What Is Kaspa (KAS)? BlockDAG, Mining and Market Data

Arquitectura BlockDAG

In a traditional blockchain, blocks form a single chain and two blocks found at the same time compete: one is kept and the other is discarded as an "orphan". Kaspa uses a Block Directed Acyclic Graph (BlockDAG), in which a block can reference several earlier blocks. Blocks mined in parallel are all kept in the ledger, so the network can run at a much higher block rate without wasting miners' work.

Principios de Lanzamiento Justo

Kaspa's mainnet launched in November 2021 with no premine, no insider allocation and no pre-sale, per kaspa.org, which publishes a proof that the genesis block started from an empty set of coins. Every KAS in circulation was mined in the open. The protocol grew out of BlockDAG research by Yonatan Sompolinsky and Aviv Zohar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; their earlier GHOST protocol is cited in the Ethereum whitepaper (see Sources).

Protocolo GHOSTDAG

GHOSTDAG is the consensus protocol at the heart of Kaspa, defined in the PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG paper (see Sources). Nakamoto consensus keeps one chain and discards competing blocks; GHOSTDAG instead orders all blocks, including those created at the same moment, into one consistent sequence that every node agrees on. No valid block is wasted.

Bloques paralelos

Each Kaspa block can have several parent blocks, which creates a web of linked blocks rather than a single chain. This is what makes 10 blocks per second (BPS) possible. Per kaspa.org, the next consensus upgrade, DAGKnight, targets block times in the 25 to 40 millisecond range, and a further hard fork aiming at 100 BPS is targeted for 2027. These are targets, not live parameters.

Fast Confirmations

At 10 BPS a new block arrives about every 100 milliseconds, so a transaction is usually included in a block within a second. As with Bitcoin, confidence grows with each block added on top; how long a merchant waits before treating a payment as final is a choice that depends on the amount. Bitcoin's convention of six confirmations takes about an hour at its 10-minute block target.

6,000 times Bitcoin's block rate of one per 600 seconds

Inclusion in a block usually within a second

Every KAS was issued to miners

Proof-of-work security, on November 10, 2026

Oferta & Emisión

• Max supply: about 28.7 billion KAS

  The emission schedule caps supply at 28.70 billion KAS. On November 10, 2026, 27.80 billion KAS were in circulation, about 96.9% of the maximum, per CoinGecko.

• Calendario de emisión cromático

  Block rewards halve once a year, but in twelve small monthly steps: each month the reward is multiplied by (1/2)^(1/12), a schedule named after the chromatic musical scale. On November 10, 2026 the reward was 1.9445 KAS per block, about 1,680,048 KAS a day, and the next step to 1.8354 KAS was due on December 5, 2026, per the Kaspa REST API.

• El 100% va a los mineros

  The protocol has no developer tax, no foundation allocation and no staking. All newly issued KAS goes to the miners who secure the network.

Principios de Distribución

KAS Market Data

Snapshot on November 10, 2026, per CoinGecko. These figures are not live: check the current price before you act on them.

Algoritmo kHeavyHash

Kaspa uses kHeavyHash, a proof-of-work algorithm built around a heavy matrix multiplication step, described in the Kaspa wiki. Its designers chose it partly because it suits optical mining hardware, which is still experimental. The algorithm was GPU-friendly at launch, but ASIC miners now produce most of the network hashrate.

Mineros ASIC

Bitmain (Antminer KS series) and IceRiver (KS series) sell kHeavyHash ASICs at several price points. Hashrate and power figures change with each model revision, so compare the current specifications on the manufacturer's site. Against these machines, GPU mining is rarely profitable today.

Rentabilidad

Mining income depends on your share of the network hashrate (about 309 PH/s on November 10, 2026), the block reward (falling every month), the KAS price and your electricity cost. Because the reward shrinks a little each month, a machine earns fewer KAS over time at a constant hashrate share. Run the numbers with current difficulty and your own power price before buying hardware.

Toccata: Covenants and ZK on L1

The Toccata hard fork activated on mainnet on June 30, 2026, per kaspa.org. It brought programmability to the base layer in the UTXO style used by Bitcoin rather than the account model of Ethereum: covenants (spending rules that carry state forward across transactions), transaction introspection, a native opcode to verify zero-knowledge proofs (Groth16 and RISC Zero STARK) and a sequencing commitment in block headers for "based" applications. Covenants make vaults, smart wallets and native assets possible; our guide to smart contracts explains the general idea. Developers write covenant logic in Silverscript, a compiler that targets Kaspa Script; the Rusty Kaspa node itself is written in Rust.

What Comes Next

Kaspa's developer page says covenant tooling is still early and advises checking the release and audit status before production use. Shared-state applications (vProgs) are under construction and are not yet a stable developer interface. On the consensus side, DAGKnight is the next planned upgrade (see How Kaspa Works). Fast block times make Kaspa a candidate settlement layer for applications that post their state on-chain, but that ecosystem is young.

Carteras

• kaspa.org lists 11 wallets and filters them by platform
• Mobile: Android and iOS wallets
• Desktop: Windows, macOS and Linux, some able to run a full node
• Hardware: 4 hardware wallets that support KAS

Intercambios

• CoinGecko lists KAS markets on Kraken, Bybit, KuCoin and Bitget
• Also on Gate, MEXC, HTX and Bitvavo
• Availability varies by country
• Send a small test amount first, then move the balance to a wallet you control (see how to protect your crypto)

Comunidad

• Discord, linked from kaspa.org
• Reddit, r/kaspa
• Research forum, research.kas.pa
• Open source code, GitHub (kaspanet)