What is Kaspa

The Fastest Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrency

Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency built on a BlockDAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) architecture. Unlike traditional blockchains that produce a single chain of blocks, Kaspa’s BlockDAG incorporates every mined block — there are no orphans, no wasted work.

At its core, Kaspa implements the GHOSTDAG protocol, a scalable generalization of Bitcoin’s Nakamoto Consensus. This enables extremely high block rates without sacrificing security.

Key Properties

Property	Detail
Launch	Fair launch, November 2021
Pre-mine / Pre-sale	None. No VC funding.
Ticker	KAS
Block rate	10 blocks per second (post-Crescendo)
Max supply	28.7 billion KAS
Proof of Work	k-HeavyHash (ASIC)
Transaction model	UTXO with Schnorr signatures and Blake2B hashing
Confirmation time	~1 second

What Makes Kaspa Different

Most blockchains discard blocks mined at roughly the same time — only one “wins,” and the rest become orphans. Kaspa’s BlockDAG changes this: all honestly mined blocks are included in the ledger. This preserves Bitcoin’s proven security model while achieving dramatically higher throughput.

The result is a network that confirms transactions in about one second, processes 10 blocks per second, and maintains the decentralization and security guarantees that proof-of-work provides.

Governance

Kaspa has no company, no foundation, and no central authority. The project is fully community-maintained. Changes to the protocol are proposed and discussed through KIPs (Kaspa Improvement Proposals) and developed openly on GitHub.

Origins

Kaspa was founded by Dr. Yonatan Sompolinsky, a researcher at Harvard whose academic work on DAG-based consensus protocols laid the theoretical foundation for the project. The project follows what the community calls “the hard path” — building from first principles with no shortcuts on security.