Main map · Ordering fairness
Who goes first, and can anyone jump the line?
Short answer first: Kaspa does not fully solve this problem today. Every node works out the same order for payments, and nobody runs the queue. But whether a well placed miner can bend that order for profit, and by how much, is still an open question, and this page says what is known and what is not.
The problem
When two payments reach for the same coin, only one of them can stand; the other is refused. So the order payments are placed in is not bookkeeping, it decides who gets paid. Anyone who can move their own payment ahead of yours, or hold yours back, holds a small power over every trade the network carries. On markets this is the front running problem: see a payment coming, step in front of it, and take the difference.
What Kaspa does today
- One order, computed by everyone. The agreed order is worked out the same way by every node, from the block web itself. No office, company, or miner publishes the order for others to trust.
- Every block counts. Blocks found in the same moment all stay in the web and in the order, as One order shows. A miner cannot push a rival's block, and the payments inside it, out of history.
- No paid fast lane in the base protocol. The rules that place payments do not sell a front position. A higher fee can ask for attention; it does not buy a place ahead of an earlier payment by rule.
Status: live · Checked Nov 5, 2026
What it does not do
- It does not police the inside of a miner's own blocks. A miner still chooses which waiting payments its own blocks carry, and the base protocol has no rule that detects or punishes a miner who arranges that choice to profit from what it can see coming.
- Nobody has measured whether bending pays. There is no published measurement of the ordering advantage of the best placed miners against the honest order, so any claim that the problem is solved, or that it is rampant, runs ahead of the evidence.
Status: unsettled · Checked Nov 5, 2026
The one sentenceThe order is public, shared, and recomputed by everyone; whether it can be bent for profit is measured by no one yet.
The exact version
The mechanism, and the exact place where bending could happen.
Kaspa orders blocks with the GHOSTDAG rule: each block points at several parents, the rule weighs blocks by their blue score, and every node derives the same ordering of blocks, and so of the payments inside them, from the web alone. Two payments that conflict are settled by that ordering: the earlier one stands. Because the inputs are the public web, any observer can recompute the order and check a node's answer, which is why there is no sequencer to bribe or to blame.
The surface that remains is the one the plain layer names. Ordering is computed after blocks exist; it does not govern how a miner assembles its own block. A miner sees waiting payments, chooses which to include, and points its block at the parents it chooses. If a payment's value depends on landing before another, that choice is where an advantage would live. The protocol's defenses are structural rather than policing: blocks arrive many times a second from many miners, so a payment a miner sits on is likely to be picked up by the next block from someone else, and a block that points oddly still has to fit the same public ordering rule. Whether those defenses are enough in money terms is the unmeasured part.
Status: live (mechanism), unsettled (whether bending pays) · Checked Nov 5, 2026
Sources and the raw numbers
The ordering rule is GHOSTDAG, from Sompolinsky and Zohar, eprint.iacr.org/2018/104, the same paper the tour's chapters cite. The known and unknown split on this page matches the open questions register entry for ordering fairness, checked Nov 5, 2026; where this page and the register ever disagree, the register is the record.
The unsettled part of this page is kept, with what evidence would settle it, in the open questions register, under Ordering fairness.