Today we will introduce a public chain project that has experienced an astonishing increase recently. The project has increased 5-6 times since the beginning of the year, and since last year, the increase has been as high as nearly a hundred times. What are the characteristics of this public chain project that enable it to perform so exaggeratedly in such a short period of time?
Kaspa is an open source, decentralized, fully scalable Layer-1 project. It is the world’s first blockDAG, a digital ledger that supports parallel blocks and instant transaction confirmations, built on a powerful proof-of-work engine with fast single-second block intervals.
Kaspa is a community project, completely open source, with no central governance and no business model. Similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero and Grin, Kaspa’s mainnet is launched publicly without pre-mining or any other pre-allocated tokens. DAGlabs is the creator of Kaspa.
DAGLabs was founded by Dr. Yonatan Sompolinsky to implement the GHOSTDAG protocol, which was co-founded by Yonatan and his then PhD supervisor Dr. Aviv Zohar.
Yonatan has earned a reputation in the blockchain academic community. As early as 2013, he co-conceived the GHOST protocol with Professor Zohar, which was cited as a design goal in the Ethereum white paper and thus received widespread attention.
Currently, Yonatan holds a postdoctoral position at Harvard University working on the MEV team on DAG.
Kaspa is a new blockchain platform designed to solve issues such as scalability, security and interoperability. The project places a strong emphasis on decentralization, which is at the core of the cryptocurrency community and blockchain technology. Therefore, the project community is committed to developing itself into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that adheres to the PoW consensus mechanism.
From a technical perspective, Kaspa adopts the GhostDAG protocol (an enhanced version of the Phantom protocol) designed by Yonatan and follows the Satoshi Nakamoto consensus. This allows Kaspa to achieve higher transactions per second (TPS) while maintaining security. #KAS
Kaspa uses the GhostDAG architecture, which combines the DAG and GHOST consensus algorithms to achieve faster transaction speeds and better scalability.
Unlike traditional blockchains, GhostDAG does not isolate blocks created in parallel, but allows them to coexist and be ordered according to consensus. Therefore, the Kaspa blockchain is actually a blockDAG. This approach, which summarizes the Nakamoto consensus, ensures secure operation while maintaining extremely low confirmation times, reducing the impact of Internet latency.
Currently, the Kaspa mainnet generates one block per second, and each block can save more than 400 transaction records. The goal is to execute 32 blocks per second and eventually achieve 100 blocks per second.
Kaspa can process up to 18 blocks in parallel and connect honest nodes with a greedy algorithm by enabling parallel blocks, ensuring instant confirmation and network security.
Kaspa also implements many features such as querying the reachability of DAG topology, block data pruning, SPV attestation and subnet support, which will provide a more convenient way to implement layer 2 solutions in the future.
In addition, Kaspa’s ambition is not just to become a public chain for mining. According to the official community description, they are actively exploring daily application scenarios of KAS and converting the development language to Rust to further improve the performance of Kaspa to attract the development of Layer 2 smart contracts and DeFi.
The operating principle of Kaspa is based on the GhostDAG consensus algorithm, which provides a high level of security. By combining PoW and DAG using a voting-based consensus mechanism, Kaspa improves its defense against attacks. The decentralized design of the GhostDAG consensus algorithm means that no one entity can control the network, with nodes proposing and validating transactions ensuring no node is too powerful.
Kaspa's GhostDAG has five main differences compared to ordinary DAG, namely security, scalability, speed, interoperability and rights distribution.
In terms of security, Kaspa’s GhostDAG uses a voting-based consensus mechanism to prevent double-spending attacks and other malicious behaviors, while ordinary DAGs usually rely on a single approval mechanism and are vulnerable to more attacks.
In terms of scalability, Kaspa's GhostDAG is highly scalable and can handle a large number of transactions, while ordinary DAG may be difficult to expand its consensus mechanism and has certain limitations.
In terms of speed, Kaspa’s GhostDAG has faster transaction speeds, mainly due to its shorter confirmation time and approval mechanism, while the confirmation speed of ordinary DAG may be slower and requires multiple confirmations.
In terms of interoperability, Kaspa’s GhostDAG is designed to make it easier to interoperate with other blockchain platforms and systems. It provides an open communication protocol and interface, making data transmission with other blockchain networks more convenient.
Finally, regarding the distribution of rights, Kaspa’s GhostDAG adopts the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) model so that rights and decisions can be distributed more equally to all participants. An ordinary DAG may not have a centralized power distribution mechanism, and power may be more likely to be concentrated in the hands of a few participants.
Overall, Kaspa is a blockchain platform using the GhostDAG consensus algorithm, providing high levels of security, scalability, speed, interoperability and rights distribution. It is committed to promoting the development of a decentralized and open blockchain ecosystem.
Kaspa is a blockchain project similar to Bitcoin, without a team and a clear roadmap. It is developed in an open source manner, with developers working on their own terms and coordinated through open R&D meetings. If a developer has a substantial project proposal, they write a grant application and collect KAS tokens from the community, with the community treasurer handling the funds.
The KAS token was launched in November 2021 with no re-mining, zero pre-sale and token distribution. The maximum supply of KAS is 28.7 billion tokens, and the current circulation ratio is 55.1%. Its emissions plan is to halve every year and reduce by a factor of (1/2)^(1/12) every month. The current price of KAS is around $0.139, with the highest price reaching 0.155 in the past few days.
In general, Kaspa is a public chain project whose main features and advantages lie in its unique GhostDAG technology and improvements to the POW consensus mechanism in Bitcoin. The project uses a decentralized team and has no token distribution, but is obtained through mining. However, the disadvantages of the project are the lack of a clear roadmap, slow development in the early stages of the project, and reliance on founders to promote technology development. In addition, although the project implements GhostDAG technology and has high TPS, it does not have significant advantages compared with other emerging public chains. In addition, ecological construction is crucial to public chain projects, and a complete ecosystem has not yet been established on Kaspa. The recent increase in KAS has been too large and exceeded expectations, so it is not recommended to buy it in the near future.
