Updated: 7/28/2026
Crescendo Hard Fork
Notes on the Crescendo hard fork - Kaspa's 10 BPS throughput upgrade.Overview
Crescendo is Kaspa’s first named hard fork. It activated on mainnet May 5, 2025 at DAA score 110,165,000 (rusty-kaspa v1.0.0).
The headline change: block rate went from 1 to 10 blocks per second, making Kaspa the fastest PoW network in production. The full fork is specified in KIP-14.
KIPs activated
- KIP-14 - The Crescendo Hardfork. The umbrella KIP: 1 → 10 BPS, plus the consensus parameter rescaling that goes with it.
- KIP-4 - Sampled difficulty windows. Difficulty adjustment samples blocks at ~4 second intervals instead of inspecting every block, so it scales with the higher block rate. Details in the Glossary.
- KIP-9 - Storage mass. An extended mass formula that prices UTXO set growth, mitigating state bloat and dust attacks.
- KIP-10 - New transaction opcodes. Limited transaction introspection - the first step toward Covenants++, later expanded by KIP-17 in Toccata.
- KIP-13 - Transient storage mass. Prices data that is validated then discarded, bounding block body size.
Parameter changes
| Parameter | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Block rate | 1 BPS | 10 BPS |
| GHOSTDAG k | 18 | 124 |
| Max block parents | 10 | 16 |
| Finality depth | ~24 hours | ~12 hours (432,000 blocks) |
| Coinbase maturity | 100 blocks | 1,000 blocks |
Difficulty was rescaled by a factor of 10 at activation to recalibrate for the new block rate. Emission was unchanged - the per-second reward is independent of block rate, so each block pays 1/10th of the per-second subsidy. Current values for everything: Network Parameters.
Resources
- KIP-14 - the full specification.
- v1.0.0 release notes (the Crescendo release).
- Crescendo in the Glossary.