Score: Legit chain, empty cash register. Kaspa is the rare crypto launch whose fairness claims mostly survive checking — no premine, no ICO, no VC allocation, and the two asterisks on that record are in print below, not buried. The protocol also shipped what it promised: a proof-of-work chain running ten blocks a second. The problem is the till. Miners mint roughly 1.78 million new KAS a day — about $58,000 at today's price — while the chain's actual users pay about 2,300 KAS a day in fees, 0.13% of the miner wage. The subsidy that covers the other 99.87% halves every year and reaches zero around 2057, with nothing behind it at current fee levels. Here is the math.
The Kaspa logo. Logo: Kaspa project, shown for editorial identification.
Official website: kaspa.org
What Kaspa is
Kaspa is a proof-of-work Layer 1 that tries to fix Bitcoin's speed limit without giving up mining. Bitcoin produces one block every ten minutes because faster blocks would orphan each other — two miners finding blocks at once means one block gets thrown away. Kaspa's answer is a BlockDAG: instead of a single-file chain, blocks form a directed acyclic graph. Each new block points at every block tip its miner can see, so blocks created in parallel are kept and ordered rather than discarded.
The ordering rule is GHOSTDAG, the practical version of the PHANTOM protocol from a 2018 academic paper. In plain terms: GHOSTDAG scores blocks by how well-connected they are to the rest of the graph (the "blue" set), treats poorly connected blocks as suspect, and derives one agreed order of transactions from the graph. A tolerance parameter, k, decides how many simultaneous blocks the network can absorb — at k = 0 the system is exactly Bitcoin's longest chain; Kaspa has run k = 124 since its 2025 speed upgrade. Because parallel blocks stop being wasted work, the block rate can rise: Kaspa ran one block per second from launch and, since the Crescendo upgrade on May 5, 2025, runs ten blocks per second — a 100-millisecond block time, with transactions confirming in seconds.
Mining is proof of work with an algorithm called kHeavyHash (a Keccak hash wrapped around a matrix multiplication), which means Bitcoin's SHA-256 machines can't mine it — but Kaspa has its own ASICs anyway. IceRiver shipped the first kHeavyHash ASICs in 2023 and Bitmain followed; GPU mining is a rounding error today. Network hashrate sits near 375 PH/s (early November 2026) — down roughly 75% from its late-December 2024 peak near 1.48 EH/s, because hashrate follows price, and price is the subject of the market section below.
First, the basics: KAS is a coin, not a token
Every review on this site states this up front: KAS is a coin. It is native to Kaspa's own BlockDAG, created only by miners as block rewards, with no contract address on anyone else's chain. The smallest unit is a sompi (10⁻⁸ of a KAS). (Tokens do exist on Kaspa — the KRC-20 standard — but those are issued by users on top of the coin, the way tokens sit on any base layer; KAS itself is the base asset.)
Who actually pays: the emission math
Kaspa's monetary policy is written as a per-second rate, which makes the arithmetic unusually clean. The schedule's second phase — the "chromatic" phase, running since May 2022 — started at 440 KAS per second and cuts by a factor of (1/2)^(1/12) every month: a smooth −5.61% step, twelve of which add up to exactly one halving per year. No cliffs, no surprises, and no tail emission — the schedule's ~426 monthly steps run out around 2057, after which miners get fees only.
We checked the current rate against the project's monetary-policy text, the explorer data carried by independent trackers, and mining calculators, all on November 2, 2026:
| Verified figure | |
|---|---|
| Block reward right now | 2.06017223 KAS per block |
| Block rate | 10 blocks/second (Crescendo, since May 5, 2025) |
| New KAS per second | 20.60 KAS |
| New KAS per day | ~1,779,989 (~1.78M) |
| Value at $0.0326 | ~$58,000 per day |
| New KAS per 30 days | ~53.4M KAS (~$1.74M) |
| Next scheduled step (~Nov 4, 2026) | 1.94454365 KAS/block → ~1.68M/day |
| Circulating supply | 27.79B of a 28.70B cap — 96.8% already issued |
| Annualised inflation at today's rate | ~2.3% of circulating supply, halving yearly |
Two things stand out. First, the dilution argument against Kaspa is nearly over: with 96.8% of all the KAS that will ever exist already mined, today's issuance is a modest ~2.3% a year and shrinking. This is not the Dogecoin situation — perpetual inflation with no cap — and it isn't an emissions firehose. Second, the absolute dollars still have to come from somewhere: ~$58,000 of brand-new coins hit the market every day, and miners as a group sell most of what they earn to pay power bills. Against $6.9M of total daily trading volume, that's roughly 0.84% of the day's entire turnover that has to be absorbed just to stand still.
Now the other side of the ledger — the part almost nobody prints. What do Kaspa's users pay for all this security? An independent measurement taken from the chain's own API over September 12 – October 11, 2026 found total fees averaging ~2,321 KAS per day — under $100 a day at the prices of that window, about $76 at today's. That is 0.13% of miner income. The chain processed roughly 93,800 user transactions a day in the same period, from at most ~18,000 active addresses a day. The payer classification is the same one we gave Helium: inflation & emissions, not customers — except Helium's holders at least knew they were funding a network people use for a service. Kaspa's fees say its service, so far, is barely used.
Hold that ratio up against the schedule. The subsidy halves every year, smoothly and permanently. At today's fee level, the chain's entire security budget in a decade would be a few thousand dollars a day — for a network whose market cap is $905 million. Either usage (and fees) grow by orders of magnitude, or the security spend shrinks toward the fee level, or the price does something dramatic. The code has already decided which of those it can't control.
The fair launch — with two asterisks
The headline claim checks out. Kaspa's mainnet launched November 7, 2021 with no ICO, no premine, and no VC or insider token allocation — the genesis block contains no coins, and every KAS in existence was mined on the public network. This isn't just the project's own lore page talking: Kraken's regulated Canadian crypto-asset statement says the same thing in compliance language ("a fair launch, with no ICO, vesting phase, or pre-mine… no token pools or allocations"), and the emission history reconciles with the published schedule. By crypto-launch standards, that is about as clean as it gets.
Asterisk one: the company that built Kaspa mined a meaningful slice of the early supply and handed it to its backers. Before it wound down (next section), DAGLabs mined Kaspa for roughly five months in the network's first days, on rented cloud hardware. The project's own wiki put the haul, as cited by an independent October 2026 analysis of the network, at "not more than 3% (probably close to 2.5%) of the max supply" — call it roughly 720–860 million KAS — and said it was distributed to investors and former employees. A 2024 ByteTree research note records the plainer version: DAGLabs repaid its lead backer, Polychain Capital, partly in initially mined KAS. None of that contradicts "no premine" in the technical sense — the coins were mined in the open, not minted in a genesis allocation. It does contradict the looser myth that no insider ever got coins cheap. They did — at launch-window mining cost, in size, and the exact split has never been independently auditable, because Kaspa's pruning design means the full transaction history of November 2021 – May 2022 is no longer served by ordinary nodes and explorers.
Asterisk two: the chain restarted once, two weeks in. Around November 21–22, 2021, a bug split the network; the chain halted for roughly 48 hours and was restarted from a checkpoint, with a new genesis block whose balances were set equal to the checkpoint's. A cryptographic "genesis proof" was published later to show the restart didn't smuggle in a premine, and the founder himself, in a February 2026 essay, called the launch "messy, borderline-clusterfrak" and noted that Kaspa's "biggest FUD — that it has missing history — dates back to these early days." Fair, restarted once, and honest about it afterwards — that's the accurate sentence. The hostile version also exists: a single, openly adversarial 2023 Substack calls the whole launch a fraud scheme. We checked for anything backing that up — a court case, a regulator, a reputable outlet — and found none. It's printed here as what it is: an allegation with no corroboration, next to launch flaws that are documented.
Who's behind it
The founder is a published cryptographer, and his record is the product. Yonatan Sompolinsky did his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Aviv Zohar, finishing in 2021. As a master's student in 2013 he co-authored GHOST, a fix for Bitcoin's throughput limits — a simplified form of it was cited in Ethereum's whitepaper. SPECTRE followed in 2016, then PHANTOM/GHOSTDAG in 2018 with Shai Wyborski and Zohar — the protocol Kaspa implements. He later did a postdoc and a research-associate stint at Harvard working on transaction ordering and MEV. His current role in Kaspa is deliberately unclear at the edges: no CEO title, no protocol-granted coins, and in that February 2026 essay he styles himself an "antifounder." Michael Sutton — a Hebrew University distributed-systems researcher, co-author of the DAGKnight paper, author of the Crescendo upgrade — is described by Sompolinsky as the project's unofficial technical owner. Wyborski, the GHOSTDAG co-author, has drifted out: an April 2026 post attributed to him said he would not rejoin the core team, citing trust in its leadership (reported in secondary coverage; his original post is the source we'd want, and it's the framing we'd trust least second-hand).
The money trail starts with a real company that no longer exists. Sompolinsky and Guy Corem founded DAGLabs in 2017/18 to commercialise the GHOSTDAG research. PitchBook records an $8 million Series A in January 2018 — mainly Polychain Capital, with smaller cheques from Accomplice and Genesis Mining. No token was sold against that raise; DAGLabs and Polychain waived their IP claims on Kaspa, funding stopped around mid-2021, and the company wound down — PitchBook lists it as out of business as of March 2023. Why it closed has never been credibly reported beyond the community's own account (a planned handover), and its mined-KAS repayment to Polychain is covered in the asterisk above. Our skeleton check — web searches across the principals' names for bankruptcies, fraud settlements, and regulatory actions — found nothing for Sompolinsky, Sutton, Wyborski, or the other named developers, and DAGLabs' closure is a dissolution, not a bankruptcy or fraud case. One genuine prior failure sits adjacent: Corem's earlier company, Spondoolies-Tech, a Bitcoin miner manufacturer, was dissolved by an Israeli court in May 2016 after it couldn't pay employees. A business that ran out of money — reported at the time with no fraud allegation attached.
Control today. There is no Kaspa company, foundation treasury, or multisig holding a protocol allocation — there is nothing to unlock and no insider tranche to dump. Upgrades move through public Kaspa Improvement Proposals and activate at a set point in the chain's history, not by anyone's signature. What actually funds development in 2026: a voluntary Public Development Fund (donations only, held in a 2-of-4 multisig by four named community treasurers, spends published in the project's Discord), past community crowdfunds (about 70M KAS for the DAGKnight research, 100M KAS for the Rust rewrite of the node), and grants from the Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation — announced March 2024 with first-phase funding from ICERIVER Ventures, the venture arm of an ASIC manufacturer, with OKX Ventures support; it funds grants and hackathons and holds no protocol authority, but an ASIC maker bankrolling the ecosystem foundation is worth knowing on a chain whose security is ASICs. The Kaspa Industrial Initiative, a Dutch non-profit launched publicly in July 2024, pushes enterprise adoption and standards; it publishes no funding amounts or backer list, so we can't check its money and say so. Sompolinsky's own February 2026 assessment of the funding model: development has leaned on the Rust fund, Sutton's willingness to shoulder the burden, and foundation grants for three core developers, and that is "unsustainable indefinitely" — his summary line was that Kaspa "funds like fair-launch, innovates like premined."
Skin versus exit is the one box we cannot tick either way: no attributed founder wallets, disclosures, or reputable reporting exist on what Sompolinsky, Sutton, or Polychain hold or have sold. The only documented insider distribution is the DAGLabs mining payout above. What we can see on-chain is the holder picture generally: the largest single address holds 5.5% of supply (owner unknown), and the top ten hold 25.6%, many of them identifiable exchange wallets.
Mining control is the quieter concentration. Kaspa is ASIC-mined with hardware from a handful of makers (IceRiver, Bitmain, iBeLink) — the opposite end of mining from Monero, where a CPU still earns. Pool data lags and sources conflict, so we print the last dated snapshot rather than a live-looking guess: MiningPoolStats data reported in October 2026 put the top three pools together at 68.8% of all blocks, with HumPool consistently the largest single pool at roughly a third of the network. Three pool operators building two-thirds of the blocks is real centralisation pressure on a chain whose pitch is decentralised speed.
The tech shipped. The usage didn't — yet
Credit where due: for a community project with no treasury, the 2025–26 shipping record is real.
- Crescendo (May 5, 2025) took the base layer from 1 to 10 blocks per second, exactly as proposed in KIP-14 — and because Kaspa's emission is denominated per second, the upgrade didn't change issuance by a single sompi.
- Toccata (June 30, 2026) switched on Kaspa's native programmability: covenants (spending rules that carry state from one transaction to the next — vaults, smart wallets, native assets) and native zero-knowledge proof verification built into the base layer, with a covenant language (Silverscript) reaching v1.0 in September 2026. This is deliberately not general-purpose smart contracts — the fully general version, called vProgs, remains research, and DAGKnight, the consensus upgrade proposed back in 2022, is still not on mainnet.
- Tokens and L2s exist, small and with one real scar. KRC-20 tokens launched in September 2024 — but they live in transaction payloads read by an off-chain indexer (Kasplex), not in the protocol itself, and on September 20, 2026 a signature-verification flaw in that indexer let an attacker mint unauthorised token balances and drain nearly all the KAS from two liquidity pools. The base chain wasn't breached; the layer everyone actually uses for tokens was, and recovery was still unfinished weeks later. Two EVM layers followed — Kasplex's zkEVM rollup (late September 2025) and Igra (mainnet March 19, 2026) — with combined TVL around $1.3 million and, by one independent October 2026 sampling, real usage on Igra of roughly 0.4 transactions per second across 157 active accounts. Neither Tether nor Circle issues a native stablecoin on Kaspa.
Set against that: ~93,800 user transactions a day and at most ~18,000 active addresses a day on a chain that can theoretically clear ten blocks a second. The engine is built for a motorway. The traffic is a country lane — and the fee line in the emission section is what country-lane traffic pays.
The market you're buying into
KAS changed hands at $0.0326 on November 2, 2026 — a $904.7M market cap at rank #76, and a fully diluted value of essentially the same $904.7M, because with 96.8% of supply already mined there is almost no dilution gap left to price. The recent tape is red across every window: −2.3% in 24 hours, −9.4% in a week, −23.9% in a month — Kaspa is the most-searched coin on CoinGecko today while falling, which tells you this is attention on a downtrend, not a breakout.
The longer arc is harsher. The all-time high, $0.2074, was set on July 31, 2024 — KAS is down 84.3% from it, and down 37.6% over the past year alone, in a year when the project shipped its two biggest upgrades ever. The market is not paying for shipped tech right now; it's pricing the gap between the tech and the usage.
KAS daily closes, past year (November 3, 2025 – November 2, 2026): $0.0521 → $0.0326 (−37.6%), with the January 2026 local high at $0.0647 and the August 2026 low at $0.0253. Data: CoinGecko, checked November 2, 2026.
Liquidity is the other half of the risk. Total spot volume on November 2 was $6.9 million across 34 listed markets — HTX, Bybit, KuCoin, Gate and MEXC carry most of it, Kraken is the largest US-accessible venue, and after five years on the market there is still no Binance spot listing and no Coinbase listing (we checked every market CoinGecko lists for KAS today; neither appears). A $905M asset trading $6.9M a day, of which ~$58K is brand-new miner supply looking for a bid, is a thin book: getting in is easy, getting out in size is the trade.
The score, revisited
The chain: legit. Published, peer-reviewed consensus research implemented more or less as written; a fair launch that survives checking with two disclosed asterisks — the builders mined ~2.5% of supply early and distributed it to backers and staff, and the chain restarted once, openly, two weeks in. No premine in the code, no allocation, no unlock calendar, no treasury to drain, named academics with no fraud or collapse in their record under their own names. On the "who's behind it" test, Kaspa is one of the cleanest files we've written up.
The money: unproven, and the clock is printed in the code. "Bitcoin, but fast" is a real engineering achievement that, five years in, has produced ~94,000 transactions a day, fees of about 0.13% of the security bill, $1.3M of L2 TVL, and no top-tier US listing. Miners mint $58K a day of new coins because the schedule says so — the schedule halves that every year whether or not anyone shows up to use the chain, and around 2057 it stops entirely, leaving fees that currently round to zero as the only security budget. What would flip this score is specific and checkable: user transactions and fees growing by one or two orders of magnitude — Toccata applications people actually pay to use — or a Coinbase/Binance listing that fixes the liquidity half of the problem. Until one of those numbers moves, KAS is a genuinely fair, genuinely fast chain whose users have not yet agreed to pay for it. Its holders are paying instead, $58,000 at a time, every day.
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Check it yourself: links and sources
- Official website: kaspa.org — the Lore page carries the project's own launch and monetary-policy claims; project wiki at wiki.kaspa.org
- The protocol paper: PHANTOM/GHOSTDAG, ePrint 2018/104 (Sompolinsky, Wyborski, Zohar); code at github.com/kaspanet/rusty-kaspa — the Toccata guide there documents the covenant/ZK upgrade and the current fee policy
- Block explorers: explorer.kaspa.org (official) · kaspa.stream · kascan.io
- Rich list: Kaspa is a UTXO coin, so there is no token holder chart — the explorers' top-address views are the equivalent; the largest address holds 5.5% of supply and the top ten 25.6% (October 2026 measurement, cited in the text)
- CoinGecko: KAS page — price, supply, ATH, and the full market list we used to check exchange coverage
- The critical reads: TradingStrategies' Kaspa capacity & fees measurement (fee revenue, transaction counts, pool shares, holder concentration — measured from the chain's API, October 2026) and Kraken Canada's KAS crypto-asset statement for the regulated fair-launch wording; Sompolinsky's February 2026 essay is on his Medium
- Official socials: @KaspaCurrency on X · Discord · Telegram · r/Kaspa
Key sources, all checked November 2, 2026: CoinGecko (price, market cap, FDV, circulating and max supply, ATH/ATL, 24h/7d/30d changes, all 34 listed markets, daily closes for the chart — pulled firsthand today); Kaspa's monetary-policy text and kaspa.org (emission design, chromatic schedule, per-second denomination, launch claims); CoinLaw's dated reads of Kaspa's own REST API and WhatToMine (current block reward 2.06017223 KAS and the step sequence); TradingStrategies (October 12, 2026 — fee revenue September 12 – October 11, 2026, user transactions, active addresses, pool shares via MiningPoolStats, holder concentration, Igra usage sampling); Kryptex Pool and MillionMiner (hashrate, November 1–2, 2026); BSC News and HelloKaspa (DAGLabs history, Dev Fund structure, KEF, founder roles); PitchBook (DAGLabs Series A, out-of-business date); ByteTree (Polychain repayment in mined KAS, August 2024); Finance Magnates (Spondoolies-Tech court dissolution, May 2016); kaspa.org and the rusty-kaspa repository (Crescendo and Toccata activation, covenant/ZK scope); BSC News incident reporting (September 2026 Kasplex indexer exploit — an indexer failure, not a base-chain breach). Full figure-by-figure sourcing is in this package's sources file.
Not financial advice.
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