Emission & Supply

Fair launch

Mainnet launched November 2021 with no premine, no ICO, and no insider or dev allocation - every KAS in existence was mined as a block reward. The network went down for three days shortly after launch; the current genesis block in rusty-kaspa is a November 22, 2021 checkpoint that carries the pre-halt UTXO set forward (consensus/core/src/config/genesis.rs).

Two phases

Pre-deflationary phase (launch → May 2022): a constant 500 KAS per block at 1 BPS, for roughly the first half year (the schedule credits the 3-day outage).

Deflationary phase (May 2022 → ~2057): the reward starts at 440 KAS per second and decreases by a factor of (1/2)^(1/12) (~5.6%) every month - so it halves every year, smoothly, instead of dropping off a cliff every four years like Bitcoin. Implemented as a 426-entry month-by-month subsidy table in the coinbase logic (consensus/src/processes/coinbase.rs); the final entry is 0, ending emission ~35.5 years after the phase began.

The community calls this the chromatic schedule: 440 is the frequency of concert-pitch A (A4 = 440 Hz), a monthly step is a semitone, and a yearly halving is an octave down. The code just calls it the deflationary phase.

Per second, not per block

Since Crescendo, the table value is explicitly a per-second reward (KIP-14): at 10 BPS each block pays the per-second subsidy divided by 10. Emission is therefore independent of block rate - Crescendo multiplied blocks by 10 and divided the per-block reward by 10.

As of July 2026 the subsidy is ~24.5 KAS/second, i.e. ~2.45 KAS per block - see Network Parameters for current values.

Max supply

~28.7 billion KAS, fully emitted by ~2057. Note the number is empirical rather than a clean code constant: summing the schedule naively (500 KAS × the pre-deflationary seconds + the monthly table) gives ~28.4B, but during the pre-deflationary phase every parallel DAG block carried the full 500 KAS subsidy, so actual emission ran slightly ahead of the per-second math.

There is no tail emission. After the table ends, miner revenue is fees only.

Who receives it

Block rewards are paid through mergeset coinbase mechanics - a block’s coinbase pays the blocks it merges, not its own miner. See Mining. Coinbase outputs mature after 1,000 blocks.

Reference: coinbase.rs subsidy table, KIP-14