A halving
with no
halving day
Kaspa's supply schedule is the most unusual thing about it after the consensus. Instead of cutting the block reward in half every four years, it multiplies the reward by 2^(-1/12) every Kaspa month — the exact frequency ratio between two adjacent semitones. Twelve of those steps compound to precisely one half, so the network halves annually and no miner ever loses half their revenue overnight.
Fourteen years
in one instrument
Cumulative supply against the left axis, issuance rate against a logarithmic right axis — logarithmic because the first year would otherwise flatten everything after it into a single line. The vertical gridlines are octaves; each one is an exact halving of the rate.
The schedule is
literally a scale
In twelve-tone equal temperament, moving up one semitone multiplies frequency by 2^(1/12), and twelve semitones make an octave — a doubling. Kaspa's emission runs the same ratio downwards. The opening rate of 440 KAS per second is the frequency of A4, the note orchestras tune to.
Thirteen bars: the opening rate, eleven intermediate semitones, and the teal bar where the octave closes at exactly half. No cliff anywhere on the curve.
Smooth versus cliff
Halving cliffs create a predictable shock: miner revenue drops by half on a known date, marginal operations shut down, and hashrate dips until difficulty catches up. Kaspa spreads the same annual reduction across twelve small steps, which is a genuine engineering improvement — and it does not change the underlying economics of a declining subsidy.
The part that is not settled
Front-loaded issuance is usually presented as a virtue, and it does have real advantages: distribution happened early, through mining, with no allocation to insiders. But it has a corollary that enthusiasm tends to skip. If the block subsidy halves every year, the security budget shrinks every year — and something has to replace it.
That something is transaction fees. Every proof-of-work network eventually depends on them; Kaspa arrives at the dependency considerably sooner than a four-year-halving network does. Whether fee revenue grows fast enough to matter depends on real sustained usage, which is an empirical question about adoption rather than a question about protocol design. Nobody knows the answer, and any account presenting one as settled is selling something.
Two related notes on precision. The sompi is the smallest unit, 10-8 KAS, which is where the eight decimal places on the reward figures come from. And storage mass (KIP-9) means transaction cost is not purely about byte size — a transaction that fragments the UTXO set into many small outputs costs more, which is a deliberate defence against state bloat at ten blocks per second.
There is no price prediction here, and no price history chart. The Kaspa API this site reads does not publish historical prices, and inventing a series to fill a panel would undermine everything else on the page. The live spot price appears where it is genuinely informative — a market cap, a mining breakeven — and nowhere else.
A halving
with no
halving day
Kaspa's supply schedule is the most unusual thing about it after the consensus. Instead of cutting the block reward in half every four years, it multiplies the reward by 2^(-1/12) every Kaspa month — the exact frequency ratio between two adjacent semitones. Twelve of those steps compound to precisely one half, so the network halves annually and no miner ever loses half their revenue overnight.
Fourteen years
in one instrument
Cumulative supply against the left axis, issuance rate against a logarithmic right axis — logarithmic because the first year would otherwise flatten everything after it into a single line. The vertical gridlines are octaves; each one is an exact halving of the rate.
The schedule is
literally a scale
In twelve-tone equal temperament, moving up one semitone multiplies frequency by 2^(1/12), and twelve semitones make an octave — a doubling. Kaspa's emission runs the same ratio downwards. The opening rate of 440 KAS per second is the frequency of A4, the note orchestras tune to.
Thirteen bars: the opening rate, eleven intermediate semitones, and the teal bar where the octave closes at exactly half. No cliff anywhere on the curve.
Smooth versus cliff
Halving cliffs create a predictable shock: miner revenue drops by half on a known date, marginal operations shut down, and hashrate dips until difficulty catches up. Kaspa spreads the same annual reduction across twelve small steps, which is a genuine engineering improvement — and it does not change the underlying economics of a declining subsidy.
The part that is not settled
Front-loaded issuance is usually presented as a virtue, and it does have real advantages: distribution happened early, through mining, with no allocation to insiders. But it has a corollary that enthusiasm tends to skip. If the block subsidy halves every year, the security budget shrinks every year — and something has to replace it.
That something is transaction fees. Every proof-of-work network eventually depends on them; Kaspa arrives at the dependency considerably sooner than a four-year-halving network does. Whether fee revenue grows fast enough to matter depends on real sustained usage, which is an empirical question about adoption rather than a question about protocol design. Nobody knows the answer, and any account presenting one as settled is selling something.
Two related notes on precision. The sompi is the smallest unit, 10-8 KAS, which is where the eight decimal places on the reward figures come from. And storage mass (KIP-9) means transaction cost is not purely about byte size — a transaction that fragments the UTXO set into many small outputs costs more, which is a deliberate defence against state bloat at ten blocks per second.
There is no price prediction here, and no price history chart. The Kaspa API this site reads does not publish historical prices, and inventing a series to fill a panel would undermine everything else on the page. The live spot price appears where it is genuinely informative — a market cap, a mining breakeven — and nowhere else.