Coin columns · Mainnet Province
Kaspa: A Proof-of-Work Chain That Stacks Blocks Side by Side
A fair-launch coin making 10 blocks a second with a blockDAG
Kaspa is a proof-of-work blockchain that launched in November 2021 with no premine and no token sale. Instead of linking blocks in a single line, its “blockDAG” accepts blocks created at the same time, aiming for very fast block production.
1. Who built it
Kaspa is built on GHOSTDAG, a consensus protocol refined by Yonatan Sompolinsky, Aviv Zohar and others from research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sompolinsky and Zohar co-wrote the 2013 paper proposing GHOST, a block-selection rule that influenced Ethereum’s design. The mainnet opened on 7 November 2021, and open-source community developers carry the work on.
New KAS is created only by mining; no share was set aside for a team or investors. Supply is capped at about 28.7 billion, and rewards follow a “chromatic halving” that trims them slightly every month so they halve each year, stepping down like a musical scale rather than dropping every four years as Bitcoin’s do. On the Crypto Nation map, KAS stands in the Mainnet Province as the city-hall tower of its own Kaspa neighbourhood.
2. BlockDAG and GHOSTDAG
On Bitcoin, when two miners find blocks almost at once, only one survives. Kaspa keeps both, so blocks form a web called a DAG (directed acyclic graph), and GHOSTDAG orders them so that very frequent blocks do not badly weaken security.
The Crescendo hard fork in May 2025 raised Kaspa from one block per second to ten. A rewrite of the node software in Rust, called Rusty Kaspa, made this possible. Mining uses the kHeavyHash algorithm, now dominated by purpose-built ASIC machines.
3. Uses and ecosystem
Kaspa’s base chain focuses on fast transfers and payments and leaves general smart contracts out. In 2024 the KRC-20 token standard (Kasplex), which marks tokens by inscribing data in transactions, brought token issuance to Kaspa. Like Bitcoin’s BRC-20, it leaves base-chain rules unchanged, and balances are computed by separate indexers.
Developers have pursued keeping the base chain simple while adding smart contracts through layers such as rollups. With no premine, development relies largely on community donations and fundraising by ecosystem groups, and many exchanges and wallets support KAS.
4. Things to know
As with other proof-of-work chains, mining power tends to concentrate among a few ASIC makers and large mining pools. Because rewards shrink every month, a long-term question is how far transaction fees can replace them for miners.
Faster blocks also raise the bandwidth and storage needed to run a node, and GHOSTDAG has a shorter track record than Bitcoin’s design. Smart contracts still depend on layers outside the base chain, so it is worth watching whether future upgrades land as planned.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.