Kaspa history: a blockDAG instead of a chain
An idea from university research
Kaspa grew out of research by Yonatan Sompolinsky and Aviv Zohar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their GHOSTDAG protocol keeps blocks mined at the same moment and orders them in a graph, a blockDAG. That lets the network produce blocks far more often than Bitcoin.
November 2021: a fair launch
The network launched on 7 November 2021 with no premine, no ICO and no coins set aside for founders or investors. Miners produced every KAS in existence. Development started at DAGLabs, a company backed by Polychain Capital, and then passed to the community.
A halving every month
Since May 2022 Kaspa has followed a chromatic schedule: each month the block reward shrinks by a factor of the twelfth root of one half, about 5.6%, so over a year it halves. Total supply should approach about 28.7 billion KAS. The all-time high of 0.2074 dollars came on 31 July 2024, per CoinGecko.
Crescendo: ten blocks per second
Kaspa ran at one block per second until 5 May 2025. The Crescendo upgrade, which followed a rewrite of the node in Rust, raised the rate to ten blocks per second. Developers cut the per-block reward tenfold to keep issuance on the same curve.