How the Community Saved Kadena from the Binance threat

Recap: Binance Delisting

After the original team resigned on October 21st, 2025, Binance unexpectedly decided to delist KDA a few days later, despite the proposed rescue plan of $50M led by Anne-Lise Osborne and backed by Nugeneis and Mohammed Khalifa [1], [2].

Of course, the delisting effectively ended any hope of a quick recovery. That’s when the community stepped in.

While the token price stabilized, demonstrating the continued support of a large community, a new threat emerged.

Binance still held 44M KDA belonging to their customers. Binance publicly announced that, according to its standard procedure, it would sell all remaining tokens on behalf of its users and refund them in USDT.

The Issue

Later, we were informed that 7M KDA had already been sold (we assume OTC, although this was never confirmed).

However, 37M tokens still remained to be sold. That’s 15% of the total supply and roughly 50 days of normal trading volume.

Even if Binance planned to sell the tokens gradually on the market over a six-month period, it would have guaranteed severe downward pressure on the price, pushing it almost Zero. Even worse, it would have discouraged any new investors.

Why invest in a token when you know there is a high probability of massive selling pressure over the coming months?

As a simple comparison (not a perfect one, but let’s try): imagine Satoshi Nakamoto, MicroStrategy, and BlackRock all deciding to dump their holdings on the market.

On May 15th, 2026, Binance started moving the tokens to Gate and confirmed that the selling process would begin soon.

The Solution

We quickly rallied dozens of investors willing to participate in a deal to purchase all 37M KDA belonging to Binance’s former KDA holders.

Pascal, assisted by several team members, coordinated the process:

• Entered into exclusive negotiations with Binance
• Collected the funds from participants
• Proposed, discussed, and consolidated feedback on a fair distribution model for investors

On the Binance side, we agreed on the following:

— The community would purchase Binance’s tokens at a discounted price of $0.0015 per KDA, for a total of approximately $55,000

On the community side, we agreed on the following:

— 53 individuals would participate

— A minimum investment of $100 and a maximum of $1,700 (average investment: $750)

— Tokens purchased at a price of $0.00165 per KDA

— 20% of the tokens distributed immediately

— 80% of the tokens vested over a three-year period with linear unlocking

— A gentleman’s agreement not to immediately engage in arbitrage or short-term profit-taking

Practical Implementation

The tokens were received from Binance on June 19th [3].

A smart contract was created [4] to lock the tokens according to the agreement reached with the community. It was deployed at the following address:

n_a93d47fd937a5d0899c9385763d5b1c4056842c5.otc-deal-locker

The funds were transferred to the smart contract the same day. [5]

The contract locked user allocations across 104 individual anonymized sub-accounts, each corresponding to an investor. Thanks to Pact, this could be implemented in only a few lines of code — something that would have been significantly more complex if not impossible on EVM-based chains.

The progress of the unlocking process can be monitored on the frontend [6]

Conclusion

The operation was a real success and confirmed the community’s commitment to supporting its favorite blockchain.

Despite very limited promotion within the community (many people were ultimately disappointed not to be able to participate, and we apologize for that), and despite having to ask people to stop sending funds, we still raised more than 50% above the required amount.

Today, these 37M tokens are in strong hands, with 80% securely locked by a smart contract. Investors can once again look at Kadena without the overhang of a massive pending sell-off. People can invest with confidence.

It’s now time to turn the page and continue building. Development of the Kinesis Bridge, which had been temporarily put on hold, is resuming and will be released soon, alongside Post-Quantum Signatures.

We need to be ready for the end of the crypto winter and the next phase of growth.

And once again: a big thank you to our supportive community.

[1] https://nugenesisou.com/insidecrypto (Kadena Missed rebuild article)

[2] https://ibb.co/sdKhZGhf Chat with Binance

[3] https://explorer.chainweb-community.org/mainnet/txdetail/3MlQLYYoCZPKxVIeYgcGJwQSTj7vfyumt3acEFlFr5s

[4] https://github.com/CryptoPascal31/binance-otc-deal-locker

[5] https://explorer.chainweb-community.org/mainnet/txdetail/jm1TWcBLrn7J5OrkZgAjJzS4apbGdJL3_-xf1ZKxXEo

[6] https://otc-locker.kda-chain.org/