Kaspa (KAS)

Kaspa (KAS) is a cryptocurrency secured by proof of work mining, designed to confirm payments much faster than older mined coins. Its network is a blockDAG rather than a single chain of blocks: blocks created at the same moment are all kept and put in order instead of one being thrown away. Since an upgrade in May 2025 the network produces ten blocks every second.

KAS is both the coin and the name of its network; there is no separate company or foundation that issued it. Kaspa launched in November 2021 with no premine, presale or initial coin offering, so every coin in circulation has been mined. It is often compared with Bitcoin (BTC), which uses the same basic security model but adds a single block about every ten minutes, and its design grew out of academic research on how to scale that model.

Picture a classroom where many pupils are writing entries into a shared diary at once. In Bitcoin's blockchain only one pupil may write a page at a time, and if two finish at the same moment one page is torn out. That rule keeps the diary tidy but slow. Kaspa lets everyone keep their page and then uses a clear rule to decide the order in which the pages are read, so nothing is wasted and pages can be added far more often.

Miners still compete to add pages by doing costly computer work, which is what makes rewriting the diary expensive. They are paid in new KAS for each page. The amount paid shrinks a little every month, so the total number of coins is limited and the supply grows more slowly each year.

Kaspa's ordering rule, GHOSTDAG, comes from a line of research by the computer scientist Yonatan Sompolinsky and colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, including the PHANTOM paper published in 2018. The network's mainnet started on 7 November 2021 as a community project. It began with a reward of 500 KAS per second in an initial phase that ran until May 2022, after which the reward started to fall every month.

Early nodes were written in the Go language. Developers later rewrote the node software in Rust, known as rusty-kaspa, to handle much higher speeds. That work led to the Crescendo hard fork, activated on 5 May 2025, which raised the rate from one block per second to ten. The emission schedule was kept the same: the reward per block was divided by ten, so the amount of KAS issued per second did not change.

Kaspa uses a hashing algorithm called kHeavyHash, and mining is now done mostly with specialised machines. Because several blocks are found at almost the same time, each new block points to all the recent blocks its miner can see, not just one parent. GHOSTDAG then picks out a well-connected set of blocks as honest and uses it to order every transaction in a single sequence, so that a double spend can be detected and rejected. This approach is one answer to the trade-off between speed, block capacity and security that limits blockchain scaling. As with other mined networks, an attacker would need a majority of the mining power to carry out a 51% attack. The smallest unit of KAS is the sompi, one hundred-millionth of a coin.

Kaspa's maximum supply is about 28.7 billion KAS, expected to be fully mined around 2057. Since May 2022 the network has followed what its community calls the chromatic phase: the reward is cut every month by a factor of $\left(\tfrac{1}{2}\right)^{1/12}$, about 5.6 percent, so it halves over each year in small steps rather than in one jump, as Bitcoin's halving does. The reward per second is:

• $R(m)$ is the reward, in KAS per second, $m$ months after the chromatic phase began.
• $R_0$ is the starting reward of 440 KAS per second in May 2022.
• $m$ is the number of whole months that have passed.

For example, after 24 months the reward is $440 \times \left(\tfrac{1}{2}\right)^{2} = 110$ KAS per second. At ten blocks per second that would be 11 KAS per block. Because most coins are released early, more than nine-tenths of the maximum supply had already been mined by 2026. The approach is a form of tokenomics that makes supply predictable, similar in spirit to Bitcoin's 21 million cap.

• Payments. Fast block times mean transfers are visible within about a second and settle within seconds, which suits everyday payments.
• Mining. Miners, usually working together in mining pools, earn KAS for securing the network.
• Trading. KAS is bought and sold on a number of centralized exchanges.
• Future development. Developers are working on support for smart contracts and tokens, including through layer 2 networks built on top of Kaspa.

KAS has been volatile, and its market is smaller than those of the largest coins. Critics point to the concentration of mining in a small number of machine makers and large pools, a common source of network centralization. Producing ten blocks a second also puts heavier demands on nodes and on the internet links between them. The project has no company behind it, which supporters see as a strength, but it leaves development dependent on volunteers and donations.

• Kaspa
• PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG research paper
• Faisal Khan: What is Kaspa (KAS)?