As the ETH price reached a new high last year, so did the mining revenue. The Block revealed that Ethereum miners earned $18.96 billion in revenue last year. However, the shift in Ethereum’s consensus mechanism deprived GPU miners of such a stable, lucrative source of income. As Ethereum miners running massive hashrates (850TH/s) are forced to search for new destinations, Kaspa, whose mainnet has been running stably for nearly a year, has captured their attention.

The decentralization ideal

Like most public chains, Kaspa also aims to solve the blockchain trilemma and build a decentralized, fully scalable, and high-performing blockchain while turning KAS into an all-purpose currency on the network.

In reality, Kaspa differs from its peers. The Kaspa community believes that many blockchain projects have been pursuing scalability and performance at the expense of decentralization, the core requirement of crypto. As such, Kaspa decided to adopt PoW and stay fully open, carrying on the spirit of decentralization championed by community-governed projects such as BTC and XMR.

In terms of token distribution, Kaspa also practices community-based governance. On Kaspa crypto, there have never been any pre-mining or pre-sale campaigns, and all tokens can only be obtained through mining. According to its official plan, the total supply of Kaspa KAS is capped at 28.7 billion. During the first six months after the mainnet went online, 1,314,900,000 KAS coins were issued each month. By the seventh month, the monthly supply was cut by 12%. Moreover, the monthly issuance of each subsequent month will be the KAS Issuance of the Previous Month*(1/2)^(1/12), thereby enabling the stable halving of the total supply every year.

The equation for calculating the monthly issuance of KAS

The issuance schedule of KAS

Strong technical capacity

Kaspa claims to be the fastest and most scalable Layer 1 blockchain using PoW. A statement like that must be backed by real technical strength and solid data records.

Yonatan Sompolinsky is on the Kaspa team. This genius developer is one of the initiators of the concept of DAG and a major contributor to the GHOST protocol, which was adopted by Ethereum in the early days. The GHOST protocol was originally used to solve the security problem of blockchain forking. Through research, the developers found that forked chains changed the data structure from a chain to a tree, so they proposed DAG (directed acyclic graph), turning blockchain’s linear designs into topological structures.

Kaspa’s DAG demo

Demo of a linear blockchain structure

Today, many public chains, including AVAX-X, Fantom, and IOTA, have adopted the DAG structure. Meanwhile, it is now clear that Yonatan Sompolinsky has gone further than his peers in exploring DAG. Kaspa uses the GhostDAG protocol, an improved version of the PHANTOM protocol designed by Yonatan Sompolinsky, to enable block parallelism and connect honest nodes through sorting by greedy algorithms, thereby facilitating real-time transaction confirmation and enhancing network security.

The GhostDAG protocol allows Kaspa to achieve high TPS and security simultaneously. Right now, the chain’s block time stands at one second. In the future, Kaspa aims to bring it up to 32 blocks/second, and its ultimate goal is 100 blocks/second. Additionally, Kaspa believes that fast block production will help miners generate more blocks, which discourages them from joining a pool. This helps to decentralize Kaspa’s hashrates.

High market expectations

After the Merge, GPU miners have been looking for the next promising coin. Kaspa uses the KHeavyHash algorithm, which supports GPU and FPGA mining machines using the common GPUs produced by AMD and NVIDIA. Moreover, KHeavyHash is more energy-efficient than Ethereum’s ETHash and Bitcoin’s SHA-256. At the moment, Kaspa’s performance in terms of power consumption and core temperature is in the top bracket among all PoW coins.

These appealing features soon captured the attention of miners. Over recent months, Kaspa’s hashrates have steadily increased, going from 80TH/s to about 360TH/s, which is equivalent to 42% of the ETH hashrates before the Merge, according to data provided by minerstat. In terms of hashrates, Kaspa now ranks No.1 among all coins for GPU mining and is followed by the well-known ETC, whose hashrates only stand at 120 TH/s. The massive hashrates also indicate that the miner community is confident in the future value of KAS.

Source: minerstat

KAS has lived up to the expectations of miners. According to calculations done by whattomine, KAS is now the most profitable coin for GPU miners. Suppose the electricity price stands at $0.03/kWh, an RTX3080 could bring us $0.45 in revenue and $0.26 in profit every day, and once we multiply that by one thousand (big miners) or even ten thousand (mining farms), the daily profit of Kaspa mining will look pretty appealing.

Source: whattomine

With massive hashrates going into KAS mining, the mining revenue hasn’t been much-affected thanks to the coin’s continued price growth during the recent period. According to CoinGecko, the Kaspa coin price has surged by 367.3% within the last 30 days, making it one of the best-performing coins in the past month.

Of course, Kaspa’s ambition goes far beyond a public chain for mining. Meanwhile, the Kaspa community is now actively expanding the everyday use cases of KAS, and the chain’s developers are also switching Kaspa’s programming language to Rust to boost its performance, thereby attracting developers focusing on Layer2 smart contracts and DeFi.

Thanks to its idealistic crypto visions and strong technical strength, Kaspa has quickly stood out from the many PoW coins that support GPU mining in just 12 months after its mainnet went live, which aroused high market expectations. When the next bull market begins, Kaspa might be able to start a new era dominated by genuinely decentralized and community-driven public chains as a leading PoW and DAG chain.

Right now, CoinEx has listed the KAS/USDT trading pair and launched the Automated Market Making (AMM) function for the pair. Trade KAS/USDT on CoinEx.

Disclaimer: This article is for reference only and offers no financial advice.