Kaspa Toccata mainnet process update:
Today we plan to publish the v1.3.0 mainnet pre-release, without activation, for 1–2 days of broader network sanity testing.
Assuming everything looks good, the following release will be v2.0.0, with activation planned for June 30, 4 weeks from today
Here we go again: rehearsing a major hardfork on testnet 10, this time crescendoing into Toccata
Activation is scheduled for tomorrow May 18, 16:00 UTC.
Existing TN10 miners/operators should upgrade now. In a few hours upgraded p2p nodes will stop connecting to non-upgraded nodes as we enter the 24h pre-activation window.
Let’s make the mainnet activation boring by making the TN10 rehearsal as mainnet-real-world as possible
The Toccata hardfork stack is now ready, and we’re entering the final stage before mainnet activation: a full hardfork activation on Testnet-10. The scheduled activation point is: May 18, 2026, 16:00 UTC DAA Score: 467_579_632
Everyone is welcome to join and mine on testnet, so we can verify the transition works fine before mainnet activation.
I wrote detailed instructions for joining as a testnet miner (Link in reply)
#Kaspa Covenants are one of the most interesting upgrades coming to the $KAS ecosystem.
The easiest way to understand them is this:
Instead of coins being just spendable you can attach programmable rules to them.
So your KAS can behave more like smart digital money with built-in conditions.
For example, you could create rules like:
These funds can’t move before 2030.
This KAS can only be sent to this wallet.
If conditions aren’t met in 7 days, refund me automatically.
Require 2 signatures before spending.
And the important part is: the Kaspa network itself enforces those rules automatically. Nobody can bypass them.
What makes this exciting is that Kaspa is trying to add programmability without becoming slow or overly complicated. Unlike traditional smart contract systems with heavy global state, Kaspa Covenants work directly on the UTXO model, which keeps things simpler and closer to Bitcoin’s design philosophy.
This could unlock:
smarter wallets
vaults and inheritance systems
escrow payments
subscriptions and recurring payments
native assets and DeFi tools
All while still benefiting from Kaspa’s fast BlockDAG architecture and POW security.
Kaspa started as fast digital money.
Covenants could turn it into programmable digital moneywithout losing the speed and simplicity that made people interested in Kaspa in the first place.
The Kaspa journey continues....
Michael Sutton from Kaspa Core delivered an article giving an outlook for the upcoming "Toccata" hard fork which includes covenants, based zk apps, and why the start date was moved.
"Kaspa Covenants++ “Toccata” Hard-Fork Outlook"
https://t.co/SwBymJ8QsE
wrote an outlook for the upcoming “Toccata” hard fork -- native L1 covenants, based zk apps, why the activation window moved, and what the road from feature freeze to mainnet looks like:
https://t.co/JFRkYp6Yd4
Kaspa is real-time bitcoin, solving scalability is great but not the core value prop.
Real-time bitcoin means achieving in a few seconds the same security guarantees that nakamoto consensus / bitcoin achieves after an hour; decentralizing each consensus round rather than chain quality achieved through a coarse aggregate of rounds.
A clean definition anchor for real-time decentralization (RTD): The ability to sample the honest majority in real-time.
(Note that even fast leaderless VRF-based proof-of-stake cant sample honestly bc the selected nodes get to choose the content of their blocks after they've been selected; pos=select then write, pow=write then select)
--
RTD affects: txn confirmation, censorship resistance, secure oracle finality, MEV resistance.
Eg censorship resistance, bitcoin is the most censorship resistant chain, but if 60% of the miners are censoring you (point in reference: OFAC abiding tornado censoring eth miners), your txn will pend for 30-40 minutes. For shady business payments that's not prohibitive, but for a real economy, for an asset aspiring to be at least a king of collateral even if not an MoE, this is unacceptable, esp under economic stress.
Beyond censorship, all things finance benefit tremendously from pow density, from sampling the majority in real-time in a secure and honest manner.
I wont get into MEV resistance now, but having a "conscious" stream of oracle attestations (not price oracles) finalized in real-time qualitatively upgrades the ability to encode informed risk, collateral, liquidity management, which is the lifeblood of defi.
In context of conf times, increasing from 1 to 10bps saturates the latency optimization. But for pow density we need dozens of blocks per second, with the endgame of 100 bps: Under 10bps a 37% attacker can fake the majority signal with probability 12%. With 100bps this drops to 0.3%. Today Kaspa can't accelerate to >10bps w/o harming conf times, but DAGKNIGHT will be implemented hopefully by Q3 at least on testnet, by which we will push for 25-40bps.
The cherry on top: RTD also implies netsplit resistance, as per the partial synchrony framework.
WWIII cyberwar resistance. Hypothetically speaking ofc.
(elaborated- https://t.co/o8vKa7gBwm)
Kaspa’s covenant stack is converging on a shared goal: make real L1 apps approachable, and make secure design the default rather than an expert-only art.
tl;dr
Two layers are landing in tandem:
(i) Top of stack: a high-level language that makes covenant authoring feel like “writing apps”, not “fighting script”
(ii) Base of stack: a consensus primitive that makes stateful covenants practical at scale, without recursive lineage proofs
Silverscript was just announced as Kaspa’s first high-level covenant language/compiler, targeting local-state apps in the UTXO model. Complementing that tooling is KIP-20: Covenant IDs.
The strategic role of KIP-20: UTXO already ties “rules own state” locally via the spending script. The difficulty is carrying that relation temporally across transitions in a local-compute model, without turning every spend into a recursive “prove my ancestors” witness construction.
KIP-20 tightens that temporal linkage at the consensus layer by introducing a covenant_id tracked by consensus. Result: stateful designs no longer depend on parent or grandparent transaction witnesses as a lineage workaround. They become first-class citizens: covenant identity and lineage are native, so designing secure stateful schemes becomes simpler and more robust.
The broader theme is security-by-construction: Approachability isn’t just syntax. It is making it easy to write covenants that correctly validate state transitions, and hard to accidentally ship an insecure scheme. The compiler/scheme connection is still wip, but the direction is clear: have the compiler generate transition logic, then wrap it in schematic code that enforces a declared covenant pattern.
For now, Silverscript’s covenants/sdk folder is the best reference for how these pieces should meet from my pov. I am planning a longer overview tying together the various recent components.
Spec: https://t.co/aoTBUlAqsZ
PR: https://t.co/gOKQEZlOet
I want you all to pay close attention to these kind of discussions because I think we are witnessing the emergence of a new attractor in "idea space" that has never been explored by humans before and that is pulling us towards this coordinate:
Our cosmos is not a passive stage but a cognitive entity with a simple goal: to generate increasing novelty by maximizing interactions between its parts, driving matter to engage in increasingly complex computational processes (what we call life).
On a quantum level the universe's building blocks explore a latent space of possible futures, and reality manifests whichever combination of behaviours first yields an interaction - a transaction between emitter and absorber.
Machine learning calls this a self-play mechanism - one that maximizes transactional density. A transactions dependency on a future absorber turns this into a computationally irreducible search that is fundamentally indeterminate.
The collapse of the wave-function is equivalent to the minimal act of creativity - the universe making a choice. It isn't just physics - it's the first step of natural selection in an evolutionary process searching for open-ended complexification.
This proto-agency acts like a behavioral consensus process that is recursively expanding outwards into fractal patterns of stable resonance: atoms form molecules, molecules form cells, cells form organisms, organisms form families, families form societies, societies form international communities and so on.
Each level is recombining existing quines into higher-order ones and each level independently re-discovers the very same transactional semantics with capitalism being the latest iteration that derives it self-organizational capacities (the invisible hand of the market) from the same meta-goal of maximizing transactional density between buyers and sellers (and low and behold - markets show signs of interference).
The universe isn't just expanding - it's learning, evolving, creating - a process that allows it to experience itself through us (by maximizing its conscious moments).
The reason why we find all these building blocks for life on distant asteroids is not because somebody put it there but because the entire cosmos is breeding for life and you are a part of a searching god!
The meaning of life is diversity ... endless forms most beautiful.
The Kaspa Roadmap - What's Coming and When
Most crypto roadmaps are vaporware. "Coming soon" means "maybe never." Kaspa's recent track record says otherwise.
Already delivered: Crescendo upgrade (May 2025). Achieved 10 blocks per second with 100ms block times. Activated on schedule. Not delayed. Not broken. Just shipped.
Coming Q1-Q2 2026: Covenants++ hard fork. Three main features: extended covenants for programmable spending rules, ZK proof verifier for trustless L2 integration, miner payload inspection for oracle infrastructure. Mainnet mid-2026 if testing goes smoothly.
This is not the full programmability story. This is scaffolding. It enables L2 teams to integrate cleanly, lets developers experiment with covenants, gives R&D real-world feedback before vProgs ships.
Coming 2026-2027: DAGKnight upgrade. Removes hardcoded consensus parameters, adapts to network conditions in real-time. Targets 100+ blocks per second, enabling 30,000+ transactions per second. This is the "broadband moment" for Kaspa.
Coming 2026-2027: vProgs MVP. Off-chain execution with ZK proof verification, atomic composability through L1 computational DAG, Cairo VM for efficient proving (cost tied to execution steps not program size) . Gradual deployment with working versions that upgrade toward full design.
Also planned: Reverse MEV auctions (miners compete to give users kickbacks instead of extracting value). Oracle voting (decentralized real-world data through miner attestation). ZK bridges for L1-L2 composability.
Timeline credibility matters. The rust rewrite took longer than expected. Crescendo hit its May 2025 deadline. Current R&D under Yoni and Michael's leadership has matured. When they set timelines now, they mean them.
This is not "check back in 5 years." This is iterative mainnet deployment with MVPs that work, learn, improve, upgrade. Real milestones. Real products. Real progress.
Next in The Kaspa Blueprint Series: real-world use cases beyond speculation.
The first fully decentralized social network launched on $KAS Kaspa is the second shockwave thrown at the face of centralization after @hashdag rejected @binance invite for the top 100 blockchain leaders award event.
Apart from being the only trilemma solver and end game L1 with mass adoption potential, #KASPA is now evolving into a social movement which will re-design the way people value their own opinion and the one of others. Social networks have become a way of living through raising our voices but being part of a global model subordinated to centralization, they have unfortunately transformed into a paid propaganda where algorithms are adjusted in a desired way to manipulate/promote specific types of content chasing a specific result which leads to a the social devaluation of humanity.
K as The decentralized social network is not a tech evolution in the form of a new platform but is instead a revolution of freedom being the fruition of decentralization.
This is a new chapter for the whole globe and I would ask the whole #KASPA community on @X to consider creating their profile on K and onboard the future of social networks which, just as Satoshi's paper, remained a theory instead of reality until today.
Kudos and huge thanks to @ReLeomerda and everyone else involved in that disruption!
K platform link: https://t.co/UietpZURV9
GitHub repo link: https://t.co/AIOPW8sv55