Kaspa kas

Kaspa (KAS) is the native cryptocurrency of a permissionless proof-of-work blockDAG network. Rather than discarding competing blocks as a conventional longest-chain blockchain does, Kaspa orders parallel blocks with GHOSTDAG/PHANTOM-family consensus into a consistent history. The project describes its goal as real-time decentralization: retaining PoW's permissionless mining and censorship resistance while reducing confirmation wait times.

Kaspa mainnet launched in November 2021 with a fair launch. Kaspa's official site says there was no premine, presale, or insider allocation; coins entered circulation through open mining from genesis. Its genesis-proof material links the chain back to an empty genesis UTXO set.

KAS is used for peer-to-peer value transfer, transaction fees, and miner rewards. The current node implementation defines 100,000,000 sompi per KAS and a 29,000,000,000-KAS maximum transaction amount; supply figures and emission should be checked against live network data because issuance is block-reward based and declines over time.

Traditional proof-of-work chains often reduce forks by enforcing a single-block-at-a-time chain, which creates a throughput/latency trade-off: blocks must be spaced apart, and high block rates increase orphaning and wasted work. This makes secure confirmation slower and makes real-time settlement difficult.

Kaspa addresses that architectural constraint by accepting and ordering parallel blocks in a blockDAG instead of throwing most concurrently mined blocks away. The intended result is faster propagation and confirmation while preserving open PoW competition, permissionless participation, and decentralized settlement. This does not remove mining centralization, software, network-partition, market, or smart-contract/application risks; the project's performance claims are protocol targets/observations, not guarantees for every workload.

Miners create proof-of-work blocks that reference multiple recent DAG tips. GHOSTDAG orders the resulting directed acyclic graph into a canonical blue-set/order, allowing many honestly produced parallel blocks to contribute to the ledger. Nodes validate transactions, block references, proof of work, and consensus rules before accepting DAG state.

Kaspa uses a UTXO transaction model: wallets control keys, transactions spend previously unspent outputs, and outputs assign value to recipient scripts. KAS pays transaction fees and coinbase rewards; miners secure the network and receive issuance according to the protocol's emission schedule. One KAS is divided into 100,000,000 sompi.

The production implementation is Rusty Kaspa, an open-source Rust rewrite of the original Go kaspad node. Official builder resources expose Rust libraries, a WASM SDK, RPC interfaces, full-node operation, and explorers/API endpoints. Kaspa's developer documentation also describes application payloads and newer programmability work; planned or rolling hardfork features should not be treated as already available on every network until activation is verified.

Kaspa's current official lore identifies 10 blocks per second on mainnet after the Crescendo upgrade. It describes Toccata covenant-based programmability and DAGKnight as future/next protocol work in the roadmap; those roadmap statements are forward-looking and may change.