When taking its blockchain public, “there was an adjustment period where we had to learn to love crypto,” Kadena founder and CEO Stuart Popejoy said. The admission sounded more like a technical adjustment than a surge of emotion on his lips, but he added, “The people who participate in your ecosystem really are your network and that is obviously not a very enterprise-y thing, that’s very grassroots.”
The merits of private blockchains remain a matter of debate, but Kadena transitioned from a private JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) blockchain in 2016 to a public spinoff in 2020, taking Popejoy, former a JPMorgan executive, with it.