Reference
Glossary
Every technical word this site uses, defined once, in at most a sentence or two. Where a word carries a number, the number is the status table's.
- Anticone
- The blocks a given block could not see and was not seen by; the ordering rule sorts these by blue work.
- Block
- A batch of payments with proof of work, pointing at several parents at once.
- blockDAG
- The web blocks form when each points at many parents; DAG is short for directed acyclic graph.
- Blue block
- A block well connected to the honest web, counted by the ordering rule.
- Blue score
- The count of blue blocks in a block's past; depth on Kaspa is measured in blue score.
- Blue work
- The proof of work carried by the blue blocks behind a block; the tiebreaker that picks the selected parent.
- Coinbase
- The first transaction in a block: it pays the miner the new coins plus the fees, and may carry the miner's name.
- Covenant
- A rule attached to a coin that miners enforce on every later spend of it.
- DAA score
- A steady counter of network time, rising about ten a second, used to date events like upgrades.
- Finality depth (protocol)
- 432,000 blocks: the KIP-14 backstop depth, far beyond the depths used in practice.
- GHOSTDAG
- The rule that turns the block web into one agreed order; the shipped ordering rule.
- Mass
- A payment's weight for fee purposes; a simple payment is about 2,000 units, a block holds 500,000.
- Mergeset
- The blocks a chain block merges into the order: everything it saw that its selected parent had not.
- Miner
- Whoever races to write blocks; paid the coinbase of each block they win.
- Parent
- An earlier block a new block points at; up to 16 since Crescendo.
- Pruning
- Deleting old block bodies once the UTXO set and headers carry everything new payments need.
- Red block
- A block ordered late: weakly connected or hidden; its payments still count, it earns no reward.
- Selected chain
- The spine through the web made by following selected parents.
- Selected parent
- The parent with the most blue work behind it; each block names exactly one.
- Sompi
- The smallest unit of KAS; one KAS is 100,000,000 sompi. Fees are counted in sompi.
- Tip
- A current edge block: a block no newer block points at yet. The tips are the moving edge.
- UTXO
- An unspent transaction output: a coin, as the ledger actually stores it.
- vProgs
- A prototyped design for shared-state programs on Kaspa; not shipped.
Checked Nov 4, 2026.