Why Kaspa Exists
The throughput-security tradeoff that caps blockchains, and the research line that set out to remove it.Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin. The reason it exists is a structural limit in Bitcoinâs design - not its values.
The blockchain bottleneck
In a blockchain, every block has exactly one parent. When two miners find blocks at nearly the same time, only one can extend the chain. The other becomes an orphan: its work is discarded, and the security it represented is wasted.
The defense is slowness. Bitcoin targets ~10 minutes per block so that parallel blocks are rare. Speeding up the block rate produces more parallel blocks, more orphans, and less security - see How Increasing the Throughput Harms Bitcoinâs Security by Ori Newman.
So a blockchain forces a choice: fast or secure, not both. Forks that just crank Bitcoinâs parameters pay for speed with security.
Kaspaâs answer
Keep everything that makes PoW work - open mining, longest-work security, no trusted parties - and remove the single-parent rule. Blocks created in parallel all count. That structure is a blockDAG, and it is the subject of the next page: The BlockDAG.
The result in production: 10 blocks per second, roughly 6,000Ă Bitcoinâs block rate, under the same PoW security model.
Not a fork - a research line
Kaspa is the product of years of research on scaling PoW consensus, led by Yonatan Sompolinsky (whose earlier GHOST work is cited in the Ethereum whitepaper) and collaborators. The resulting protocol is PHANTOM GHOSTDAG.
The values carried over intact:
- Fair launch. Mainnet launched November 2021 - no premine, no ICO, no insider allocation. Every KAS was mined.
- Pure proof of work. Mining is the only issuance.
- Open source, community-driven. No company controls Kaspa.
See Also: What is Kaspa?