First published 10 November 2021, the week the network opened. Expanded in October 2026 for the faster block rate, which is easy to misread as a change in supply. Kaspa is a proof-of-work network. It does not line blocks up in a single chain and throw the losers away. Several blocks can be mined at once, and a protocol called GHOSTDAG orders them into one history. The research is associated with Yonatan Sompolinsky. KAS is the coin miners are paid. There was no premine, no public sale, and no founder allocation. The first coins came out of the open mine on 7 November 2021.
What is Bitcoin, in plain language? is the chain this one is often compared with. The comparison stops at proof of work and a cap. The data structure is not Bitcoin’s.
A cap the curve approaches
The monetary policy is a reward per second, not a reward per block. For the first months the rate was high and, at the very start, partly random. Since May 2022 the reward has stepped down every month, smoothly, so that a year of those steps is a halving. The project’s figures put the ceiling near 28.7 billion KAS, and the code is written not to reach 29 billion. By 2026 most of that ceiling had already been mined, because the early years pay more. The tail is small and long. A headline that says “the halving” as if it were a single night, the way Bitcoin’s is, is the wrong shape.
On 5 May 2025 an upgrade called Crescendo moved the network from about one block a second to about ten. The reward is still defined per second. Ten blocks share the second’s coins. They do not mint ten times the coins. A chart that draws issuance from the block count, and forgets the split, invents a supply.
What you can confuse it with
A Kaspa address is not an Ethereum address and not a Bitcoin address. The wrong network is still the wrong city. A token someone issues on top of Kaspa, if the network has started allowing that, is not KAS. The native coin pays the miner. The token is a different object with a different contract, or none.
There is no staking contract in the base coin. Mining is the issuance. This page will not tell you how to point a machine at it. Nothing here is an instruction to mine, buy, or move KAS.
