Kaspa originated as digital money. It has since grown into programmable digital infrastructure, courtesy of the 2025 Crescendo and 2026 Toccata hard forks.
Kaspa is fast. It produces ten blocks every second. And it does so without any security tradeoff. This is enabled by its consensus mechanism PHANTOM GHOSTDAG, and extreme performance engineering. Kaspa is a consensus, software engineering, and architectural marvel.
Kaspa's blocks as they are mined, newest at the right. Blocks appear side by side because several are always being mined at once, and the lines are each block pointing back at the ones its miner had already seen. Hover to pause and inspect a block.
All secured the same way Bitcoin is secured - by proof of work, with no company, no foundation treasury, and no shareholders behind it. It launched in November 2021 with no premine and no ICO.
How it works
A blockchain makes blocks stand in a single-file line. When two miners find a block at the same moment, only one of them can be next - the other is thrown away, along with the work that made it and any transaction it alone was carrying. This is why Bitcoin is slow on purpose: the faster blocks arrive, the more often they collide, and the more honest work gets discarded. Discarded work is wasted security. The whole tradeoff is here.
Kaspa removed the single-file rule. A new block points back at every block its miner has seen, so blocks mined at the same moment all become part of the record instead of competing to be the survivor. The structure that results is a blockDAG rather than a chain, and nothing honest is ever thrown away.
In practice that means your transaction is in a block in about a second, is ordered about a second after that, and then piles up confirmations at ten per second.
Key features
| Feature | What it means |
|---|---|
| Speed | Transaction inclusion within a second* (fee market withstanding). 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 badly connected or dishonest, which forfeit their reward to the block that merges them - the protocol pays for participation, not for withholding.
Difficulty is recalculated every 100 milliseconds, ten times a second, rather than every two weeks. Hashrate can arrive or leave and the block rate barely moves.
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 by someone.
- Mining is the only issuance. There is no treasury, no staking yield, and no lever anyone can pull to create coins.
- It halves every year, smoothly. Rather than a 50% cliff every four years, the reward steps down about 5.6% each month - the same annual halving, delivered in twelve pieces instead of one shock. 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.
- A large coin count is a denomination choice, not an economic one. What matters is the fixed cap and the schedule, both of which were set at launch and have never moved.
Why it’s a breakthrough
For a decade, the working assumption was hat proof-of-work throughput was bounded by security. You could have one or the other. Kaspa is the counterexample. It is not a whitepaper, it is running in production.
- It came out of research. The line runs from GHOST - cited in the Ethereum whitepaper - through SPECTRE and PHANTOM to GHOSTDAG, led by Yonatan Sompolinsky and collaborators, with DAGKnight proposed as its successor.
- Two hard forks brought groundbreaking features to a PoW UTXO model network. The Crescendo hard fork (May 2025) took a live network carrying real value from one block per second to ten. Toccata (June 2026) made the base layer programmable.
- The speed is the base layer’s own. No rollup, no sidechain, no sequencer to trust, no bridge to get your money back out.
- It kept what people came to proof of work for. Open participation, security bought with electricity rather than with existing wealth, a fixed supply, and no privileged parties anywhere in the design.
Ten blocks a second is the headline. The achievement is that it is ten blocks a second and still Bitcoin’s trust model.
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.