Fair launch
Mainnet launched November 2021 with no premine, no ICO, and no insider or dev allocation - every KAS in existence was mined as a block reward. The network went down for three days shortly after launch; the current genesis block in rusty-kaspa is a November 22, 2021 checkpoint that carries the pre-halt UTXO set forward (consensus/core/src/config/genesis.rs).
Two phases
Pre-deflationary phase (launch → May 2022): a constant 500 KAS per block at 1 BPS, for roughly the first half year (the schedule credits the 3-day outage).
Deflationary phase (May 2022 → ~2057): the reward starts at 440 KAS per second and decreases by a factor of (1/2)^(1/12) (~5.6%) every month - so it halves every year, smoothly, instead of dropping off a cliff every four years like Bitcoin. Implemented as a 426-entry month-by-month subsidy table in the coinbase logic (consensus/src/processes/coinbase.rs); the final entry is 0, ending emission ~35.5 years after the phase began.
The community calls this the chromatic schedule: 440 is the frequency of concert-pitch A (A4 = 440 Hz), a monthly step is a semitone, and a yearly halving is an octave down. The code just calls it the deflationary phase.
Per second, not per block
Since Crescendo, the table value is explicitly a per-second reward (KIP-14): at 10 BPS each block pays the per-second subsidy divided by 10. Emission is therefore independent of block rate - Crescendo multiplied blocks by 10 and divided the per-block reward by 10.
As of July 2026 the subsidy is ~24.5 KAS/second, i.e. ~2.45 KAS per block - see Network Parameters for current values.
Max supply
~28.7 billion KAS, fully emitted by ~2057. Note the number is empirical rather than a clean code constant: summing the schedule naively (500 KAS × the pre-deflationary seconds + the monthly table) gives ~28.4B, but during the pre-deflationary phase every parallel DAG block carried the full 500 KAS subsidy, so actual emission ran slightly ahead of the per-second math.
There is no tail emission. After the table ends, miner revenue is fees only. Emission to date can be tracked on the live circulating supply chart, and current fee revenue on total fees paid.
Who receives it
Block rewards are paid through mergeset coinbase mechanics - a block’s coinbase pays the blocks it merges, not its own miner. See Mining. Coinbase outputs mature after 1,000 blocks.
Reference: coinbase.rs subsidy table, KIP-14
See Also: Network Parameters, Units (KAS & Sompi)