No.081
Kaspa KAS
The PoW coin that refuses to wait in line
๐ญ Most chains make blocks queue up one at a time, and toss out whoever loses the race. Kaspa thinks that's a waste. It weaves every block into a web (DAG) at once and keeps even the "ghost" losers. Cocky? Maybe. But it actually delivers the speed it brags about.
๐ฌ โWait in line for my turn? Hard pass. I weave the whole web at once and I keep the ghost blocks everyone else throws in the trash. You blinked. It's already confirmed. ๐ธ๏ธโกโ
- It's mined with proof-of-work (PoW), same idea as Bitcoin, but built for speed.
- The trick: instead of a single line, it weaves blocks into a "web" (a blockDAG) all at once. Since the 2025 upgrade, that's 10 blocks every second.
- Supply is hard-capped near 28.7 billion coins, and every single one came from mining. No premine, no insider stash.
๐ The Story
Here's a thing classic mining never liked to admit: it wastes work. Miners stand in a single line, and if two of them dig out a block at nearly the same moment, one of those blocks gets thrown away. People call the loser a ghost block (GHOST). Real electricity, real effort, gone. Everybody just shrugged and called it the cost of doing business.
Yonatan Sompolinsky, a Harvard PhD, refused to shrug. His question was blunt: why a line at all? Weave the blocks into a web (DAG) instead, let them coexist, then sort out the order afterward. The ghost blocks nobody wanted? Keep them and put them to work. The recipe for that web is a protocol called GHOSTDAG, and Sompolinsky had been chasing the idea since his 2013 GHOST paper, the same one Ethereum once cited.
Kaspa went live on November 7, 2021 with a fair launch: no premine, no venture allocation, no coins quietly handed to founders. You wanted KAS, you mined it like everyone else. Plenty of projects say "decentralized" and mean "we kept 20%." Kaspa actually meant it. The speed claims are real too. After the May 2025 Crescendo upgrade it hit 10 blocks per second, which makes most other proof-of-work chains look like they're standing still. ๐ธ๏ธ
๐ Stats
๐งฉ How it works
Most blockchains add blocks one at a time, in a single line. So when two miners dig out a block at around the same moment, one of them becomes an "orphan block" (a ghost block) and gets thrown away, all that effort, wasted. Kaspa uses GHOSTDAG to weave those blocks into a web (DAG) instead of discarding them, then sorts them into order. That cuts the waste and lets blocks be produced very fast, after the 2025 Crescendo upgrade, that's 10 blocks per second (10 BPS).
๐ Light & Shadow
- The web (DAG) is the real deal: 10 blocks per second, and confirmations land almost instantly
- It's proof-of-work like Bitcoin, so security comes from mining muscle, and the hard cap near 28.7 billion means nobody can print more on a whim
- The fair launch is genuinely rare. No ICO, no premine, no venture allocation. Plenty of coins promise this and don't deliver (everyone mined the same way from day one)
- Speed is great, but it doesn't buy you apps. Smart contracts are still unfinished (KRC20 tokens landed in 2024, the rest is a roadmap)
- Born in 2021, it has far less history and name recognition than Bitcoin or Ethereum. New tech is exciting and unproven at the same time
- The price can swing hard, and "10 blocks a second" still needs years of real-world use before anyone calls it boring and reliable
๐งฌ Evolution lineage
Kaspa isn't a fork (a copied branch) of any other coin, it's an independent L1. But it does have a "bloodline of ideas." Its root is the GHOST protocol that founder Sompolinsky created back in 2013, and that GHOST was even cited in Ethereum's whitepaper. Sompolinsky's own line then evolved GHOST โ PHANTOM โ GHOSTDAG, which became Kaspa. So you can think of Kaspa as a sibling that shares the "GHOST idea" with Ethereum, and as the direct descendant of that idea.
GHOST was cited in Ethereum's whitepaper too, so Kaspa is like a sibling that shares the "GHOST idea" with Ethereum.
๐งญ Meet other friends
โ FAQ
- What is Kaspa (KAS)?
- It's a coin mined with proof-of-work (PoW), just like Bitcoin. But instead of linking blocks into one single line, it stacks many blocks at once in a "blockDAG" (a web) structure, built to fix the slow speed of classic PoW. It launched in 2021.
- Why is it so fast?
- Most blockchains add blocks one at a time in a single line, but Kaspa uses the GHOSTDAG protocol to let many blocks coexist at once like a web, then sorts them into order afterward. That cuts down on wasted "orphan blocks" and lets blocks be produced very fast. After the 2025 Crescendo upgrade, it reached 10 blocks per second (10 BPS).
- Who created it?
- Yonatan Sompolinsky, a Harvard PhD, invented the GHOSTDAG/PHANTOM protocol. Sompolinsky, Shai Wyborski, and Aviv Zohar released the whitepaper on November 10, 2021. It started at the research firm DAGLabs, which dissolved around launch, after that Kaspa became a community-driven project.
- How many will ever be made?
- The supply is hard-capped at about 28.7 billion (exactly 28,704,026,601 KAS). Just like Bitcoin stops at 21 million, Kaspa is blocked from making any more (the exact opposite of Dogecoin, which has no limit). Every coin was shared out through mining only, a "fair launch."
โ ๏ธ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only (MOCK ยท 2026-06-04).