The Coin Galaxy › Hello Kaspa · Updated
Independent guide · proof of work · blockDAGTen blocks a second, and none of them wasted
Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency that replaces the single chain of blocks with a blockDAG: many blocks are created at once, all of them are kept, and an algorithm called GHOSTDAG puts them in order afterwards. This is the independent guide to how that works, what it has actually delivered, and what it has not.
Did you know Kaspa’s genesis block contains no coins at all, so the “no premine” claim is a property of the ledger rather than a promise.
Live market data
KAS is the coin that pays Kaspa’s miners. It has no other job: no staking, no governance vote, no claim on anyone’s revenue. These numbers come from CoinGecko when the page can reach it, and fall back to figures checked by hand.
Fetching live data…
Uses the live price above. Nothing here is a price forecast or a recommendation to buy.
- Ticker
- KAS
- Max supply
- 28,704,026,601
- Consensus
- PoW / GHOSTDAG
- Hash function
- kHeavyHash
- Launched
- 7 Nov 2021
- Smallest unit
- 1 sompi = 1e-8 KAS
Kaspa in 60 seconds
Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, launched in November 2021 with no premine and no company behind it, that produces ten blocks every second instead of one every ten minutes. It keeps every valid block rather than discarding the ones that arrive at the same time, and an algorithm called GHOSTDAG sorts them into a single agreed order.
The one idea that matters
In Bitcoin, blocks form a chain. If two miners publish a block at the same moment, only one survives; the other becomes an orphan and the work that went into it is thrown away. That is why Bitcoin keeps blocks ten minutes apart: the slower the blocks, the rarer the collisions, and the safer the chain. Speed and security are traded against each other.
Kaspa breaks that trade by letting blocks have more than one parent. The structure that results is not a chain but a directed acyclic graph — a blockDAG. Blocks mined at the same instant all point back at the same tips, all of them are kept, and the protocol decides afterwards which order to read them in. Collisions stop being a problem to avoid and become a normal condition of the network.
What that buys, and what it does not
It buys very fast inclusion. A transaction normally appears in a block within a fraction of a second, and the first confirmations follow in a second or two. It does not buy instant irreversibility: Kaspa’s protocol-level finality window is 12 hours, and the practical safety of a payment grows with the number of confirmations, just as it does in Bitcoin. It also does not, by itself, buy general-purpose smart contracts — Kaspa spent its first four and a half years without them, and the programmability that arrived in 2026 is deliberately narrow.
Five things to know before you read on
- It is genuinely fair-launched. There was no ICO, no premine and no allocation to the founder or to investors. The first coins were mined by whoever turned up on 7 November 2021.
- The emission is unusual. Instead of a halving every four years, the block reward shrinks every single month by a factor of 2−1/12, so it halves smoothly each year. Kaspa calls this the chromatic phase, after the twelve semitones of a musical octave.
- Almost all of it is already mined. About 27.8 billion of the 28.70 billion cap is in circulation, roughly 96.7%, with new issuance running near 2.3% a year and falling.
- The 10 blocks per second are real; the headline throughput figures are not the same thing. Ten blocks a second is live on mainnet. The transactions-per-second numbers you see quoted are mostly testnet measurements or arithmetic, and they disagree with each other. Section 07 takes them apart.
- Programmability is new and partial. The Toccata hard fork of June 2026 added covenants and zero-knowledge proof verification at the base layer. A full smart-contract environment is still research. Most of the application activity happens on layer-2 networks.
Origins: thirteen years of trying to break one trade-off
Kaspa is unusual in that the research came first and the coin came second. The chain of papers behind it starts in 2013 with a master’s student in Jerusalem noticing that Bitcoin’s ten-minute block time is not a law of nature but a safety margin — and that the margin could be removed if blocks stopped competing.
2013: GHOST, and the problem it named
Yonatan Sompolinsky, then a master’s student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem working with Aviv Zohar, wrote a protocol called GHOST (Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree). Its observation was simple and uncomfortable: as you speed a blockchain up, orphan blocks multiply, and the honest hash power splits between competing branches while an attacker’s does not. Past a certain block rate the chain becomes insecure not because of any bug but because of arithmetic. GHOST proposed counting the weight of whole sub-trees rather than a single longest chain, so the work in orphaned blocks still contributed to security. The paper was formalised as Secure High-Rate Transaction Processing in Bitcoin in 2015. Vitalik Buterin implemented a simplified, single-level version of the idea in Ethereum, where it survived into the proof-of-stake era as the uncle/ommer rule.
2016–2018: SPECTRE and PHANTOM
GHOST still produced a chain. The next step, with Zohar and Yoad Lewenberg, was SPECTRE (2016): abandon the chain entirely, let blocks reference several parents, and settle conflicts by a pairwise vote between blocks. SPECTRE was fast but gave only a partial order — enough to decide whether a payment is safe, not enough to run a ledger that needs to know which of two transactions came first. PHANTOM, drafted from 2018 with Shai Wyborski and Zohar, fixed that by producing a full linear order over the whole DAG. Its practical, greedy variant is GHOSTDAG, and that is the protocol Kaspa runs. The PHANTOM/GHOSTDAG paper was published at the ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies on 2 September 2021.
2018–2021: DAGLabs, and then not DAGLabs
Sompolinsky co-founded DAGLabs in 2018 to turn the papers into software, with venture backing. By 2021 that company had wound down, and a group of its engineers and a volunteer community relaunched the work as a public, unfunded project. The decision not to carry the company’s cap table into the coin is the reason Kaspa has no premine: there was no one left to allocate it to. Kaspa was launched on 7 November 2021 with a genesis block whose coinbase embeds recent Bitcoin block hashes as a timestamp, and whose UTXO commitment is empty — a claim anyone can verify from a node, and which the project publishes a notebook for checking.
2022 onwards: the Rust rewrite
The original node, kaspad, was written in Go. KIP-1 proposed rewriting it in Rust, and rusty-kaspa became the reference implementation. This was not cosmetic: the ten-blocks-per-second target was not reachable with the Go node’s performance, and the rewrite is what made the 2025 Crescendo upgrade possible. KIP-1 is formally marked implemented and closed out by Crescendo.
Timeline: 2013 to October 2026
Filter the timeline to follow one thread: the research, the protocol upgrades, the market, or the ecosystem built on top.
Showing all events
- 2013–2015
GHOSTresearch
Sompolinsky and Zohar describe the speed–security trade-off in Nakamoto consensus and propose counting sub-tree weight. Ethereum adopts a simplified version.
- 2016
SPECTREresearch
With Yoad Lewenberg: a blockDAG protocol with pairwise voting. Fast, but only a partial order.
- 2018
PHANTOM drafted; DAGLabs foundedresearch
A protocol that produces a full linear order over a DAG. DAGLabs is set up to implement it.
- 7 November 2021
Mainnet launchprotocol
Kaspa goes live: no premine, no ICO, 1 block per second, randomised rewards of 1–1,000 KAS for the first two weeks.
- 2 September 2021
PHANTOM GHOSTDAG published at AFTresearch
Sompolinsky, Wyborski and Zohar’s paper appears at the ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies.
- 8 May 2022
Chromatic phase beginsprotocol
The six-month pre-deflationary period at 500 KAS per block ends. The monthly reduction schedule starts at 440 KAS per second.
- November 2022
DAGKnight paperresearch
Sompolinsky and Michael Sutton publish a parameterless generalisation of Nakamoto consensus that does not need an assumption about network latency. It is still not on mainnet.
- 2023
kHeavyHash ASICs arrivemarket
Purpose-built miners from IceRiver, Bitmain and iBeLink end GPU mining on Kaspa within months and multiply the network hashrate.
- 17 November 2023
Binance lists KAS futuresmarket
KAS reaches a wide audience. A Binance spot listing has still not happened.
- 23 March 2024
Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation announcedecosystem
A non-protocol body for grants, hackathons and merchant adoption, first funded by ICERIVER Ventures.
- 31 July 2024
All-time high of $0.2074market
The peak price to date. KAS has traded well below it since.
- 20 February 2025
Coinbase opens KAS perpetual futuresmarket
KAS-PERP on Coinbase International and Advanced. Again, derivatives rather than spot.
- May 2025
Crescendo: 1 → 10 blocks per secondprotocol
KIP-14 raises the block rate tenfold, recalibrates GHOSTDAG’s k to 124, activates storage-mass rules and shortens finality to 12 hours. The per-block reward is divided by ten so the schedule is unchanged.
- May–September 2025
Kasplex zkEVM testnet, then mainnetecosystem
The first EVM-compatible layer 2 for Kaspa, built as a based rollup, moves from public testnet to a mainnet launch announced with the Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation.
- 19 March 2026
Igra Network mainnetecosystem
A second EVM execution layer, sequenced by Kaspa miners rather than a central sequencer, opens to the public with fifteen protocols and iKAS as gas.
- 30 June 2026
Toccata activates at DAA score 474,165,565protocol
Covenants, covenant IDs, a zero-knowledge precompile opcode and partitioned sequencing commitments (KIP-16, 17, 20, 21) go live. Node version 2.0.1 or later required.
- 9 September 2026
SilverScript v1.0.0ecosystem
A language for writing Kaspa covenant logic reaches 1.0, alongside a Python SDK release.
- 20 September 2026
Kasplex KRC-20 indexer exploitmarket
A signature-bypass bug in the off-chain KRC-20 indexer lets an attacker forge transfers and drain two bridged token pools. Kaspa’s own consensus was not broken.
- 22 September 2026
Rusty Kaspa v2.1.0protocol
Node sync improvements and security fixes; operators urged to upgrade.
- 1 October 2026
KCC-1 and KCC-2 enter Last Callprotocol
The post-Toccata token standards move toward finalisation. KCC-20, the fungible token standard, is still a draft.
What a blockDAG actually is
A blockchain is a list. A blockDAG is a graph. The whole of Kaspa follows from allowing a block to name more than one parent — and from the realisation that once you do, you no longer have to keep blocks far apart in time.
Why a chain has to be slow
Blocks take time to travel across the internet. Call that time D — the propagation delay, perhaps half a second to a couple of seconds for a global peer-to-peer network. If a new block is produced every T seconds and T is far larger than D, almost every miner has seen the previous block before they start work on the next one, so almost every block extends the same tip and almost nothing is wasted. That is Bitcoin at ten minutes.
Push T down towards D and miners increasingly work in the dark, building on a tip that someone else has already replaced. In a chain, only one of those simultaneous blocks can survive. The others are orphaned and their proof of work is discarded. Two bad things happen at once: throughput stops rising in proportion to the block rate, and the honest hash rate fragments across competing branches while an attacker, who is not racing anyone, keeps all of theirs. That second effect is what makes a fast chain genuinely less secure, not just less efficient.
Explainer 1 — Chain versus DAG at the same block rate
Set a block rate and a propagation delay, then switch between the two structures. Blocks produced inside one propagation window are drawn stacked, because they were mined without knowledge of each other.
Model, not measurement. This uses the standard textbook approximation for a longest-chain protocol, in which the useful share of blocks is about 1 ÷ (1 + rate × delay). Real orphan rates depend on topology, block size and miner behaviour. The point it makes — that a chain throws away a rising share of its own work as it speeds up, and a DAG does not — is the real one.
What Kaspa changed
A Kaspa block names every tip it can see as a parent, up to a limit of sixteen. Simultaneous blocks therefore do not compete; they sit side by side and are later merged by whichever block references them. Nothing is orphaned. The work in every valid block counts towards the security of the whole structure, which is why the network can run at ten blocks a second without the fragmentation problem that would wreck a chain at the same rate.
Three consequences are worth holding onto:
- Inclusion is nearly immediate. Your transaction does not have to win a race. It goes into the next block, which is at most a tenth of a second away.
- Ordering becomes a separate problem. A chain gets its order for free. A DAG does not, and needs an algorithm — GHOSTDAG — to produce one that everybody agrees on. That is the subject of the next section.
- “Nothing is discarded” is about work, not about transactions. If two blocks in the same window contain conflicting spends of the same coin, only the first in the final order is accepted. The DAG keeps both blocks; it does not pay out twice.
The numbers Crescendo set
| Parameter | Before Crescendo | After Crescendo (now) | What it controls |
|---|---|---|---|
| Target block time | 1,000 ms | 100 ms | Ten blocks a second |
| GHOSTDAG k | 18 | 124 | How many simultaneous blocks can all stay blue |
| Max parents per block | 10 | 16 | How wide a merge can be |
| Mergeset size limit | 180 | 248 | How much past a block may absorb at once |
| Finality depth | 24 hours | 12 hours (432,000 blocks) | Depth beyond which a reorganisation is rejected outright |
| Coinbase maturity | ~100 blocks | 1,000 blocks | How long a miner waits before spending a reward |
| Pruning window | ~51 hours | ~30 hours | How much block history an ordinary node keeps |
The k value is the one to notice. In GHOSTDAG, k bounds how many blocks may be mined in ignorance of one another while still all being treated as well-behaved. Raising the block rate tenfold means ten times as many blocks land in each propagation window, so k had to rise with it — from 18 to 124, calculated for a delay parameter of five seconds and a failure probability of 1%.
GHOSTDAG: how a pile of blocks becomes one ledger
Keeping every block is the easy half. The hard half is agreeing, across thousands of machines that each saw the blocks arrive in a different order, on one sequence. GHOSTDAG does it by colouring blocks blue or red according to how well connected they are, and then reading the DAG off in a fixed order.
The intuition
An honest miner publishes its block immediately. Within one propagation delay, every other honest miner has it. So an honest block will only ever be unaware of, and unknown to, the handful of other blocks produced in that same window — its anticone, the set of blocks that are neither its ancestors nor its descendants. A block deliberately withheld by an attacker, published late to rewrite history, has a large anticone: it was hidden from a lot of blocks that were all happily aware of each other.
GHOSTDAG turns that observation into a rule. Pick the largest set of blocks you can such that every block in the set has at most k other blocks of the set in its anticone. Those are the blue blocks: the well-connected, probably-honest core. Everything else is red. Finding the largest such set exactly is computationally hard, so GHOSTDAG uses a greedy approximation that is fast and, the paper argues, secure for the same reasons.
Reading the order off
Each block picks one of its parents — the one with the highest accumulated blue work — as its selected parent. Following selected parents backwards from the newest block gives a chain through the DAG, the virtual selected parent chain. That chain is the spine. Each block on it merges the blocks that are new relative to its own selected parent — its mergeset — and those are slotted in behind it, blues before reds. The result is one total order over every block in the graph, and therefore over every transaction.
Conflicts are resolved by that order: the first spend of a coin wins, later ones are simply not accepted. Red blocks are not deleted and their honest transactions still count; what their miners lose is the reward, which goes to the merging blue block’s miner or is not paid at all.
Explainer 2 — Colour a DAG yourself
This runs a real greedy GHOSTDAG colouring over a small fixed graph in your browser. Move k and watch which blocks lose their blue status. Click any block to see why it was coloured as it was. On mainnet k is 124; here it is small so the effect is visible.
Select a block in the graph.
Why k matters so much
k is the protocol’s estimate of how messy honest behaviour can look. Set it too low and ordinary blocks, delayed by a slow link, get marked red and their miners go unpaid. Set it too high and an attacker can hide a larger cluster of blocks and still have them accepted as blue. GHOSTDAG derives k from an assumed maximum network delay and a tolerated failure probability: after Crescendo, k = 124 for a delay parameter of five seconds and a 1% bound.
Confirmations, not finality
Because every block in the DAG adds weight, a transaction accumulates confirmation quickly: in normal conditions it is in a block within a tenth of a second and has meaningful confirmation within a second or two. That is not the same as being irreversible. Kaspa’s hard finality depth — the point past which nodes refuse a reorganisation outright — is 12 hours at 10 blocks per second. For a small payment, a couple of seconds is plenty. For a large one, treat Kaspa the way you would treat Bitcoin: wait.
The network today: where the throughput claims actually land
Ten blocks per second is a fact you can check from any node. Everything downstream of it — transactions per second, “instant” payments, comparisons with Visa — is where the marketing and the measurements start to diverge. This section separates them.
What is definitely true
- Mainnet produces ten blocks a second. That has been live since the Crescendo hard fork in May 2025, and it is a consensus parameter, not an estimate.
- Transactions are included in a block in a fraction of a second, and confirmation accumulates over the following seconds.
- Protocol finality is 12 hours; pruning means an ordinary node keeps roughly 30 hours of block data and the full UTXO set, with archival nodes keeping everything.
- Running a node is modest but no longer trivial: the Toccata guide asks for a minimum of 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM, a 640 GB SSD and about 80 Mbit/s, and prefers 12–16 cores, 32 GB and 1 TB.
What is contested: transactions per second
Kaspa’s capacity is not set by a transactions-per-block number but by a mass budget per block, which charges a transaction for its size, its compute and the storage burden it leaves behind. So the honest answer to “how many transactions per second?” is “it depends what the transactions look like” — and that is exactly where the big headline numbers come from.
The most useful public evidence is a community stress test of Testnet-10 run over 1–3 October 2026 by STP-KAS, which published its methodology and its raw counts. Its findings are worth reading closely, because they contradict several numbers in circulation:
| Figure | Value | What it really measures |
|---|---|---|
| Best 1 minute | 4,253 tx/s | Unique transactions accepted on the virtual chain, on testnet, from one well-provisioned box |
| Best 10 minutes | 3,717 tx/s | Sustained over ten minutes, same conditions |
| Best 60 minutes | 2,518 tx/s | The most meaningful “sustained” number in the report |
| Node “processed” counter | up to 8,965 tx/s | Double-counts the same transaction across parallel blocks. An upper bound, not throughput |
| Submit-ok rate | up to 24,249/s | Transactions offered to the network, not transactions included |
| Realistic mainnet ceiling | ~2,854 tx/s | The report’s arithmetic for properly signed transactions of about 1,752 mass units |
So: thousands of transactions per second is defensible for simple transfers under test conditions. The widely repeated “5,000 TPS” is not supported by that report’s own data, and the report says so explicitly. Mainnet in ordinary use runs nowhere near any of these numbers, because there is not the demand — which is a point about adoption, not about capacity.
Hash rate and security
Kaspa is secured by kHeavyHash proof of work. On 14 October 2026 the network hash rate was reported at roughly 340–365 PH/s (0.34–0.36 EH/s) across two independent trackers, with difficulty around 3.3 × 1016. That is a serious amount of specialised hardware, and it is also several orders of magnitude less work than secures Bitcoin. The cost of attacking Kaspa is correspondingly lower. Anyone comparing the two should hold both facts at once.
Mining and the ASIC era
Kaspa was mineable on a graphics card for about eighteen months. Purpose-built machines arrived in 2023 and ended that, as they have on every proof-of-work coin that got large enough to be worth designing a chip for.
kHeavyHash in one paragraph
Kaspa’s proof-of-work function is kHeavyHash: a Keccak-based hash wrapped around a matrix multiplication step. It was chosen partly because the matrix step maps onto optical computing hardware, which the designers hoped would eventually make mining far more energy-efficient. In practice the hardware that arrived was conventional silicon from IceRiver, Bitmain (the KS series) and iBeLink. Because it is not SHA-256, a Bitcoin miner cannot be pointed at Kaspa.
What a miner earns
Mining pays the block subsidy plus fees, and only blue blocks are rewarded — a red block’s reward goes to the blue block that merges it, or is not paid at all. At ten blocks a second the per-block subsidy in October 2026 is about 2.06 KAS, which is the per-second schedule of about 20.6 KAS divided by the block rate. Coinbase outputs mature after 1,000 blocks.
Explainer 3 — Mining maths
A rough model of what a machine earns at today’s network size. It assumes your share of the network hash rate equals your share of the rewards, which is what a pool is for.
Published specifications, for setting the sliders. Not a recommendation, and street prices and availability move constantly.
- IceRiver KS5L — about 12 TH/s
- Bitmain Antminer KS5 / KS5 Pro — 20–21 TH/s class
- Antminer KS7 class — about 40 TH/s at roughly 3,080 W (about 77 W/TH)
Centralisation, honestly
Kaspa’s mining hardware comes from a small number of manufacturers, and a manufacturer that can build a machine can also run one. The same concentration risk exists on every ASIC-mined coin, and Kaspa has no special defence against it. There is a second, subtler point: Kaspa’s own ecosystem foundation was first funded by ICERIVER Ventures, the venture arm of one of those manufacturers. That is public and not hidden, but it is worth knowing when you read ecosystem announcements.
What a blockDAG does change is the relative penalty for being small. In a chain, a miner with a slow connection loses whole blocks to orphaning, which systematically favours large, well-connected operations. In Kaspa, a slightly-late block is still merged and, as long as its anticone stays within k, still paid. The advantage of being big is smaller than it is on a fast chain — though not smaller than on a slow one like Bitcoin.
Tokenomics: the chromatic emission
Kaspa has the simplest token design in this network of guides: one coin, no premine, no vesting schedule, no treasury, no staking yield. The only interesting part is the shape of the issuance curve — and it is genuinely interesting.
Two phases
The pre-deflationary phase ran from launch on 7 November 2021 to 8 May 2022. For the first two weeks the reward per block was randomised between 1 and 1,000 KAS; from the first hard fork it was a flat 500 KAS per block, at one block per second.
The chromatic phase began on 8 May 2022 at 440 KAS per second and has run ever since. Instead of a sudden halving every four years, the reward is multiplied by 2−1/12 — about 0.9439 — at the start of every emission month. Twelve of those steps make exactly one halving, so the reward halves every year, but it does so in twelve small steps rather than one cliff. The name comes from music: the twelve semitones of an equal-tempered octave are separated by the same ratio, 21/12.
Crescendo did not change any of this. When the block rate went from 1 to 10 per second, the schedule was simply reinterpreted as a per-second reward and divided by the block rate, so the per-block subsidy fell from about 20.6 KAS to about 2.06 KAS and the curve below was untouched.
Explainer 4 — The emission curve
Every bar is one emission year. Hover or select a year to see the reward and the cumulative supply at that point. Figures are computed from the published schedule, so they are close to but not identical with the exact on-chain totals, which drift slightly with DAA scoring.
What this does and does not mean
- Issuance is already small. About 650 million KAS a year is being created against roughly 27.8 billion in circulation. By the standards of most crypto assets that is a very low rate of new supply, and it keeps halving.
- It is not deflationary. There is no burn mechanism. Supply rises towards the 28,704,026,601 cap and then stops. Lost coins aside, the float only grows.
- The security budget shrinks with it. This is the structural question every capped proof-of-work coin eventually faces, and Kaspa faces it sooner than Bitcoin does. Once the subsidy is negligible, miners must be paid by transaction fees. Kaspa raised its minimum standard fee a hundredfold at Toccata (from 1 to 100 sompi per gram of mass) — a node policy rule rather than a consensus change, but a sign of the direction.
- Low issuance is not demand. A tight supply schedule tells you nothing about whether anyone wants the coin. KAS trades roughly 82% below its July 2024 high.
Units
One KAS is 100,000,000 sompi, exactly as one bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshis. Fees after Toccata are quoted in sompi per gram, Kaspa’s unit of transaction mass, with a minimum standard rate of 100 sompi per gram applied to the larger of the compute grams and twice the transaction’s byte count.
Smart contracts: what Toccata actually added
Kaspa spent its first four and a half years with no programmability at all, and the gap was its most-cited weakness. The Toccata hard fork of 30 June 2026 closed part of it — but it deliberately did not add a virtual machine, and understanding why is the key to understanding Kaspa’s strategy.
Covenants, not a VM
Kaspa is a UTXO ledger, like Bitcoin. Each coin sits in an unspent output locked by a small script. Ethereum’s approach would be to bolt on an account-based virtual machine where arbitrary programs hold state. Kaspa went the other way: it extended the script language so that an output can constrain what the next transaction is allowed to look like. That is a covenant. A coin can insist that it may only be spent to a particular script, or only after a delay, or only in a transaction that also pays someone else, or only in a way that preserves an attached asset.
Covenants are strictly less expressive than a general virtual machine, and that is the point. There is no global contract state to synchronise, no gas estimation to get wrong, and the parallel execution that makes a blockDAG fast is preserved, because transactions still only touch their own inputs and outputs.
The four KIPs in Toccata
ZK precompile opcode
A protocol-level opcode for verifying zero-knowledge proofs. The transient mass limit was doubled specifically to make room for ZK-STARK proofs. This is what lets Kaspa act as a settlement layer for rollups and, later, for private transfers.
Covenants and improved scripting
The core change: new introspection opcodes and an output covenant field, so a script can inspect and restrict the transaction spending it.
Covenant IDs
A stable identifier carried on a UTXO (covenant_id), which is what makes native assets possible: a token is a covenant that follows the coin.
Partitioned sequencing commitments
Proving machinery with cost proportional to activity rather than to the whole DAG, exposed through a new GetSeqCommitLaneProof RPC. Infrastructure for light clients and for proving things about the order of events.
What else changed at Toccata
- Transaction version 1, with new
computeBudgetinputs andcovenantoutputs;masswas renamedstorage_mass. - The minimum standard fee rose from 1 to 100 sompi per gram. This is a relay policy, not consensus.
- A new
GetBlockRewardInfoRPC reports a block’s colour, confirmations and reward — a nice illustration of how blue-and-red is a first-class concept at the API level. - Nodes had to run v2.0.1 or later, and the database upgrade is one-way: downgrading means resyncing.
SilverScript, and what is still missing
Writing covenant logic in raw opcodes is unpleasant, so a companion language, SilverScript, reached v1.0.0 on 9 September 2026 along with a Python SDK release. A separate compiler, Argent, exists but its own documentation calls for further audit and hardening before production use.
What Kaspa still does not have, as of October 2026: a mature native smart-contract environment, native lending or other DeFi on layer 1, and a finalised fungible-token standard. The post-Toccata standards KCC-1 and KCC-2 entered Last Call on 1 October 2026; KCC-20, the token standard that would replace the off-chain KRC-20 scheme, is still a draft. The larger piece, vProgs — off-chain computation with on-chain zero-knowledge verification, which is the route to general programmability — has active proposals and no release.
Roadmap: shipped, in progress, and still a paper
Kaspa’s roadmap is quoted widely and often loosely. The useful discipline is to ask, for each item, whether there is a merged KIP and a release behind it. On that test the picture as of 14 October 2026 looks like this.
| Item | Status | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Rust node (rusty-kaspa) | Shipped | KIP-1, marked Implemented and closed out by Crescendo. Current line is v2.1.0 (22 Sep 2026) |
| 10 blocks per second | Shipped | KIP-14 Crescendo, live on mainnet since May 2025 |
| Covenants + ZK precompile | Shipped | Toccata, DAA score 474,165,565, ~30 June 2026. KIP-16, 17, 20, 21 all Active |
| SilverScript language | Shipped | v1.0.0, 9 September 2026 |
| KCC token standards | In progress | KCC-0 finalised 21 Sep 2026; KCC-1 and KCC-2 in Last Call from 1 Oct 2026; KCC-20 still Draft |
| 25 blocks per second | Proposed in roadmap prose | No KIP or release found; mainnet is still 10 BPS |
| vProgs (ZK off-chain execution) | Research | Active proposals, no release |
| DAGKnight consensus | Research | KIP-2, status Proposed since 2022. Mainnet runs GHOSTDAG |
| 100 blocks per second | Aspiration | Appears in roadmap articles only; no KIP, no code |
The pattern is consistent: the things with named authors, numbered proposals and activation scores have shipped, roughly on the timelines given. The things quoted most enthusiastically in price commentary — 100 blocks per second, DAGKnight, full programmability — are the ones with the least behind them. DAGKnight in particular has been “coming” since 2022. It would be a genuine advance if it arrived, because it removes the network-delay assumption that GHOSTDAG needs; treat any date attached to it with suspicion.
Ecosystem and projects
Because layer 1 had no programmability until mid-2026, almost everything built on Kaspa was built either beside it, as an off-chain indexed convention, or above it, on a rollup. Both approaches are represented here, and the difference between them matters a great deal for how much you should trust them.
Showing all entries
Igra Network
An EVM-compatible execution layer whose transactions are ordered by Kaspa miners rather than by a central sequencer — a “based” rollup. Public mainnet opened 19 March 2026 with fifteen protocols. Gas is paid in iKAS, which wraps KAS 1:1 through a bridge. Audited by Sigma Prime; governed by a Swiss association.
Kasplex
The first EVM layer 2 for Kaspa, also built as a based rollup, using bridged KAS as its only gas token. It ran a public testnet from May 2025 and announced a mainnet with the Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation; coverage of the exact mainnet date is inconsistent. Kasplex also maintains the KRC-20 indexer.
KRC-20
A convention for inscribing token operations in Kaspa transactions, with ownership tracked by an off-chain indexer rather than by consensus. It gave Kaspa a token ecosystem years before the base layer could support one — and it is precisely the part that broke in September 2026.
KCC-20 (draft)
The intended replacement: token rules enforced inside Kaspa scripts using Toccata’s covenants, so ownership is a consensus fact rather than an indexer’s opinion. Still a draft as of October 2026, with KCC-0 finalised and KCC-1 and KCC-2 in Last Call.
Zealous Swap, Kaskad and friends
The decentralised exchange and lending apps that launched with Igra, alongside Zealous Auctions. Ecosystem TVL was reported in the low single-digit millions of dollars around the Igra launch — tiny next to the chains Kaspa is compared with.
NACHO, ZEAL and the KRC-20 crowd
The memecoin layer that formed around KRC-20. Both NACHO and ZEAL were the direct victims of the September 2026 indexer exploit; the NACHO community has said it intends to move to the native KCC-20 standard.
Hyperlane and KAT Bridge
Cross-chain messaging and asset bridges, including bridged USDC, deployed with Igra. Every bridged asset is an IOU backed by whoever operates the bridge; this is the single largest category of loss in crypto, and Kaspa’s ecosystem is no exception.
kaspa.stream, explorer.kaspa.org, kas.fyi, Dagscan
Block explorers that have had to invent an interface for a structure with no single block height. kas.fyi and the DAG visualiser at kgi.kaspad.net are the ones to look at if you want to see the graph forming in real time.
rusty-kaspa, Python SDK, SilverScript
The reference implementation and the developer toolchain. This is where to look if you want to verify a claim about Kaspa yourself rather than take anyone’s word for it.
research.kas.pa and the KIP repository
Kaspa’s protocol changes go through numbered Kaspa Improvement Proposals with explicit statuses — Draft, Proposed, Active, Implemented, Rejected. Reading the KIP list is the fastest way to tell a shipped feature from a slide.
A note on what counts as a Kaspa project
Three very different things get called “building on Kaspa”, and they carry very different risk:
- On layer 1. Plain KAS transactions and, since Toccata, covenants. Secured by Kaspa’s proof of work. This is the only category where “Kaspa’s security” is the right phrase.
- Beside layer 1. KRC-20 and other inscription-style conventions, where the data is on Kaspa but the rules are enforced by an indexer that someone runs. A bug there is a loss, even though nothing in Kaspa failed.
- Above layer 1. Rollups such as Igra and Kasplex, plus everything deployed on them. These inherit Kaspa’s ordering, and sometimes its censorship-resistance, but they have their own code, their own bridges and their own failure modes.
OP_NOT placed after OP_ENDIF made a forged script evaluate as valid. Kaspa accepted the transaction, because at the consensus level it was valid; the indexer then credited the forged transfers. Roughly 186 million ZEAL and 54 billion NACHO were moved out of a bridge custody address, minted on Igra and Kasplex, and sold into Zealous Swap pools, which lost between 94% and 99.6% of their KAS-side value. Igra paused iKAS exits and Hyperlane transfers. Native KAS and Kaspa consensus were unaffected — which is exactly the distinction in the list above, demonstrated the expensive way.People and organisations
Kaspa has no chief executive, no company and no foundation that controls the protocol. It does have an unusually identifiable intellectual origin, and a small number of engineers whose names appear on everything that ships.
Yonatan Sompolinsky
Founder · author of GHOST, SPECTRE, PHANTOM/GHOSTDAG and DAGKnight
Sompolinsky is an academic computer scientist rather than a crypto entrepreneur, and Kaspa reads like the artefact of a research programme rather than a product launch. He took a B.Sc. in mathematics and an M.Sc. in computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and completed his PhD there in 2021 with a dissertation titled The Design and Architecture of Permissionless Consensus Protocols, supervised by Aviv Zohar.
His first and still most widely deployed contribution was GHOST, begun in 2013 and formalised in 2015, which identified the speed–security trade-off in Nakamoto consensus and proposed measuring sub-tree weight instead of chain length. Vitalik Buterin took a simplified single-level version of it into Ethereum. Between 2015 and 2018 Sompolinsky and Zohar also published a string of papers on mining incentives, selfish mining and Bitcoin’s security model, with Aviv Sapirshtein among the co-authors — work that is cited independently of anything to do with Kaspa.
The blockDAG line followed: SPECTRE in 2016 with Zohar and Yoad Lewenberg, then PHANTOM and its practical variant GHOSTDAG with Shai Wyborski and Zohar, published at ACM AFT on 2 September 2021. In 2022, with Michael Sutton, he published The DAG KNIGHT Protocol, a parameterless generalisation of Nakamoto consensus that makes no assumption about network latency — the one piece of the research programme that has not yet reached Kaspa’s mainnet.
He co-founded DAGLabs in 2018 to implement the protocols commercially; it had wound down by 2021, and the community relaunch that followed is the reason Kaspa has no investor allocation. Academically he moved to Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as a postdoctoral researcher and later an associate in computer science, working on transaction ordering, distributed consensus and miner extractable value. He chaired the Scaling Bitcoin conference programme in 2019, having spoken at Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong in December 2015.
Two details tell you something about how he operates. In 2025 he was named in Binance’s Blockchain 100 as an independent researcher and publicly declined both the recognition and the invitation to the ceremony in Dubai. And in March 2026 he addressed the Oxford Union. He is not the chief executive of anything, holds no protocol-granted coins, and does not control Kaspa; the most accurate description is that he wrote the papers the network implements.
Google Scholar recorded an h-index of 9 and about 4,529 citations as of April 2026.
Aviv Zohar
Professor at the Hebrew University and Sompolinsky’s doctoral supervisor. Co-author of GHOST, SPECTRE and PHANTOM/GHOSTDAG. Not an operational figure in Kaspa.
Michael Sutton
Co-author of DAGKnight and the author of KIP-14, the Crescendo hard fork. If you want one name attached to the engineering that actually shipped the ten-blocks-per-second network, it is this one.
Shai Wyborski
Co-author of the PHANTOM GHOSTDAG paper and a long-standing public explainer of the protocol in the Kaspa community.
Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation (KEF)
Announced 23 March 2024 for grants, hackathons, incubation and merchant adoption. First funded by ICERIVER Ventures — the venture arm of an ASIC manufacturer — with a board drawn from Kaspa-adjacent companies including KasMedia. It has no protocol authority and holds no protocol allocation.
KasMedia
Operates kaspa.org and publishes the weekly development roundups that much of the community relies on. Useful, and not independent of the project it covers.
The rusty-kaspa maintainers
A small set of volunteer and grant-funded engineers. The bus factor is a real risk and is discussed openly in the community; nobody is paid by the protocol.
Community, governance and how decisions get made
There is no token vote, no DAO and no foundation with a veto. Kaspa is governed the way Bitcoin is: by proposals, rough consensus among developers, and the willingness of node operators and miners to run the resulting software.
The KIP process
Protocol changes are written up as numbered Kaspa Improvement Proposals in a public repository, each with an explicit status. As of October 2026 the list runs from KIP-1 (the Rust rewrite, Implemented) through KIP-21 (partitioned sequencing commitments, Active), and includes a rejected one — KIP-3, block sampling for high-BPS difficulty adjustment — which is a healthy sign that the process says no sometimes. A hard fork is scheduled by DAA score, published in a guide, and activated when nodes have upgraded. This is the single most useful primary source for anyone checking a claim about Kaspa.
Where the community actually is
- Discord is the centre of gravity for development and support.
- r/kaspa on Reddit, and a large and boisterous presence on X.
- kaspa.org, operated by KasMedia, is the main front door; research.kas.pa hosts the research material and kgi.kaspad.net a live DAG visualiser.
- The Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation runs grants, an ambassador programme and merchant-adoption work, funded from outside the protocol.
No treasury means no safety net
The absence of a premine is the thing Kaspa supporters are proudest of, and it has a cost worth stating plainly: there is no pot of money to pay core developers, fund audits, buy exchange listings or market the project. Development depends on grants, donations and volunteers. Several of the project’s slower timelines, and some of its exchange-integration frustrations, are downstream of that choice rather than of anything technical.
Kaspa compared with the obvious alternatives
Kaspa is usually sold as “fast Bitcoin”. That is the right comparison for its design and the wrong one for its market, where it competes with every chain that claims to be fast. Here it is against both kinds of rival, with the columns chosen so the trade-offs are visible rather than hidden.
| Kaspa | Bitcoin | Ethereum | Solana | Monero | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consensus | PoW, GHOSTDAG on a blockDAG | PoW, longest chain | PoS, Gasper | PoS, Tower BFT + PoH | PoW, longest chain |
| Block interval | 0.1 s | ~10 min | 12 s | ~0.4 s | ~2 min |
| Ledger model | UTXO | UTXO | Accounts | Accounts | UTXO (stealth) |
| Smart contracts | Covenants only; no general VM | Script only | EVM | SVM | None |
| Supply cap | 28.70bn, ~96.7% issued | 21m, ~95% issued | No cap | No cap | Tail emission |
| Issuance shape | Monthly step, halves yearly | Halving every 4 years | Variable, burn offset | Disinflationary to 1.5% | 0.6 XMR per block forever |
| Premine / ICO | None | None | Genesis sale | Pre-sales | None |
| Privacy | Transparent ledger | Transparent ledger | Transparent ledger | Transparent ledger | Private by default |
| Practical confirmation | Seconds | 10–60 min | ~13 min to finality | Seconds | 20–60 min |
| Node history kept | ~30 h plus full UTXO set | Full chain | Full, with pruning options | Partial; archives are large | Full chain |
| Main claim | PoW security at chain-free speed | Maximum settlement assurance | Programmable settlement | Throughput and low fees | Fungible digital cash |
Reading the table
Against Bitcoin, Kaspa’s pitch is coherent: the same security model, the same UTXO ledger, the same absence of a premine, but confirmations in seconds instead of an hour. The honest counter is that Bitcoin’s hash rate is orders of magnitude larger, its history is kept in full by every node, and its slowness is partly the point for people using it as a settlement asset.
Against the fast programmable chains, Kaspa is in a harder position. Solana and Avalanche are also fast and have mature application ecosystems, large developer populations and billions in on-chain value; Kaspa’s ecosystem was reported in the single-digit millions of dollars around the Igra launch in March 2026. Kaspa’s answer is that it is the only one of them secured by proof of work and launched without an allocation to anybody. Whether that matters to you is a values question, not a technical one.
Avalanche is the most interesting structural comparison, because it also abandons a single linear chain in favour of a DAG-shaped view of history, but reaches agreement by repeated random sampling among stakers rather than by proof of work and a colouring rule. Two different answers to the same question about what consensus is for.
Wallets
Kaspa addresses start with kaspa: and the network is not supported everywhere, so the choice is narrower than for Bitcoin. The official site counts eleven wallets in total, including four hardware options. Filter by what you need.
Showing all wallets
Kaspium
The community mobile wallet most Kaspa holders start with, for Android and iOS. Straightforward send and receive, with the keys on your device.
Kasware
The extension wallet used for KRC-20 tokens and for connecting to Kaspa layer-2 applications. It shipped with the Igra mainnet launch. Treat token features as higher-risk than plain KAS.
KDX / Kaspa NG
The desktop clients that can run their own node. Maximum verification, maximum storage and sync time, steepest learning curve.
Kaspa web wallet
A browser-based, open-source wallet. Convenient and non-custodial, but a web page is the easiest thing in the world to impersonate — type the address, never follow a link from a message.
Tangem
A smartcard you tap against a phone. Popular in the Kaspa community for its simplicity. Needs an NFC phone, and you should buy backup cards.
Ledger
Kaspa is supported via a dedicated app and a third-party interface rather than smoothly inside Ledger Live, so expect a slightly manual workflow. Check current support before buying for this purpose.
OneKey
An open-source-firmware hardware wallet with Kaspa support, available in air-gapped models.
OKX Wallet, Zelcore and similar
General multi-chain wallets that have added Kaspa. Zelcore notably distinguishes Kaspa L1 from the layer-2 networks — a distinction that matters, because sending to the wrong one can lose funds.
Rules that are worth more than the wallet you pick
- Write the recovery phrase on paper before you fund it. Not a photo, not a password manager note, not a cloud document.
- Send a small test first. Then send the rest once it arrives.
- Check the first and last characters of the address every single time. Clipboard-replacing malware is common and cheap.
- Know which network you are sending to. KAS on Kaspa layer 1, iKAS on Igra and bridged KAS on Kasplex are not interchangeable.
- Install wallets only from the official project page. Fake Kaspa wallets are a recurring scam, and there are unrelated companies using the Kaspa name.
Where and how to buy KAS
KAS is widely listed and conspicuously absent from the two largest Western exchanges’ spot markets. That gap is one of the most-discussed facts about the coin, so it is worth stating precisely rather than hopefully.
Listed on, among others: Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, Bybit, Gate, Bitget, CoinEx, BingX, BitMart, LBank, CoinW, BYDFi, WEEX and OurBit, with the official site counting more than fifty venues in total.
Not listed for spot trading on Binance or Coinbase, as far as we can establish in October 2026. Both offer derivatives: Binance has had KAS futures since November 2023 and Coinbase opened a KAS perpetual market (KAS-PERP) on 20 February 2025. A perpetual future is not the coin; you cannot withdraw it to a wallet, and it carries funding costs and liquidation risk that spot does not.
Decentralised options exist but mostly trade bridged KAS on other networks, or iKAS on Igra. A bridged token is an IOU from the bridge operator. For most people, buying spot on a centralised exchange and withdrawing to a wallet you control is both simpler and safer.
- Pick an exchange that serves your country and actually permits KAS withdrawals to the Kaspa network, not only trading. Check this before you deposit anything.
- Complete identity verification. Expect it everywhere reputable.
- Fund the account with your local currency or a stablecoin.
- Set up your wallet first and write down the recovery phrase — see section 16.
- Buy with a limit order rather than a market order if the book is thin. KAS is liquid but not evenly so across venues.
- Withdraw a small test amount to your own address, confirm it arrives, then withdraw the rest.
- Double-check the network on the withdrawal screen. It must be Kaspa, not an EVM layer 2 or a wrapped version on another chain.
The other way to get KAS is to mine it, which is how every coin in existence entered circulation. In practice that means buying a kHeavyHash ASIC, pointing it at a pool, and accepting that you are now exposed to the coin price, the network hash rate and your electricity tariff simultaneously. Run the numbers in section 08 first. The subsidy shrinks by about 5.6% every month by design, so a machine’s revenue declines even if nothing else changes.
Pool mining pays a smoothed share of rewards for a fee of typically 0.5–2%; solo mining at household scale means almost never finding a block. Remember that coinbase rewards on Kaspa mature after 1,000 blocks before they can be spent.
Risks and criticisms, stated frankly
Kaspa’s engineering is better than its reputation among sceptics, and its prospects are worse than its reputation among supporters. Here is the case against, without softening.
Security budget: a much smaller shield than Bitcoin’s
At roughly 340–365 PH/s in October 2026, Kaspa is secured by a tiny fraction of the hash power behind Bitcoin. Proof of work is only as strong as the cost of renting or building more of it than the honest network has. With about 96.7% of the supply already issued and the subsidy halving annually, the budget paying for that security is on a programmed decline, and fee revenue is nowhere near replacing it. This is the single most serious structural question about Kaspa, and it has no answer yet beyond “fees will grow”.
Mining hardware concentration, and a related conflict of interest
kHeavyHash ASICs come from a handful of manufacturers. A manufacturer can run machines before selling them, and can decide who gets the efficient models. Separately, the Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation’s first phase of funding came from ICERIVER Ventures, the venture arm of one of those manufacturers. None of that is hidden, and none of it is unique to Kaspa, but it is a real concentration of influence around a project that otherwise prides itself on having no insiders.
The ecosystem is very small, and its first big incident was self-inflicted
Reported DeFi value on Kaspa was in the single-digit millions of dollars around the Igra mainnet launch — orders of magnitude below the chains Kaspa is compared with. And the first major loss came not from an attack on Kaspa but from the off-chain KRC-20 indexer, where a forged script with an empty signature and a misplaced OP_NOT was accepted as a valid transfer. Two bridged token pools lost 94–99.6% of their value. The base layer behaved correctly throughout, which is reassuring about Kaspa and not at all reassuring about what is built around it.
Programmability is years behind, and the big piece is still research
Smart contracts were discussed for Kaspa’s base layer as far back as 2024 and did not arrive. What shipped in 2026 is covenants — useful, but not a general computing environment. vProgs, the route to real programmability, has proposals and no release. Developers choosing a chain today are choosing against an ecosystem that already has tooling, auditors, libraries and users.
DAGKnight has been four years away for four years
KIP-2 has sat in Proposed status since 2022. DAGKnight would remove GHOSTDAG’s dependence on an assumed network delay, which is a genuine improvement. Its continued absence is the clearest example of a pattern worth noticing: Kaspa’s research pipeline is deep, and the distance between a published paper and a mainnet parameter is long.
Pruning means most nodes do not keep history
An ordinary Kaspa node keeps roughly 30 hours of blocks plus the full UTXO set. The full history exists only on archival nodes. This is a reasonable engineering decision at ten blocks per second — the alternative is unbounded growth — but it is a meaningful difference from Bitcoin, where every full node holds every block ever mined, and it is rarely mentioned in comparisons.
No privacy
Kaspa’s ledger is as transparent as Bitcoin’s: every amount and every address is public forever. Toccata’s ZK opcode makes private transfers conceivable in future, but nothing of the kind exists today. If privacy is your requirement, Monero is the comparison to make, and Kaspa loses it.
Market and liquidity risk
KAS trades roughly 82% below its July 2024 peak of $0.2074. It is absent from Binance and Coinbase spot markets. Much of its volume sits on second-tier exchanges. There is no revenue, no yield and no cash flow anywhere in the design; the only thing supporting the price is what someone else will pay.
Name confusion and scams
Unrelated businesses use the Kaspa name, fake wallets circulate, and impersonation of developers in Discord and on X is routine. Because there is no company, there is also nobody to send a takedown notice. Verify everything from kaspa.org or the GitHub organisation.
Depth of the contributor pool
A protocol with no treasury is maintained by a small number of people, some funded by grants and some not. The quality of the work is high and the quantity of the people is low. That is a risk whether or not anyone wants to say so.
Myths and facts
Ten claims that circulate widely, and what the documentation actually supports.
“Kaspa is just another Bitcoin clone.”
In fact: It shares Bitcoin's proof of work, UTXO model and capped supply, and almost nothing else about its consensus. GHOSTDAG is a different protocol with a different data structure, published in a peer-reviewed venue, and the lineage runs back to a 2013 paper that Ethereum also borrowed from.
“Kaspa does 100 blocks a second.”
In fact: It does ten. One hundred appears in roadmap articles with no KIP, no release and no code behind it. Twenty-five is also widely quoted and is in the same category.
“Nothing is discarded, so double spends are impossible.”
In fact: No block is discarded; conflicting transactions still are. If two blocks in the same window spend the same coin, GHOSTDAG's ordering accepts the first and rejects the second. The DAG keeps both blocks and pays out once.
“Transactions are final in a second.”
In fact: They are included in a second and confirmed quickly, which is good enough for a coffee. Protocol finality is 12 hours. Treat large payments the way you would on Bitcoin.
“Kaspa now has smart contracts like Ethereum.”
In fact: It has covenants: rules about how a specific coin may be spent. There is no general-purpose virtual machine on layer 1, and vProgs, the path to one, is still research. EVM contracts run on the Igra and Kasplex layer 2s, not on Kaspa itself.
“The KRC-20 hack proves Kaspa is insecure.”
In fact: It proves an off-chain indexer was insecure. Kaspa's consensus accepted a transaction that was valid by its own rules and did exactly what it was designed to do. The lesson is about where the rules are enforced, which is the point of the native KCC-20 work.
“A fair launch means the coin will go up.”
In fact: A fair launch means nobody got free coins. It says nothing about demand, and Kaspa has traded roughly 82% below its 2024 high for a long stretch. It also means there is no treasury to pay developers, auditors or exchanges.
“Kaspa is private because it is fast.”
In fact: Kaspa's ledger is fully transparent, exactly like Bitcoin's. Speed has nothing to do with privacy.
“Running a node needs a laptop and nothing else.”
In fact: The Toccata guide asks for a minimum of 8 cores, 16 GB of RAM, a 640 GB SSD and about 80 Mbit/s of bandwidth, and prefers considerably more. Ten blocks a second is not free.
“A Binance listing is imminent.”
In fact: It has been said every year since 2023. Binance has offered futures since November 2023; a spot listing has not happened, and nobody outside Binance knows whether it will.
Learn: glossary and learning path
A route through this guide, a progress tracker that remembers where you got to in this browser, and a searchable glossary of every term Kaspa uses differently from everyone else.
Your learning path
Sections mark themselves as read when you reach the end of them. Progress and your best quiz score are stored in this browser only; nothing is sent anywhere.
0% complete · best quiz score: not taken ·
Glossary
- Anticone
- The set of blocks that are neither ancestors nor descendants of a given block. Blocks in each other's anticone were produced without knowledge of one another. Anticone size is what GHOSTDAG uses to decide whether a block is blue or red.
- Blue block
- A well-connected block, which GHOSTDAG treats as honest. Blue blocks count towards blue score and blue work, and their miners are paid.
- Blue score
- The number of blue blocks in a block's past. It equals the selected parent's blue score plus the blue blocks in the block's mergeset, and it drives confirmation counting.
- BlockDAG
- A directed acyclic graph of blocks, in which a block may name several parents. Kaspa's structure, as opposed to a blockchain's single-parent list.
- Chromatic phase
- Kaspa's emission period since 8 May 2022, in which the block reward is multiplied by 2 to the minus one twelfth every emission month, halving each year in twelve steps.
- Covenant
- A spending condition attached to an output that restricts what the next transaction may look like. Added to Kaspa at the Toccata hard fork by KIP-17.
- Crescendo
- The May 2025 hard fork (KIP-14) that raised the block rate from one to ten per second, set GHOSTDAG k to 124 and shortened finality to 12 hours.
- DAA score
- Difficulty adjustment algorithm score: a count of blue blocks plus merged and rewarded red blocks. Used to schedule upgrades, estimate timestamps and set lock times. Hard forks activate at a DAA score, not a date.
- DAGKnight
- A successor consensus protocol by Sompolinsky and Sutton that needs no assumed network-delay parameter. Proposed as KIP-2 in 2022 and not on mainnet.
- Finality depth
- The depth beyond which nodes refuse a reorganisation outright. Twelve hours on Kaspa after Crescendo, equal to 432,000 blocks.
- GHOSTDAG
- The greedy, practical form of the PHANTOM protocol. It colours blocks blue or red by anticone size and uses the selected parent chain to produce one total order over the DAG.
- Gram
- Kaspa's unit of transaction mass, combining size, compute and storage burden. Fees are quoted in sompi per gram.
- iKAS
- The gas token of the Igra layer-2 network, wrapping KAS one for one through a bridge.
- kHeavyHash
- Kaspa's proof-of-work function: a Keccak-based hash around a matrix multiplication step. Not SHA-256, so Bitcoin miners cannot be reused.
- KCC-20
- The draft native token standard that would enforce token rules inside Kaspa scripts using covenants, replacing the off-chain KRC-20 scheme.
- k parameter
- The maximum anticone size a block may have and still be coloured blue. Set to 124 on mainnet after Crescendo, derived from an assumed five-second delay and a 1% failure bound.
- KIP
- Kaspa Improvement Proposal. Numbered protocol proposals with explicit statuses, from Draft through Proposed, Active, Implemented and Rejected.
- KRC-20
- A token convention inscribed in Kaspa transactions whose ownership is tracked by an off-chain indexer rather than by consensus. The scheme exploited in September 2026.
- Mergeset
- The blocks a given block brings into the order: everything in its past that is not in its selected parent's past.
- PHANTOM
- The 2021 protocol by Sompolinsky, Wyborski and Zohar that produces a full linear order over a blockDAG. GHOSTDAG is its greedy, practical variant.
- Pruning
- Discarding old block data to keep node requirements bounded. Kaspa nodes keep roughly 30 hours of blocks plus the complete UTXO set; archival nodes keep everything.
- Red block
- A poorly connected block, whose anticone holds more blue blocks than k allows. It is still valid and still merged, but its reward goes to the merging blue block's miner or is not paid.
- Selected parent
- The parent of a block with the highest accumulated blue work. Following selected parents backwards gives the virtual selected parent chain, the spine of the DAG.
- SilverScript
- A language for writing Kaspa covenant logic, released at version 1.0.0 on 9 September 2026.
- Sompi
- The smallest unit of KAS: one hundred-millionth, the equivalent of a satoshi.
- Toccata
- The hard fork activated at DAA score 474,165,565 on about 30 June 2026, adding covenants, covenant IDs, a zero-knowledge precompile and partitioned sequencing commitments.
- UTXO
- Unspent transaction output. The accounting model Kaspa shares with Bitcoin, in which coins are discrete outputs locked by scripts rather than balances in accounts.
- Virtual selected parent chain
- The chain of selected parents running from the newest state back to genesis. The backbone against which transaction acceptance and ordering are decided.
- vProgs
- A research proposal for off-chain computation with on-chain zero-knowledge verification: Kaspa's intended route to general programmability. No release as of October 2026.
Test yourself: the Kaspa quiz
Sixteen questions drawn from this page. Every answer comes with an explanation, and your best score is kept in this browser.
Frequently asked questions
What is Kaspa in simple terms?
Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency that replaces the single chain of blocks with a blockDAG. It produces ten blocks every second, keeps every valid block instead of discarding simultaneous ones, and uses an algorithm called GHOSTDAG to put them all into one agreed order. It launched on 7 November 2021 with no premine, no ICO and no company behind it.
What is a blockDAG?
A directed acyclic graph of blocks. In a blockchain each block has exactly one parent, so simultaneous blocks compete and the losers are orphaned. In a blockDAG a block names every tip it can see as a parent, up to sixteen on Kaspa, so simultaneous blocks sit side by side and are all merged into the structure rather than thrown away.
What is GHOSTDAG and how does it order blocks?
GHOSTDAG colours blocks blue or red. Blue blocks are the well-connected ones: a block stays blue if at most k other blue blocks were produced without knowledge of it. Each block picks the parent with the most accumulated blue work as its selected parent, and following those backwards gives a chain through the graph. Every block is then slotted in behind the chain block that merged it, blues before reds, which produces one total order over the whole DAG.
Does Kaspa really do 10 blocks per second?
Yes. Ten blocks per second has been a mainnet consensus parameter since the Crescendo hard fork in May 2025, when the target block time went from 1,000 ms to 100 ms. It is not an estimate and you can verify it from any node.
How many transactions per second can Kaspa handle?
It depends on what the transactions look like, because capacity is budgeted by transaction mass rather than by a count. The best public evidence is a testnet stress test run on 1 to 3 October 2026, which measured a best minute of 4,253 transactions per second and a best hour of 2,518, and calculated a realistic mainnet ceiling of about 2,854 per second for properly signed transactions. The widely quoted 5,000 figure is not supported by that report's own data.
What is the chromatic emission schedule?
Kaspa's block reward is multiplied by 2 to the power of minus one twelfth, about 0.9439, at the start of every emission month. Twelve of those steps make exactly one halving, so the reward halves every year but in twelve small steps rather than one cliff. The name comes from the twelve semitones of a musical octave, which are separated by the same ratio.
What is the maximum supply of KAS?
28,704,026,601 KAS. About 27.8 billion, or roughly 96.7%, had been mined by October 2026, with new issuance running near 2.3% a year and halving annually. There is no burn mechanism, so supply rises to the cap and stops.
Did Kaspa have a premine or an ICO?
No. The genesis block contains no coins and the UTXO commitment is empty, which anyone can verify from a node. There was no ICO, no presale, no founder allocation and no investor allocation. Every KAS in existence was paid to a miner.
Who founded Kaspa?
Yonatan Sompolinsky, an Israeli computer scientist who wrote the GHOST, SPECTRE, PHANTOM/GHOSTDAG and DAGKnight papers and completed his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021. He is not a chief executive, holds no protocol-granted coins and does not control the network; Kaspa has no company and no foundation with protocol authority.
Does Kaspa have smart contracts?
Partly. The Toccata hard fork of 30 June 2026 added covenants, covenant IDs, a zero-knowledge verification opcode and sequencing commitments to layer 1, so a coin can restrict how it is spent. There is no general-purpose virtual machine on Kaspa, and the larger programmability project, vProgs, is still research. Most application activity happens on the Igra and Kasplex layer-2 networks.
Can you mine Kaspa with a GPU?
Not profitably. Kaspa uses the kHeavyHash algorithm, and purpose-built ASICs from IceRiver, Bitmain and iBeLink arrived in 2023 and displaced GPU miners within months. A Bitcoin ASIC cannot be used, because kHeavyHash is not SHA-256.
What is the current block reward?
About 2.06 KAS per block in October 2026, which is the per-second schedule of roughly 20.6 KAS divided across ten blocks a second. It falls by about 5.6% at the start of every emission month.
Is Kaspa listed on Binance or Coinbase?
Not for spot trading, as far as we can establish in October 2026. Binance has offered KAS futures since November 2023 and Coinbase opened a KAS perpetual futures market in February 2025, but neither lists the coin itself. KAS does trade spot on Kraken, KuCoin, MEXC, Bybit, Gate, Bitget and dozens of other venues.
Is there a Kaspa ETF?
No. Kaspa was added to Grayscale's list of assets under consideration for future products back in 2024, which guarantees nothing, and we found no spot KAS exchange-traded fund filed or trading as of October 2026.
How long does a Kaspa transaction take to confirm?
Inclusion in a block normally takes a fraction of a second and useful confirmation accumulates over the next few seconds. That is not the same as irreversibility: Kaspa's protocol finality depth is 12 hours. For small payments seconds are fine; for large ones, wait, exactly as you would on Bitcoin.
What happened in the Kasplex KRC-20 exploit?
On 20 September 2026 an attacker used an empty signature and an OP_NOT placed after OP_ENDIF to make a forged script evaluate as valid. Kaspa accepted the transaction because at consensus level it was valid, and the off-chain KRC-20 indexer then credited the forged transfers. About 186 million ZEAL and 54 billion NACHO were drained from a bridge custody address and sold, and affected liquidity pools lost 94 to 99.6% of their KAS-side value. Kaspa's own consensus was not broken.
What is DAGKnight and when is it coming?
DAGKnight is a successor consensus protocol by Sompolinsky and Michael Sutton that needs no assumption about network latency, unlike GHOSTDAG, which derives its k parameter from an assumed maximum delay. Its proposal, KIP-2, has been in Proposed status since 2022 and mainnet still runs GHOSTDAG. Nobody should attach a date to it.
Is Kaspa private?
No. Every amount and every address is public and permanent, exactly as on Bitcoin. Toccata's zero-knowledge opcode makes private transfers technically conceivable in future, but no such feature exists today.
What is a sompi?
The smallest unit of KAS. One KAS is 100,000,000 sompi, the same relationship bitcoin has with satoshis. Transaction fees after Toccata are quoted in sompi per gram of transaction mass, with a minimum standard rate of 100 sompi per gram.
Is Kaspa a good investment?
This guide does not give investment advice and makes no forecasts. KAS is a volatile asset with no revenue, no yield and no cash flow, trading well below its 2024 high, in a project with a small ecosystem and a declining security budget. Section 18 sets out the risks in detail. Speak to a qualified adviser before making financial decisions.
Sources and further reading
Every substantive claim on this page traces to one of these. Primary sources — the KIP repository, the hard-fork guides and the published papers — are listed first, because they are the ones you can check yourself. All were read on or before 14 October 2026.
- Kaspa Improvement Proposals (kaspanet/kips)The authoritative list of protocol proposals and their statuses. Used for KIP-1, 2, 3, 14, 16, 17, 20 and 21. Checked 14 October 2026.
- KIP-14: The Crescendo HardforkMichael Sutton's specification: block time, k = 124, max parents, mergeset limit, finality depth, coinbase maturity, pruning and the per-second reward reinterpretation.
- Toccata hard fork guide (rusty-kaspa)Activation at DAA score 474,165,565 on about 30 June 2026, node v2.0.1, the 100 sompi/gram fee floor, transaction version 1, covenant fields and the new RPCs.
- Kaspa Explained: status page, 6 October 2026A claim-by-claim status snapshot distinguishing shipped work from roadmap prose. Source for SilverScript 1.0.0, Rusty Kaspa 2.1.0, the KCC standards and the DAGKnight status.
- STP-KAS: Testnet-10 stress test report, 1 to 3 October 2026Measured throughput figures and an explicit debunking of the 5,000 TPS claim, plus the public API indexer failures. The main source for section 07.
- Yonatan Sompolinsky (Wikipedia)Biography, papers and dates: GHOST, SPECTRE, PHANTOM/GHOSTDAG, DAGKnight, DAGLabs, Harvard, and the declined Binance recognition.
- PHANTOM GHOSTDAG: A Scalable Generalization of Nakamoto ConsensusThe protocol paper by Sompolinsky, Wyborski and Zohar. The source for blue sets, k-clusters and the greedy approximation.
- The DAG KNIGHT Protocol (Sompolinsky and Sutton, 2022)The parameterless successor to GHOSTDAG, still unshipped.
- kaspa.orgThe project's front door, operated by KasMedia. Used for the fair-launch and genesis-proof claims, the wallet counts and the exchange list.
- Kaspalytics glossaryDefinitions of blue and red blocks, mergeset, selected parent, blue score, DAA score, virtual chain, anticone and pruning, including who is paid for a red block.
- The Chromatic Symphony of KaspaA community explanation of the emission schedule: the pre-deflationary phase, 440 KAS per second, and the 2^(-1/12) monthly factor. Community-written, cross-checked against observed rewards.
- Kasplex KRC-20 indexer signature bypass (Bitcoin.com News, 21 September 2026)The detailed account of the 20 September 2026 exploit, the amounts, the mechanism and the response.
- Igra Network mainnet launch (Chainwire, 19 March 2026)The based-rollup design, iKAS gas, the launch partners, the Sigma Prime audit and the ecosystem TVL figures quoted.
- Gate integrates Kasplex layer 2 (crypto.news, 20 April 2026)Kasplex's design and gas model, and evidence that reporting on its mainnet date is inconsistent.
- minerstat: Kaspa network statisticsNetwork hash rate, difficulty and the 2.06 KAS block reward, read 14 October 2026.
- Kryptex: Kaspa network hash rateAn independent hash rate reading for 14 October 2026, used to cross-check minerstat.
- CryptoRank: KAS price and supplyAll-time high of $0.2074 on 31 July 2024, all-time low, circulating supply and the exact 28,704,026,601 maximum supply.
- ViaBTC: Kaspa mining in 2026 (14 August 2026)kHeavyHash, the per-block reward division at Crescendo, and the KS7-class hardware figures used in the mining calculator.
- Learning Crypto: Kaspa reviewA balanced critical write-up used for the risks section, including ASIC concentration, name-confusion scams and bridged-token caveats.
- Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation announcement (23 March 2024)The foundation's remit, board composition and its first-phase funding from ICERIVER Ventures.
- Coinbase lists KAS perpetual futures (13 February 2025)Confirmation that the Coinbase listing was KAS-PERP, not spot.