Kaspa originated as digital money. Since the 2025 Crescendo and 2026 Toccata hard forks, it is also programmable digital infrastructure.
Kaspa produces ten blocks every second without reducing proof-of-work security. This block rate is enabled by its consensus protocol, PHANTOM GHOSTDAG.
Kaspa's blocks as they are mined, newest at the right. Blocks appear side by side because several are mined at once. Each line points from a block to the parents its miner had already seen. Hover to pause and inspect a block.
Kaspa is secured by proof of work, the same model as Bitcoin. No company, foundation treasury, or shareholders stand behind it. It launched in November 2021 with no premine and no ICO.
How it works
In a blockchain, each block has exactly one parent. When two miners find blocks at the same time, only one can extend the chain. The other is discarded, along with its proof of work and any transactions that only it contained. Bitcoin targets a slow block rate to keep this rare: a faster rate produces more simultaneous blocks, more discarded work, and therefore less security. For more detail, see Why Kaspa Exists.
Kaspa removes the single-parent rule. A new block references every block its miner has seen, so blocks mined at the same time all become part of the record. The resulting structure is a blockDAG rather than a chain, and no honest block is discarded.
In practice, a transaction is included in a block in about a second, ordered about a second after that, and then accumulates confirmations at roughly ten per second.
Key features
| Feature | What it means |
|---|---|
| Speed | Transaction inclusion typically within a second, subject to fee market conditions. Confirmations accrue at approximately 10 per second. |
| Cost | A typical transaction costs a small fraction of a single KAS. |
| Capacity | Ten blocks a second, each holding up to a few hundred transactions. A ceiling in the low thousands of transactions per second (the arithmetic), all on the base layer with no L2 involved. |
| Security | Proof of work, the same trust model as Bitcoin. No staking, no validator set, no committee, no permissioned sequencer. |
| Fair mining | Every honest block is paid, including blocks mined in parallel. |
| Supply | Capped at ~28.7 billion KAS, issued only as block rewards, halving smoothly every year. |
| Ownership | No company controls it. No insider allocation, no treasury, open source, fair launch. |
| Programmability | Since June 2026 the base layer is programmable. Supporting covenants (enforced spending rules) and zero-knowledge proofs. |
| Node operation | Consumer hardware: 8 cores, 16 GB RAM, and a 640 GB SSD is the official minimum, with 12-16 cores, 32 GB RAM, and a 1 TB SSD preferred. Pruning keeps only the last ~30 hours of block data, keeping storage requirements low. |
Mining
Kaspa is mined with an algorithm called kHeavyHash, on ASICs, in the same sense that Bitcoin is mined with SHA-256. Mining is the only way coins are created and the only way blocks enter the record.
Parallel blocks are merged into the blockDAG and paid. The exception is blocks that were poorly connected or withheld, which forfeit their reward to the block that merges them.
Difficulty is recalculated every 100 milliseconds rather than every two weeks. The block rate stays close to target as hashrate joins or leaves the network.
Tokenomics
The coin is KAS.
- Fair launch. Mainnet opened in November 2021 with no premine, no ICO, and no allocation to founders or investors. Every KAS in circulation was mined.
- Mining is the only issuance. There is no treasury, no staking yield, and no other issuance mechanism.
- The reward halves every year, smoothly. Rather than a 50% drop every four years, the reward steps down about 5.6% each month - the same annual halving, spread across twelve monthly steps. See Emission & Supply.
- Capped at ~28.7 billion KAS, fully issued by around 2057. After that, miners are paid by transaction fees alone. There is no tail emission.
- The large coin count is a unit choice. The supply cap and emission schedule were set at launch and have not changed.
Background
Proof-of-work throughput was long assumed to be limited by security: raising the block rate meant weakening the chain. Kaspa demonstrates on a production network that this limit does not hold.
- Research lineage. Kaspa’s consensus descends from GHOST (cited in the Ethereum whitepaper) through SPECTRE and PHANTOM to GHOSTDAG, led by Yonatan Sompolinsky and collaborators. DAGKnight is the proposed successor.
- Two hard forks. Crescendo (May 2025) raised the block rate from one per second to ten on a live network. Toccata (June 2026) made the base layer programmable.
- Base-layer throughput. The block rate is achieved on the base layer, without rollups, sidechains, sequencers, or bridges.
- Unchanged proof-of-work properties. Open participation, security from expended work rather than staked wealth, a fixed supply, and no privileged parties.
Next steps
- Continue with Why Kaspa Exists and follow the Learn pages in order. They build up the protocol step by step, from the blockDAG to consensus to transactions.
- Use the Glossary as vocabulary reference along the way.