Litecoin improved on this somewhat – it reduced block time to 2.5 minutes and enjoys lower transaction fees, making it more suitable for everyday payments. But even 2.5 minutes per block is an eternity in the digital age, and both Bitcoin and Litecoin still follow a single-chain architecture that can only handle so many transactions.

GHOSTDAG takes a fundamentally different route. Instead of insisting on one-block-at-a-time and orphaning any “competing” blocks, GHOSTDAG allows multiple blocks to coexist and orders them in consensus. In traditional blockchains, if two miners produce blocks simultaneously, one block wins and the other is thrown away. Kaspa’s protocol doesn’t waste those blocks – it weaves all mined blocks into a structured DAG, picking an ordering such that the network eventually agrees on the same ledger. The protocol splits blocks into a “blue set” versus “red set,” essentially distinguishing the blocks mined by honest, cooperative nodes (blue) from those that conflict or might be malicious (red). By favoring the blue set when finalizing the ledger, Kaspa can include many parallel blocks while preserving security and consensus.

Crucially, Kaspa remains a pure Proof-of-Work (PoW) system, meaning it retains the battle-tested security model of Bitcoin. Kaspa’s consensus uses a custom hashing algorithm (kHeavyHash) and was launched with no premine, no ICO, and no central governance, much like Bitcoin’s fair launch ethos. Every KAS coin has been mined into circulation by the community, which has cultivated a fiercely loyal base of miners and supporters.

Sub-Second Blocks and Scalability Upgrades for Kaspa

One of Kaspa’s headline features is its fast block times. Blocks on Kaspa were initially targeting roughly 1 block per second, and thanks to a recent upgrade, that rate increased by an order of magnitude. In May 2025, Kaspa’s network implemented the “Crescendo” hard fork, boosting block production from 1 to 10 blocks per second (BPS).

These sub-second blocks allow Kaspa to handle a high volume of transactions in parallel – far more than the 7 transactions per second often cited as Bitcoin’s limit. In tests, the Kaspa network achieved first transaction confirmations in mere seconds, handling around 40 transactions per second – a throughput higher than what Bitcoin or even Ethereum have ever sustained.

Litecoin and other first-generation PoW coins only modestly improved throughput by tweaking parameters (Litecoin’s 4× faster blocks, slightly bigger block size, etc.), but they could not break the fundamental bottleneck: any significant speed-up in a single-chain PoW system tends to cause more forks and threaten consensus stability. Kaspa’s multi-block DAG approach side-steps this issue by absorbing orphaned blocks into the ledger rather than fighting them. As a result, Kaspa can safely push the block time down to seconds or less – and the successful 10 BPS upgrade demonstrates the network’s confidence in handling that scale.

This suggests that the security and decentralization of Proof-of-Work don’t inherently require the slowness and low throughput we see in Bitcoin. Scaling via blockDAG could allow PoW networks to compete with or exceed the speed of newer Proof-of-Stake chains, all while leveraging PoW’s simplicity and robustness.

Kaspa’s Community-Driven Growth and Miner Adoption

Kaspa’s journey from academic concept to a multi-billion-dollar network has been largely community-driven. There was no flashy VC-marketed token sale to kick it off; instead, early development was funded by an $8 million investment into DAGLabs, a startup co-founded by Sompolinsky to commercialize blockDAG research. After Kaspa’s mainnet launch in November 2021, DAGLabs was dissolved and the project handed over to the open-source community.

A bottom-up marketing approach has kept Kaspa in the conversation without the “influencer pumps” or paid hype that many crypto projects rely on. The result is an authentic, technically literate following that genuinely believes in the tech.

That ethos has attracted not just armchair supporters, but serious miners. In mid-2024, Marathon Digital Holdings, one of North America’s largest Bitcoin miners, revealed it had mined $16 million worth of KAS to diversify its revenue. Even though Marathon emphasized it wasn’t pivoting away from Bitcoin – Kaspa would be only a small fraction of its total hashpower – the move was telling. It signaled that Kaspa had entered the big leagues of Proof-of-Work. According to data from June 2024, Kaspa was already the fifth-largest PoW cryptocurrency by market cap, trailing only Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Dogecoin.

Today, Kaspa’s network security is secured by thousands of GPUs and ASICs around the world, and its community continues to push development forward. Recent upgrades have expanded Kaspa’s functionality – for instance, the KRC-20 token standard (akin to Ethereum’s ERC-20) was introduced to lay groundwork for future smart contracts. The project’s roadmap hints at plans for DeFi and dApps, either through native smart contracts or layer-2 integrations.

Kaspa’s Big Picture: Revitalizing Proof-of-Work

Kaspa’s rise poses an intriguing question for the crypto world: Can Proof-of-Work be scaled up for the modern era? For years, the narrative has been that if you want fast, scalable blockchains, you abandon PoW (as Ethereum did) or compromise on decentralization. Kaspa offers a counterpoint – an existence proof that PoW networks can significantly increase throughput and remain decentralized.

By inventing new consensus algorithms like GHOSTDAG, researchers in Jerusalem have opened a path to turbocharge Nakamoto’s invention without breaking it. To be sure, Kaspa is still young and faces plenty of challenges. It must prove that its blockDAG can handle real-world usage at scale, fend off any potential exploits, and attract a broader user base beyond die-hard enthusiasts. Competition is also fierce, with many alternative Layer-1 blockchains trying to be the next big thing.

For the broader crypto audience, the takeaway is clear. Kaspa’s GHOSTDAG is a reminder that blockchain technology is far from done evolving, even in the Proof-of-Work arena. By blending academic theory with open-source execution, this Israeli-born project has cracked a piece of the scalability puzzle. Whether Kaspa becomes a dominant network or not, its approach will likely influence how future protocols are designed. It’s a development worth watching – not just for what it is today, but for what it might enable tomorrow.

P.S. This article is not investment advice. The author does not hold KAS tokens or have any financial interest in the Kaspa project.