Updated: 7/28/2026
Crescendo Hard Fork
The Crescendo hard fork - Kaspa's 10 BPS throughput upgrade (May 2025).Overview
Kaspa did not launch at 10 blocks per second - it arrived by hard fork. Crescendo is Kaspa’s first named hard fork, named musically in keeping with the chromatic emission schedule. 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 Difficulty Adjustment.
- 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.