Why a web of blocks beats a chain
A chain can only grow one block at a time. Make blocks faster than the internet can carry them and most get thrown away. Kaspa keeps them all, in a web called a , and then agrees on one order for everything inside it.
Why it matters to you
Speed and safety usually pull against each other. Bitcoin makes a every ten minutes so that almost every hears about the last one before making the next. That gap is why a payment takes so long to settle.
If blocks that cross in flight can both stay, the gap is no longer needed. Kaspa makes ten a second, and your payment is in one of them within moments. Nothing honest is thrown away, so the work miners do all counts toward security.
How it works: past, future and the blocks in between
Each new block points at every block it has heard of that nothing points at yet. That gives every block three groups. Its past is everything it builds on. Its future is everything built on it later. The rest is its : blocks made at about the same time somewhere else.
On a chain the anticone is always empty, and anything in it is thrown away. In Kaspa it is normal and small. Tap a block below to see its three groups.
GHOSTDAG: one order from the web
A web isn’t enough on its own. If two payments spend the same coin, every computer has to pick the same winner. GHOSTDAG, the rule Kaspa runs today, gives the web one order in three steps.
- Find the main line. Each block picks one parent, the one with the most honest work behind it. Following those picks gives a chain through the web: the chain blocks.
- Color the rest. Each chain block takes in the blocks it newly sees. A block is blue (honest) if at most other blue blocks are in its anticone. A block that hid from the network for too long has a big anticone and is colored red.
- Read it off. The order is the chain blocks, each followed by the blocks it took in, in a fixed tie-break order. Every node computes the same thing from the same blocks, without voting.
Red blocks aren’t deleted. Their payments still count unless they clash with an earlier one, and then the earlier one wins. “Try to break it” on the main page lets you test this rule yourself.
What isn’t settled
GHOSTDAG needs a fixed guess of the worst network delay, and sets from it. If the internet got much slower than that guess, its safety margin would shrink. , the planned successor, measures the delay as it goes instead. It isn’t on yet.
Sources
- Sompolinsky, Wyborski and Zohar, PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG (2018, revised 2021).
- Blocks: api.kaspa.org, recorded Oct 30, 2026, 14:32 CET.
- Sompolinsky and Sutton, The DAG KNIGHT protocol (2022).