Creators of JP Morgan’s First Blockchain Launch Own Alternative to Ethereum L2s

Founders who left JP Morgan to build their own L1 Kadena have now launched an alternative platform to Ethereum L2s - Chainweb EVM.

Published by

Sneha Agrawal

July 3, 2025

Creators of JP Morgan’s First Blockchain Launch Own Alternative to Ethereum L2s

Kadena:- Two former JP Morgan executives who led the bank’s early blockchain efforts – Stuart Popejoy and Will Martino – left it in 2017 to found Kadena. Both Popejoy and Martino played a key role as Blockchain Team Lead and Tech Lead respectively in creation of JP Morgan’s first blockchain, called Juno.

However, when the bank eventually pivoted to Ethereum, their dissatisfaction with existing platforms led them to build their own blockchain – Kadena. They believed that they could build a more scalable and secure Layer-1 blockchain from scratch rather not based on Ethereum.

Now, their L1 PoW blockchain, Kadena, is developing and growing rapidly with a major announcement it made at the ongoing Ethereum CC conference in Cannes.

It has launched Chainweb EVM, which lets developers build apps just like on Ethereum but on Kadena’s network instead. It is meant to be a powerful alternative to Ethereum’s layer‑2 scaling solutions.

Stuart Popejoy told Coingape, “The Chainweb EVM testnet proves that true horizontal scaling can live on the base layer, not on a patchwork of rollups. Solidity builders now have a PoW backbone that keeps fees low, execution fast, and censorship out of the equation.” It’s meant to be a faster, scalable alternative to Ethereum L2s.”

What is Kadena? | CoinGecko — Kadena Founders | Source: CoinGecko

Can Kadena’s new platform be a Native Alternative to L2s?

Layer 2 (L2) rollups like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base are built on top of Ethereum. They are helping users by providing reduced gas fees with increase in transaction throughput.

However, Rollups do come with certain drawbacks. They rely on bridges and centralized sequencers, which pose security risks and control concerns. Users also have to wait minutes (or days) for final settlement.

In order to solve this, Kadena’s new platform ChainwebEVM aims to allow developers build Ethereum-style apps directly at Layer 1 – which is Kadena’s natively scalable Proof-of-Work blockchain.

Thus, with its Chainweb EVM, Kadena aims to provide its developers the benefits of rollups – low fees, high speed, Solidity support. Since everything happens directly on the Kadena L1, it also promises base-layer security and more decentralization.

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“Bitcoin-level security”

Chainweb EVM has 20 integrated EVM chains running in parallel with Kadena’s native Proof-of-Work (PoW) network. Interestingly, all the five EVM chains that Kadena has introduced have the “same merge mined security as Bitcoin.”

With the launch, Kadena’s Chainweb EVM will be competing with other Ethereum L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base which remain prominent.

Interestingly, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is also looking forward to replace Ethereum’s native execution engine (EVM) with RISC-V — a more efficient, general-purpose virtual machine. This will increase the network’s speed which is currently 800 times slower than native RISC-V in complex ops.

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About Author

With over four years of experience in covering and tracking the financial markets, Sneha Agrawal is a dedicated Crypto Journalist and Editor with passion for researching and writing the crypto pieces. She is currently leading the Brandtalk section, here at CoinGape. She likes to keep track of political, legal and financial happenings all around the world - without which she deems her day incomplete. Apart from her Journalistic endeavours, she is a solo traveler, museum goer, and a keen reader of books.