Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin. It exists to address a structural limit in Bitcoin’s design, and is the result of years of consensus research.
The blockchain bottleneck
In a blockchain, every block has exactly one parent. When two miners find blocks at nearly the same time, only one can extend the chain. The other becomes an orphan: its work is discarded, and the security it represented is wasted.
The defense is a slow block rate. Bitcoin targets ~10 minutes per block so that parallel blocks are rare. Speeding up the block rate produces more parallel blocks, more orphans, and less security - see How Increasing the Throughput Harms Bitcoin’s Security by Ori Newman.
A blockchain therefore forces a choice between block rate and security.
Kaspa’s answer
Kaspa keeps the properties that make proof of work function - open mining, heaviest-work security, no trusted parties - and removes the single-parent rule. Blocks created in parallel all count. The resulting structure is a blockDAG, covered in The BlockDAG.
The result in production: 10 blocks per second, roughly 6,000× Bitcoin’s block rate, under the same PoW security model.
Origins
Kaspa is not a fork of an existing network. It is the product of years of research on scaling PoW consensus, led by Yonatan Sompolinsky (whose earlier GHOST work is cited in the Ethereum whitepaper) and collaborators. The resulting protocol is PHANTOM GHOSTDAG.
The values carried over intact:
- Fair launch. Mainnet launched November 2021 - no premine, no ICO, no insider allocation. Every KAS was mined.
- Pure proof of work. Mining is the only issuance.
- Open source, community-driven. No company controls Kaspa.
See Also: What is Kaspa?