What is Kaspa (KAS)?

Kaspa is a decentralized, open-source, and scalable Layer-1 solution.

The project was founded by Yonatan Somplinsky. Sompolinsky is also one of the founders of  the GHOSTDAG protocol, which serves as Kaspa’s underlying infrastructure. 

Kaspa - in their own words

Kaspa is supposedly the ‘fastest and most scalable instant confirmation transaction layer ever built on a proof-of-work engine’. 

The most obvious difference between Kaspa and traditional blockchains is their use of GHOSTDAG, which is a proof-of-work consensus protocol. Instead of orphaning blocks created in parallel, GHOSTDAG allows these blocks to coexist and orders them in consensus.

You can see how that works by checking out their real-time blockDAG visualizer.

This process also allows Kaspa to circumvent the ‘traditional security-scalability-decentralization tradeoff’ of blockchains by allowing them to improve on block rates, all whilst maintaining the ‘security guarantees of Bitcoin’. 

The project has positioned itself as a ‘scalable generalization of the Nakamoto Consensus’, which is ‘faithful to the principles Satoshi embedded into Bitcoin’. 

Kaspa prides itself in being a community project - KAS was distributed via fair launch, and the project’s marketing materials maintain that Kaspa is a fully community-governed and community-funded project.

KAS utility?

KAS is not a token - it is a digital currency, hence references to KAS as a ‘coin’.

KAS is the project’s native currency and is used for all on-chain transactions and to distribute mining rewards.