't mass market. So we have seen the start of projects from just amazing teams. So Shrapnel, which was on this, the show a couple weeks ago. You know, those are, you know, people that it's considered AAA developers. And this is why I'm excited about the longer term arc of Web

3 gaming. I've seen talent from Zinga. So Gallagames is the current example. So you have Eric Schramyer and John Oswald, who, you know, some of the founders in folks who created games like Farmville and Citibill at Zinga. I've seen developers from Blizzard, from Riot, from, you know, people who created genre defining games. And in the traditional world, I'm just starting to make Web 3 games. I

think, you know, I think that the two audiences are going to remain, you know, some are separate. You know, I think the, you know, more traditional for crypto games, you know, play to earn style are going to sort of rain for the next, you know, 12, 18 months. But I think you're seeing some very ambitious projects started by traditional game makers who are going to be

combining sort of the best of both worlds. So in the production value and the fund of traditional games. But then the sort of ability to own items to have player driven economies and potential actually, you know, ownership of games with with their community. So I'm pretty excited about the longer term arc of Web 3 gaming. Yeah, that's, that's an interesting take. I feel like as well,

you know, you say these player driven economies. How important after deployment is, is the team? Because we've seen just in the recent week, this past week, some pretty dramatic things happening in, in NFT space. And in the, in the traditional crypto space, of course, everyone's talking about, Luna and all this stuff. But even with, like, what happened with a Zuki, I don't know if you guys

followed all of that. How important do you think it is that a, the creators of these things become docs, so to speak, you know, more transparent about who you are. Who's building? And how important do you think they even are further down the line as, as these things become more decentralized? Like the, the blockchains that we all use have become decentralized and less reliant on the

person that built it. Yeah, I think it's a great question. And look, I think the irony of crypto right now is despite building technical foundations that ought to be trustless. That there seemed like there's a whole lot of situations or a single central authority. A lot of power. Honestly, a, a lot of power. A full, soft, well discussion that I think is really important and overlooked

a lot of the time, you know, many of us got into crypto because of Bitcoin and Ethereum. And we got excited about other projects after having that introductory path. And, you know, I think that we shouldn't be quick to dismiss the innovation that is proof of work. And there's some real reality to proof of work networks, having fundamental differences from other networks. Like a proof of

state network, like, Tara, or Salana, that can be turned off suggests that there's some pretty serious centralization there. If someone has a power to flip an off switch on a network, how do you centralize is it really? You know, you look at Bitcoin and Ethereum, Ethereum 1.0 and you look at cadena and the uptime of the proof of work network, you know, you know, you know,

there's no ability to turn off the network. Like the network's going to chug along because it's decentralized, you know, the miners ultimately power it. Now, I think that when it comes to teams and doxing, there are certain types of companies that are going to run on blockchain that do require some central authority figures. So, for example, if you want to invest in a group that's running

some kind of investment fund that is investing and distributing crypto assets, you know, you're going to have to trust some asset managers that are going to sort of distribute it. And, you know, as we've seen with the implosion of things like Wonderland and some other protocols. Yeah, it's pretty important that you probably do your research. And, like, you know, have the central key signing authorities doxed.

I think that when it comes to gaming and what comes to projects that are decentralized and in the form of DAUS, there becomes this really interesting element of trying to understand, is this project decentralized in name only or is it actually decentralized? And I expect that we're going to see a lot of innovation and excitement in this space. You know, I'll just put out a call

to any builders out there. If you're thinking about problems around identifying who's on the cap table or accountability around voting or, you know, thinking about governance structure for projects and DAUS, you know, huge invitation to reach out and apply for grants. We're super actually interested in this space and want to bring and develop best practices. So, I think that, you know, ultimately, crypto is going to

have to rediscover some of the lessons of the corporate world over the last hundred years in terms of shareholder protections. And it may turn out that some businesses are going to look a little bit more like, you know, Web2 businesses organizationally, even in Web3. But on the flip side, I also want to say that, you know, the power of DAUS is beautiful in terms of allowing

someone to just walk into a project and start working on it and then get compensated for that work. So it's a fundamental shift. And it's something that anytime there's a paradigm shift like what we're seeing in Web3, there's going to be growing pains. And, you know, all we can do is do our best to try to do our best. Try and support projects such that the

growing pains happen to other people and not to the ones that are near and dear here. Yeah, we'll state it. We'll state it. You have something to add there, Dan. Yeah. So going back to, you know, more creative projects like games, I think that the team fundamentally matters. So these are very complicated multi-year projects, right? So when you look at a game, right? So they're fundamentally

an entertainment product. You know, some people like we want games that are fun. And I'm going to put fun aside for one moment. Because it's a hard thing to quantify. But so I focus on service-based games or free-to-play games or however it is you want to define it. But these are games. When I look like, what is a good game? A good game is a game

that, you know, players play and retained users for a long period of time. So they want to come back and play tomorrow, the next day, the next month, six months in a year from now, right? So that requires a team of very creative people who are thinking about how to develop an experience. It's artists and engineers. And game designers, you know, working together. And it's not

an easy project to pull off. So I think that you are so going to have at least the game industry, these like studio models where there is a team. I think where where I start to sort of get excited, right, is let's say that you're a game developer who launches a traditional Web 2 game, right? So a platform, right, takes 30%. Right. So, you know, like

I look at it, you know, the one of the opportunities in Web 3 gaming is actually more tightly couple the audience. In a platform-based way, you know, in a platform where you can play and play on a platform that is working, you know, a platform. But I think I've got a platform that has a platform of games. And the developer. And actually take out some of

the the actual platform, right. So platform takes 30%. If you look at a free-to-play game developer's budget, you know, they probably are spending, you know, 40 to 50% of net revenue on user acquisition spent, right. So, you know, one of the the great things about about blockchain is there is network effects within games. You know, some of the financial, you know, rewards to grow projects and

actually have, you know, that those dollars be used to support the community and the project and build things that the community wants. I think that's super exciting. But I don't think that we're, you know, at least with, you know, game projects that we're going to have, you know, fully distributed autonomous organizations. I think you're still going to have those creative leaders. I mean, we saw this

with traditional games you see, you know, the people who made successful mobile games, they frequently actually made successful Facebook games. And before that, they were making games on the PC platform. So there is a there is a skill and an art of making entertainment experiences. Yeah, absolutely. That's true. I wonder too, you know, how important, if something is really fun and really engaging. And we see

this with the traditional publishers, right. Like we see it with Ubisoft. We see it with EA where people hate these publishers. And yet they still pick up every single game that comes out. So I wonder like if over time the funness. You know, the engaging nature of these things will matter more than, you know, a guy who maybe says something that you disagree with or what

have you. So I think this is an interesting dynamic that we'll see develop over time. Because with with Ubisoft, game, you pay $60 you get the game. That's it. You're not invested beyond that. Right. And this actually a lot of these Web three games and NFTs. You are invested. You feel like you have some affinity with it. And that affinity draws all the way down to

your wallet. So I'm interested to see how that kind of develops. So going back to cadena, you guys have a you mentioned something that I saw on your website. And that I've seen a lot of announcements around. And that's is it cad X cad X. Yeah, cad X cad X. Now this is coming soon, right. It's almost it's almost deployed to to production. Yeah, my understanding

is that it's, you know, expected in the next month. So it's exciting times. And you know, they've had a sort of a beta pool with a couple million in it. For KDA and flux that's been been operating for quite some time and has been operating really well. You know, if you look at the, I don't know, I was curious maybe around December, January. And I was

like, I wonder if anyone's running Arbon this pool. You know, a centralized exchange and I like watch the price for a few days was like, holy crap. Like someone must be because like the price is tracking really, really tightly. So it was cool to see just that, you know, in production, the thing had been operating well. And, you know, I think we're all very, very excited

for one of the K assets for, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum and other things come over and, you know, bring and help bring liquidity and kind of that bridging between the different boxchains to to create a DeFi. Yeah, that'll be cool. So you said next month, most likely. Yeah, yeah, you know, I'm a can't speak for cad X. I'm just a fan boy, if you will.

But, you know, I think, yeah, it's supposed to be in the next month and very excited to see what happens there. And of course, there's, there's other Dexes too. You know, there's, there's ASWAP that's been running and already has several pools with, you know, some of the early tokens like hyper cent and babe and some others. And then there's a night decks and, you know, there's

a few other Dexes that we're tracking as well that we're really excited about. And, you know, we're very excited to help support Dexes. So, if you're building a, you know, building something cool, you're interested in building something cool, come from talk to us and we'd love to support you. Absolutely. We'll make sure that all the links to how to get in touch with the cadena team

or, of course, in the show notes. It's always hard to fit everything about a project in one 30 minute episode. But before we start to wind down here, is there anything I miss anything that you really wanted to touch on before, before the episode ends? Yeah, you know, I think some areas that I'm really excited about is how crypto provides these opportunities that really didn't exist

before to create your own product of your dreams and have a community that is just there enthusiastic to rally behind it. And this is something that we've seen, you know, as cadena has grown organically from, for example, 8,000 Twitter followers this time last year to more than 200 to 10,000 now, that there's this vibrant community of people that cadena has been fairly distributed in terms of,

you know, the people that have bought in, the people that have sold out, supporting the project, the people that are marking the project are, you know, distributed and, you know, self organized even. And what we're seeing with these initial projects is the community is just rallying behind them in such a big way. And so I'd say to you, if you're a builder and you're choosing a

blockchain platform to build on, if you build with us, not only will you get a technical foundation with the security of proof of work that's going to be around for a hundred years, but you will also get that community that's going to be your tireless advocates that are hungry and that are delighted to support you. And there's nothing better than a project walking in and, you

know, announcing that they're building. And then within a couple days, having, you know, 2000 people on Discord and, you know, having people just like waiting to support them into IDO on a high percent or on KD launch to the launch pad platforms for cadena. So this is, to me, the most exciting time ever in crypto to be a builder. We may be a crypto winter for

traders and speculators, but it's a crypto and a vana for builders come build with us. We'd love to have you. Wonderful. Dan, any final thoughts? Yeah. So I'm in the, so I've spoken a little bit about our, our grants program, but we're also spending up a accelerator and an incubator for, you know, projects that need sort of a different sort of help, you know, I think,

you know, step one, get in touch with us. I don't think we have straight up a cookbook cutter approach like, you know, you fall in this bucket or if you applied for grants, you're not appropriate for, you know, our incubator or if you, you know, applied to our incubator, you're not appropriate for grants. You know, reach out. We'll figure it out. You know, we're excited to

chat with folks and understand what they're trying to build and, and how we can help. Fantastic. Okay. Last thing is where can we find you guys online, social media, all that stuff. Yeah, you can visit our website, which is cadena.io and check out our grants program, which is that plus backslash grants. You can keep progress on the network. You can follow us on Twitter, which is,

you know, cadena underscore.io and we also have a pretty active telegram group. And you can also find us on discord, which is discord.io backslash cadena. Fantastic. And as you guys know, listening, we will always have all of the links to everything we've discussed in this episode in the show notes on the blog. I've had Tyler Benster and Dan Wiggins from cadena today. This has been a

really interesting episode. I really can't thank you guys enough for coming and hanging out with me for this past half hour. I hope to have you guys on again soon so we can talk more about what's going on in the ecosystem. And I'll be watching out as well. For now listeners, that is it. We're going to sign off and I will see you guys next time.