Kaspa Rolls Out Major Upgrade
The Kaspa (KAS) blockchain has rolled out its DAGKnight consensus upgrade and now supports "covenant-centric" contracts. The upgrades are designed to enhance the Proof-of-Work chain's scalability and security for DeFi and payment applications.
The DAGKnight protocol was authored by Kaspa founder Yonatan Sompolinsky and Michael Sutton. Sompolinsky's 2013 GHOST protocol was notably cited in the Ethereum whitepaper, and DAGKnight is an evolution of his foundational GHOSTDAG and PHANTOM consensus mechanisms. Unlike its predecessor GHOSTDAG, the DAGKnight upgrade is parameterless, meaning it adapts to real-time network conditions instead of relying on fixed assumptions about latency. This self-stabilizing behavior is designed to maintain 50% Byzantine fault tolerance even during periods of network stress or high congestion. This upgrade is engineered to achieve sub-second transaction finality under normal conditions. The network, which has already been upgraded to handle 10 blocks per second (BPS), is being tested for rates of 25-40 BPS, with a long-term goal of exceeding 100 BPS. The introduction of "covenants" allows for programmable conditions to be placed on transactions at the protocol level. This enables smart contract-like functionality, such as restricting where funds can be sent or enforcing time-locks, without requiring a global execution environment like the EVM. Kaspa was fair-launched in November 2021 without any pre-mined coins, pre-sales, or team allocations, aiming for decentralized distribution from day one. The maximum supply is capped at 28.7 billion KAS, with an emission schedule that halves annually through smooth monthly reductions.
