Kaspa is a decentralized and fully scalable cryptocurrency that uses a BlockDAG architecture to eliminate the scalability issues associated with traditional blockchain implementations. It is based on the GhostDAG protocol, a proof of work (PoW) technology that ensures secure and fast transaction processing. Kaspa’s unique ability to support high block rates while maintaining a high level of security makes it stand out in the market.
The current Kaspa mainnet operates at a rate of one block per second (1tps), which is quite fast when compared to other leading cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (10 minutes) and Ethereum (15 seconds). Further, with network upgrade the team plans to increase the speed to ten blocks per second (10bps) and dreams of hundred blocks per second (100tps) upon a successful move from its existing programming language; Golang to Rust, a high-performance programming language. Basically, with Rust, transactions and confirmations happen instantly with no delay.
The absence of central governance promotes transparency and community-driven development. Essentially, Kaspa is a community project that operates on an open-source platform. Its use of a special protocol that allows multiple blocks to be processed simultaneously is what makes it stand out as a faster and more efficient cryptocurrency. This feature solves the problem of slow and inefficient transaction processing that traditional cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin suffer from. As a PoW blockchain, Kaspa follows the same security standards as Bitcoin, which optimizes its security.
- Who created Kaspa (KAS)?
Kaspa (KAS) was created by a group of blockchain enthusiasts headed by Yonatan Sompolinsky, who launched it in November 2021. Yonatan is a former Harvard student and is well-known in the cryptocurrency academic circle for his research on the GhostDAG protocol, and for inventing the Ghost protocol with Professor Aviv Zohar in 2013. Intending to create a crypto network that is both accessible and efficient, the Kaspa team introduced the currency with no prior mining, sales, or coin allocations.
- What is GhostDAG?
GhostDAG is designed to solve a problem that many other cryptocurrencies have: as they get popular and more people use them, it becomes harder to keep them secure.
The problem is that these cryptocurrencies use a system called Nakamoto consensus, which is supposed to be very secure as long as most of the people using the system are honest. But there’s a catch. Two people often create blocks simultaneously, and the system has to choose which block to use. This can lead to “orphaned” blocks, which means that some of the work that people did to create those blocks ends up being wasted. And if you want to attack the system and reverse some old transactions, you just need to create slightly fewer blocks than the previous network, which is easier to do if more blocks are being created.
GhostDAG solves this problem by allowing blocks to be linked in a more complex way. Instead of just pointing to one parent block, a block can point to many parent blocks, creating a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of blocks called BlockDAG instead of a simple chain. This allows for parallel blocks, which can increase the system’s throughput without decreasing security. However, the challenge is to choose an ordering for these blocks that is secure, agreed upon by everyone, and does not allow for retroactive reordering by attackers. The GhostDAG protocol is one way to do this.
- Tokenomics
The blockDAG architecture – with rapid block rates – allows more mining decentralization and enables effective solo-mining even at lower hashrates. Fair-launched in November of 2021 with no pre-mine, zero pre-sales, and no coin allocations; Kaspa is 100% decentralized, open-source, and community managed. The max supply of Kaspa is 28.7 Billion coins with an emission schedule that halves once per year via smooth monthly reductions by a factor of (1/2)^(1/12).
First mining was done on CPUs, during the initial month of the mainnet. By December 06, 2021 one of the community members wrote and released the first-ever open-source GPU mining software for Kaspa
For almost one and a half year, Kaspa was primarily mined using GPUs, and at some point, also using FPGAs (the exact date of their appearance is unknown because public FPGA bitstreams emerged much later than individual community members started talking of their FPGA mining).
On April 13th, 2023, the ASIC era began when a representative of the IceRiver company joined the Discord server and presented their product lineup.
More Information available in: https://www.holdminer.com/
