About

Kaspa is a decentralized peer-to-peer payment network and open-source software project. The network is a Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain that borrows various additional principles from the Bitcoin protocol: a UTXO model, deflationary monetary policy, no premine, and no central governance. Kaspa diverges from Bitcoin’s linear blockchain design via its blockDAG (Directed Acrylic Graph) architecture, which enables parallel block creation and ordering. This mechanism consists of GhostDAG, which facilitates rapid block creation and validation, and PHANTOM, which orders constructed blocks.

History

Kaspa was originally founded by DAGLabs, a cryptocurrency research and development lab led by founder Dr. Yonatan Sompolinsky. According to the Kaspa Wiki, DAGLabs was founded in 2018 and “backed by (mainly) Polychain and (lesser) Accomplice and Genesis Mining” via an $8.00 million investment. According to a blog post, DAGLabs was dissolved shortly after the Kaspa launch. Kaspa is community-run, and DAGLabs and Polychain have “[waived] any intellectual property rights.”

Kaspa’s mainnet was launched on Nov. 7, 2021, with the genesis block being produced on Nov. 8, 2021.

According to a GitHub post from Kaspa Core Developers Michael Sutton and Shai Wyborski, a “major bug caused the network to split” on Nov. 21, 2021. To remedy the crash, a “checkpoint block,” or the latest block known to most of the network, was chosen using nodes’ data prior to the crash. On Nov. 22, 2021, a new genesis block was “hardwired” with a UTXO set identical to the checkpoint block. Additionally, the project team provided cryptographic proof to address possible concerns around “premining hidden behind timestamp manipulation.”

Kaspa has undergone two major upgrades since its mainnet launch:

• On April 14, 2022, Kaspa underwent a hard fork “to address the issue of deep side chains that spam the network.” According to the hard fork’s GitHub release, the upgrade was “mandatory,” with non-compliant users being “split off the network.
• On Sept. 15, 2023, Kaspa underwent a performance update to improve the network’s responsiveness to transaction flows within its mempool.

In September 2023, Kaspa’s dedicated self-custodial mobile wallet, Kaspium, launched via its v1.0.1 release. Kaspium can be downloaded on the iOS and Android app stores.

On Jan. 5, 2024, Kaspa developers announced the launch of “Testnet 11,” a testing ground for Kaspa’s codebase rewrite in RustLang. The rewrite is designed to increase throughput and enable “groundwork for smart contracts.” The transition will increase the block time to ten blocks per second (10 BPS), with an “ultimate goal” of 100 BPS at some point in the future. Changes to the codebase will include a hard fork to integrate DAG KNIGHT, an intended scalability mechanism to replace GhostDAG. Testnet 11’s block explorer can be found here. Based on a commercially reasonable search, no verifiable information could be found on the planned mainnet launch date for the rewritten codebase.

Block rewards are subject to a concept called “halving” and have since decreased to 130.81 KAS per block. Halving refers to the decreasing rate of Kaspa’s inflation. KAS’ block reward decreases geometrically each month by a factor of (1/2)^(1/12). Rewards will decrease in this manner until the 28.70 billion KAS maximum supply is mined around the year 2057. KAS’ full emission schedule can be found here. Of note, following the transition to RustLang, the KAS reward per block will decrease proportionally to the increase in blocks per second (i.e., if 1 BPS = 130.81 KAS per block, then 10 BPS = ~13.08 KAS per block). The emission schedule will remain unchanged.