KAS is the native coin people send, receive, mine, and pay fees with.
Beginner answer
What is Kaspa?
Kaspa is a live proof-of-work blockDAG network. It keeps Bitcoin-style mining and UTXO ownership, and uses GHOSTDAG to order parallel blocks into one payment history.
Citable summary: Kaspa is a mined UTXO blockDAG where GHOSTDAG turns parallel proof-of-work blocks into one ordered payment history.
Plain model
The simple picture.
Kaspa uses Proof of Work. Miners spend energy and hardware work to create blocks.
Kaspa uses UTXOs, meaning wallets spend specific outputs instead of editing a global account balance.
Kaspa uses a blockDAG, so honest blocks found close together can stay visible in the graph.
GHOSTDAG gives nodes the rule for ordering that graph into one shared payment history.
The live network is in the 10 BPS Crescendo era. Future app and consensus work needs separate status labels.
Status boundary
What is live, and what is not live?
| Claim | Status | Safer wording |
|---|---|---|
| Kaspa is Proof of Work | Live | Kaspa is mined Proof of Work. |
| Kaspa is 10 BPS | Live | Kaspa is in the Crescendo-era 10 BPS network. |
| KRC tokens exist around Kaspa | Ecosystem live | KRC20/KRC721-style tooling exists around data written to Kaspa; it is not native smart contracts. |
| Toccata has activated on mainnet | Targeted | Toccata is a targeted hard-fork track until mainnet activation evidence exists. |
| DAGKnight is current mainnet consensus | Research | DAGKnight is future consensus research and implementation work, not current mainnet behavior. |
Read next
Where to go from here.
MechanismUnderstand GHOSTDAG.
How the blockDAG becomes one ordered history.
PaymentsInclusion versus finality.Why fast blocks are not the same as instant irreversibility.
ClaimsCheck common claims.Live, ecosystem, targeted, roadmap, research, or unsupported.
EvidenceOpen the sources.Use code, releases, KIPs, docs, and research for status-sensitive claims.