What is Kaspa?
Explained for everybody.

Usually to achieve speed others sacrifice decentralization or security, but Kaspa stayed true to the vision of the Bitcoin creator, by building new technology that allows near instant confirmation of payments across the globe with a zero trust verify vision and the same mining security as Bitcoin.

Kaspa is fairly launched just like Bitcoin, and has the same consensus mechanism including the way it is mined across the globe.

Kaspa is a community project, built and fairly launched to the public in the same style as Bitcoin, built without ICOs or VC capital backing on the research of Dr. Yonatan Sompolinsky who spent over a decade mathematically solving the scalability limits of Bitcoin.

When Vitalik Buterin authored the Ethereum whitepaper in 2014, the very first mechanism cited to solve blockchain throughput was Yonatan Sompolinsky and Aviv Zohar's GHOST protocol.

Kaspa is built directly on his blockDAG research, which created the mechanisms and breakthroughs that Kaspa utilizes to gain its speed without sacrificing anything.

In Bitcoin, if two miners find a block at the exact same time, the network has to throw one of them away. This is called an orphan block. If you try to make Bitcoin fast, too many blocks get thrown away, which destroys the security of the network. This is why Bitcoin forces you to wait 10 minutes between blocks.

Kaspa solved this problem completely. Instead of throwing parallel blocks in the trash, Kaspa lets blocks be mined simultaneously and weaves them together into a web called a blockDAG.

Because nothing gets thrown away, Kaspa can safely produce 10 blocks every second right now, and testnets have already proven 100 blocks per second. Your transaction confirms in seconds while keeping the exact same proof-of-work security.

Satoshi Nakamoto built an incredible breakthrough with Bitcoin, but the only known way to keep everyone agreeing on the ledger back then was a single, slow line of blocks.

Changing Bitcoin today into a blockDAG would require rewriting the entire network from scratch, which the Bitcoin community will never agree to do. Bitcoin prioritizes never changing over upgrading its speed.

Ethereum tried to add smart contracts, but kept the same single blockchain bottleneck. When it got congested, Ethereum gave up on fixing the base layer with mining and switched to Proof of Stake, pushing users to complicated second layers. Kaspa was built from day one using modern math to scale directly on the base layer without giving up mining.

You would think that this is the catch—if it does 10 blocks per second, how does it remain decentralized? Wouldn't the chain gain too much weight for conventional hardware?

Kaspa solves this by automatically pruning old data. Instead of forcing every computer to store every transaction since the beginning of time, the network safely deletes old, finalized block data after about 30 hours.

Because of this, a standard Kaspa node only needs about 30 to 50 GB of free disk space. You do not need a massive corporate server to trust and verify the network.

Not much is different conceptually. Both are fair launched, both use majority consensus to vote on upgrades, both use mining to create security, and both are truly decentralized.

The main difference is speed. Kaspa is many times faster than Bitcoin, with fees being among the lowest in the world.

Kaspa also has a faster, smoother coin issuance rate. Instead of Bitcoin's supply halving all at once every 4 years, Kaspa's block reward reduces gradually every month, totaling a halving every year.

Kaspa is actively working to bring a smarter, non-congested way of integrating smart contracts using zero-knowledge proofs.

Instead of forcing the main network to do all the heavy lifting, applications will do the math off-screen and just hand Kaspa the proof that it was done correctly.

This will not create clutter, it will work insanely fast, and remain entirely on the Layer-1 network. It will create a DeFi ecosystem to rival Ethereum, but without any bottlenecks or high fees—it will be true internet-latency DeFi.

Kaspa is a fundamental upgrade over the existing infrastructure for cryptocurrencies with its own network. Whilst scaled to be 6,000 times faster than Bitcoin today, that is not the end.

Kaspa developers are working on implementing, besides programmability, the DagKnight optimizations, which is another breakthrough research by Dr. Yonatan Sompolinsky and Michael Sutton. This could boost Kaspa's block rate to 100 blocks a second, making it 60,000 times faster than Bitcoin. But that is not it!

The only limiting factor to Kaspa's throughput is internet speed and latency. With DagKnight optimizations, as the global internet infrastructure scales and goes up in speed, Kaspa adjusts its k block producing parameter to be higher and self-scales forever as long as the technology of internet speed advances. This makes Kaspa the first self-scaling crypto without developers needing to touch anything else.

All this, paired with programmability, makes Kaspa the true Swiss Army knife of crypto. It will be the fastest and most secure settlement layer for payments, home to all Web3 traffic and decentralized financial applications, and able to transact more transactions than all the world's payment processors and banks combined.

BlockDAG refers to the structure of how blocks on the Kaspa network look like. In traditional blockchains, blocks are like a chain, they go one after the other.

In the DAG structure, they are woven together like a web or a net. Instead of forcing everyone to wait in a single file line, multiple blocks can be created at the exact same time.

Because of this blockDAG structure, Kaspa does not have to throw away blocks that are mined at the same time. It keeps all the data and organizes it, which is exactly how it reaches such massive speeds without losing security.

Kaspa maximum supply is capped to 28.7 billion coins with all coins being publicly mined.

Just like Bitcoin, there is a hard limit to how many coins will ever exist, meaning Kaspa cannot be printed out of thin air to cause inflation.

Fun fact: owning 1367 KAS is equivalent supply share to owning 1 BTC on the Bitcoin network (28.7 billion divided by 21 million).