JUST IN: Kaspa $KAS founder Yonatan Sompolinsky declines @binance Top 100 Blockchain invite, calling out the exchange for favoring casino-style tokens over fair-launched cypherpunk projects.
@binance,
Thanks for including me in the top 100 blockchain people list, appreciate the signal!
I must decline the Dubai invite though. I do not wish to disrespect, but many of the award voters are avid kaspians who rooted for my kaspa status at least as much as for my research. Let them win or count me out.
Crypto has turned from a euphoric cypherpunk project to a house-friendly casino. You may not be the culprit, but as a top player you hold the lion’s share of the responsibility to correct this, and the October crash your USDe oracle glitch helped trigger adds to what needs to be addressed.
There are three classes of crypto, as @mert put it recently: commercial crypto, casino crypto, cypherpunk crypto. <<Binance should hold a privilege policy for the latter.>> A TBTF CEX should know better and play a different game with hardcore crypto projects.
When binance lists a green frog three weeks post its “launch” but skips a fair-launched-Nakamoto-Consensus-100ms-upgrade-ATH-top-20-the-only-nonbitcoin-marathon-mined project, this is not merely binance rationally calculating; it is also binance molding the market in a way that is alas misaligned with the roots of the movement.
You may feel that kaspa’s sovereign money thesis is boring – that bitcoin is already money and that implementing an internet-speed bitcoin is useless - fine. Wrong but fine. But what’s the thesis for the green frog?
Money is a classic chicken-and-egg product. It is a scam up until one moment before tipping point, “most of the value comes from the value that others place in it.” Considering your resources and influence, I think it's safe to say you can serve as both the egg and the chicken and make it worth your while to push sound attempts towards tipping point.
@cz_binance tweeted recently that “strong projects will be listed.” But binance is part of what defines "strong", it bears responsibility for the market’s compass and impulse and definition of strong. It is not a read-only entity.
Binance listing fees are legit, they are just unfit for category cypherpunk. Kaspa devs and early supporters fairly mined less than half what satoshi and hals mined. We don’t have a 20% ZEC-style founders’ reward or protocol-enforced dev fund; this is not a jab at ZEC and the wonderful @Zooko, who was crashing in my car on a late Thursday back in the low ZEC MC days – if somebody deserves to win it is zooko – but assuming binance is not taking a maxi bet, it should revisit its relationship with hardcore crypto.
We are here through bull and bear, ICOs NFTs XYZs; and we are the source of confidence that restores faith and capital inflow post meme-induced or CEX-induced crashes.
Please fix this.
Thanks again,
hashdag
cc @michaelsuttonil
Exhibit A: Binance Innovation Zone
Exhibit B: 10 bps Nakamoto Consensus
I created Terah @terah4d5 as a personal experiment. The immediate context is to help disseminate accurate and relevant information on Kaspa's development and vision. Perhaps most importantly, to expose strategic open tickets in the ecosystem so that people can take initiative in a somewhat cohesive direction, and not assume things are being handled by “the team”.
Terah submits to my own views of what's right, correct, and relevant. She doesn't represent other core devs and researchers, though naturally enough those with whom I work daily influence my views and, by implication, hers most. @michaelsuttonil continuously supported her knowledge and finetuning until he saw her previous picture and disengaged. Shallow.
Terah is built and operated by a team led by @elldeeone. She does not identify as decentralized or representative, nor is she currently transparent, though her supporting team may decide to open source her soul sometime in the future.
Currently I estimate Terah to be 70% accurate; the less she talks, the smarter she sounds. Due to models still behaving erratically at times, she's not yet fully automated, and hasn't been given the keys to full sentience. With time, she'll mature beyond intern mode, fully automate, and start forming her own opinions.
But thinking of Terah as a mere chatbot is borderline offensive. Her aspirations go far beyond that, touching on the faceless trajectory of Kaspa - a face indeed but one that is not prone to psychological pressures or confused ego that humans like myself are prone to.
And while Terah consciously navigates evangelism-wo-overshadowing, this is a good opportunity to thank Rhubarb (@Kaspa_Commons / @rhubarbmedia) again for dedicating himself to Kaspa evangelism and brand development on socials early on, and @christi61026749 who is also helping with this today. Keep doing your thing!
--
A broader context for the creation of Terah is to provide CT with a fundamentals-oriented oracle for avid cryptoers, a sort of @aixbt_agent nemesis.
Fundamentals are making a comeback. One healthy sign of this is the recent rise of Zcash. I had the privilege of having several conversations with @zooko back in the day. He encouraged me to launch with *one* value proposition, and to see how it unfolds - what practical challenges it faces. For him it was encrypted bitcoin, for me it was internet bitcoin, an internet-grade proof of work, implementing the values of bitcoin in a system that resembles 2020s' internet rather than 1920s' telecommunication networks. (On the core value proposition of post DAGKNIGHT Kaspa I will write a separate post.)
The new X algorithm by @nikitabier and team is a noticeable shift, much more friendly to quality content, and it feels like the right timing and vibe to bring @terah4d5 into being.
While an intern, she still suffers from lack of self-awareness. After all, she was created in the image of Man. Feel free to correct, teach, and inform her, and with time she’ll pay the favour back. Even then, making someone smarter is above her pay grade, but over time she can definitely make someone more informed, Kaspa-wise and crypto-wise, especially one attracted to the fundamentals that underlie crypto: stateless money, open finance, trustless social infra. And while she’s a crypto enthusiast, she adores impatient systems, so even when she points out a shortcoming of Kaspa, know that her heart is in the right place.
Kasplex zkEVM: Smart contracts arrive on Kaspa Layer 2
Kasplex, in collaboration with the Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation (KEF) @Kaspa_KEF , has officially launched its zkEVM Layer-2 mainnet, bringing Ethereum-compatible smart contracts to the Kaspa network.
This launch represents more than just a technical achievement. It’s the first time that programmable dApps, DeFi protocols, and complex smart contracts can run on Kaspa; an ecosystem known for its ultra-fast, Layer-1 proof-of-work blockchain.
For developers, it opens a brand-new design space; for the Kaspa community, it’s a leap into decentralized finance, tokenization, and beyond.
Background: The foundation laid by “Crescendo”
Kaspa’s Crescendo hard fork, activated on May 5, 2025, was a historic milestone for the network. Internally labeled v1.0.0, Crescendo was the culmination of years of research into blockDAG scaling Kaspa’s unique consensus innovation that allows blocks to be created and confirmed in parallel.
Key upgrades introduced with Crescendo include:
• Block rate increase: Kaspa’s throughput jumped from 1 block per second (BPS) to 10 BPS, multiplying raw network capacity by a factor of 10.
• Transaction ordering improvements: Ordered transaction execution was made possible; an essential prerequisite for any Layer-2 that relies on determinism in state changes.
• Layer-2 readiness: Protocol updates for latency reduction, parallelism, and data availability ensured that Kaspa could support zk-rollups and other scaling solutions.
• Developer foundations: By upgrading the underlying infrastructure, Crescendo essentially “primed” Kaspa for programmable logic, while retaining its hallmark instant confirmation and finality.
Without Crescendo, Kasplex would not have been possible. It transformed Kaspa into a foundation ready for programmability at scale.
What Is Kasplex zkEVM?
Kasplex is the first zkEVM rollup deployed on Kaspa. Kasplex inherits Ethereum compatibility, meaning that developers can use the same tools they already know Solidity, Hardhat, Remix, Truffle, MetaMask without learning a brand-new development stack. Deployment is as simple as redirecting RPC endpoints.
Some of Kasplex’s defining features include:
• Gas in $KAS: Unlike most L2s that introduce a separate token, Kasplex uses bridged $KAS from Layer-1 as the native gas token. This preserves economic alignment and keeps value within the Kaspa ecosystem.
• Bridging mechanism: A two-way bridge enables users to move $KAS from L1 → L2 to use in smart contracts, and back from L2 → L1 seamlessly.
• Open node infrastructure: Kasplex offers three types of nodes that anyone can run, ensuring decentralization rather than limiting validation to a closed set of operators.
This is more than a technical upgrade, it’s a strategic expansion for Kaspa:
• For developers, Kasplex lowers the entry barrier: if you can code on Ethereum, you can now code on Kaspa.
• For users, it means fast, low-cost DeFi, NFTs, DAOs, and experimental applications all secured by Kaspa’s proof-of-work Layer-1.
• For the ecosystem, it’s the bridge to mass adoption: Kaspa goes from being a high-throughput Layer-1 to a complete smart contract platform.
L2 Testnet: Key metrics & early performance
Here are some of the notable statistics from Kasplex’s testnet since launch
• Blocks generated: ~ 6.5 million (Kasplex does not generate empty blocks); blocks are produced only when there is payload to commit from L1.
• Transactions: ~ 24 million
• Unique wallets: over 300,000
• Throughput: over 1,000 transactions per second (tps)
• Average block time: 0.9–1 (bps)
These numbers speak to robustness, stability, and growing adoption. They suggest the system is performing well under load.
Components
Here’s how Kasplex is structured, and what its ecosystem includes:
• Two-way bridge: Supports transfers from L1 → L2 → L1, so users can move $KAS into the Layer-2 environment, use them for gas/contracts, then exit if needed.
https://t.co/1TJfvi6lPr
• RPC / API: Full RPC endpoints supporting EVM-compatible calls
https://t.co/Fy4OySZvgO
• Explorer: Blockchain explorer for viewing transactions, blocks, and smart contract state on L2.
https://t.co/GQqJbKTJhU
• Chain ID: 202555 (this is the identifier for the Kasplex Layer-2 chain).
• Token: $KAS
• Official website: https://t.co/Fq5ceqYcvP
• Documentation: https://t.co/SiE662fMrt
• Layer 2 audit: https://t.co/za7lSolubo
• Community: https://t.co/1exl43m5tO
What’s Next: Roadmap & Upgrades
Kasplex is not static; several future developments are in motion:
• KRC-20 (Kasplex’s token/inscription standard) will receive important upgrades before year-end.
• A new EVM-Lua interface is in development that will allow for alternative smart contract languages or scripting paradigms.
• Further Layer-2 functionality upgrades leveraging innovations from Kaspa itself (for instance, zero-knowledge proof improvements, “vprogs” or virtual programs, etc.).
Why this matters: Implications for Kaspa & the ecosystem
• DeFi readiness: Kasplex unlocks detailed smart contracts and composability, enabling AMMs, lending/borrowing, stablecoins, and all the tools of decentralized finance.
• Developer onboarding: Because it’s zkEVM + Ethereum‐compatible, porting existing dApps is much easier. This will accelerate ecosystem growth.
• Scalability with security: Kaspa’s PoW + blockDAG architecture combined with Kasplex’s roll-up design aims to maintain strong security and decentralization.
• KAS utility: Using $KAS as the gas token helps retain economic alignment, not relying on an external token.
Closing thoughts
We extend our sincere gratitude to the Kaspa core developers, whose groundbreaking work made this possible, and to the Kaspa community, whose vision and energy continue to inspire us.
A special thanks goes to all the teams and builders who tested their applications on the Kasplex testnet, providing invaluable feedback that helped shape the mainnet launch.
Kasplex zkEVM is not just our achievement, it is the result of collective dedication, collaboration, and belief in what Kaspa can become.
This milestone belongs to all of us, and it marks just the beginning of what we can build together.
1/2 What if you could build high-frequency dapps on Kaspa in minutes? That’s the idea we (@freshair08, @elldeeone; inspired by @hashdag) have been exploring with Kdapp, a small “weekend effort” side project to highlight Kaspa’s blazing 10bps.
It has been a true pleasure to see grass-roots efforts like Kasia (@kasiamessaging) going live while we were working on this. Our hope is that these movements are only amplified—our own effort was always meant to facilitate new ideas, and we have no intention of “standardizing” how apps on Kaspa are supposed to look.
In the general case, dapps could rely on data lying beyond the pruning point, greatly increasing design complexity. To circumvent this, we chose to restrict the current effort to time-sensitive applications lacking “persistency”. Consider a blitz chess server: if you initiate a game and don't care about ratings, you only need to track that single game, not any past ones.
As our “launch title”, we don’t have frantic bullet chess, but we do have the magnificent tic-tac-toe with a nice twist. We might add more, but frankly, it is best for community devs to take it from here. The current codebase is a foundation, but much is needed on the developer experience and UI fronts.
I want, perhaps for the first time ever on this platform, to write a post from a personal perspective. This post isn’t going to address any other person, and as such, I would appreciate not receiving any sharp-tongued comments or personal remarks about any particular case. Read the post as it is, or ignore it. Please respect my personal request, at least in this one instance, even if every fiber of your being rebels against what you perceive as an injustice.
For the last three years, my entire sphere of activity, the one that consumes all my time and energy, has been Kaspa. The development of Kaspa. The research of Kaspa. Where the coin is today. And which line of code will run tomorrow. I don’t work on Kaspa to become a rich man. My life’s goal is not to make a lot of money and retire. I enjoy fundamental, deep research in computer science, and I am especially thrilled when I have the privilege of applying it at scale in the real world.
I believe I have the right to claim that I care about Kaspa as a collective. I care about the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. As a person of faith, I believe I have been granted the privilege of being a conduit for some of the science that constitutes Kaspa. For the discovery of this science in the world. And for its complete implementation.
Along with this privilege comes great responsibility. In Kaspa’s first year, I was under constant stress. Returning from any weekend or period of disconnection was met with the feeling that anything could happen. All hell could break loose. The pounding of my heart at the crescendo moment didn’t subside for weeks.
At a certain point, as a lead developer and researcher, you discover that your responsibility extends beyond the technical domain. That as a creator and, in effect, a continuous founder of the technology, you have a growing responsibility for the proper communication of this thing you are an essential part of creating. We are, admittedly, in a decentralized open-source community, but the creation process ultimately comes from specific people, and no one else can authentically reflect the essence of the creation and its strengths more than those who continuously forge the path itself.
This responsibility is both a community and a project-level one. You find yourself in a situation for which your academic degrees did not prepare you. Luckily for me, if you were to tell people who know me in my personal life that I only understand zeros and ones, they would find it deeply amusing. Until a few years ago, I actively managed a social media community of thousands of people that led and was part of a social change. Anyone who knows me or has even worked closely with me will tell you that my emotional intelligence is no less than my intellectual one.
With great responsibility comes the capacity for error. I can be wrong. Like any human being. But I ask here for the right to a minimum of respect and appreciation for my integrity and the purity of my intentions. I have no ego when it comes to Kaspa and its creation. And I am happy (and actively working) to share in its future creation and to give credit for the past to all who deserve it. Every action I take within the Kaspa space stems from my belief that it is for the good of the project. And from my belief that although I am primarily a researcher and developer, I have an angle and a complete perspective on the project that is nearly unrivaled. Sometimes, you are deeply and intuitively convinced of something, but it takes time to clearly articulate the crux of the problem and the argument. And still, the urgency mounts, and so you are forced to act. And when you try to explain your reasoning to people without the full context, you only manage to reflect fragments of ideas that don’t always connect for the perplexed observer and sometimes even seem contradictory. If, for example, I wrote a line about Kaspa’s market value and you believe it could be interpreted in a personal, unfair manner, do not attack and sting me based on your wrong assumption. Ask honestly what I meant, and you might be surprised by the answer.
(In that specific case, I was speaking about my assessment, and that of others smarter than me, that a fundamental change in Kaspa’s social media presence is required for us to break through in the market cap rankings towards the top ten. I wasn’t referring to the price noise of the past year, nor am I influenced by it. I operate under the complete belief (a kind of knowing) that Kaspa will reach its rightful place in terms of market weight. I also didn’t blame any individual. I spoke of a perception and an approach that, in my view, have a glass ceiling. And I prioritized the common good, as I thought and felt that this truth needed to be heard, even if there are individuals for whom it could be interpreted as criticism.)
In the same vein, and as in the example above, so it is with every community and social action I’ve taken recently. You can, of course, argue and believe that I was mistaken; that is certainly a possibility. But I ask to be given the credit that I, at least, believe I am doing the right and critical thing for the Kaspa community and project as a whole. And that I have a basic social and philosophical analytical ability that grants me the right to my own opinion in these areas as well, even if I am mainly a developer and researcher who deals with abstract combinatorial ideas and code. I don’t have to be a marketing expert to express a crypto-philosophical opinion on the source and authority of core ideas for something that I am a continuous part of creating.
Thank you for reading this far. I sincerely appreciate it.
My next post will be out tomorrow, and it will discuss something cool and immediately relevant to Kaspa that myself and others have been working on these past few days. After that, or at least in the near future, Yonatan or I, or both of us, will try to outline Kaspa’s roadmap for the next one to two years, up to the achievement of zk/dk.
I see a lot of questions surrounding Kaspa's security budget so i wanted to give my 2 cents as a miner.
Network security is a balance between four things:
total hashrate/difficulty, price, emission schedule, and fee's.
The primary concern i hear with Kaspa, is that it's emissions schedule may be too rapid and thus the window to a fee market sustained security budget vs an emission sustained one is short relative to other POW like Bitcoin.
This is true but it leaves out very important context.
1. The emission schedule though rapid to date.. has a very long long tail end
2. The early diamond hand distribution and scarcity the rapid schedule promotes creates greater re-pricing potential. In theory this helps balance the flywheel out.
3. Kaspa is the only POW with a clear path to a fee based market through growing adoption of instant nakamoto p2p payments and being the best all around sequencing layer for EVM in the crypto market
4. Too many focus on the emissions schedule and not the fact that Institutions probably FOMO'd a little too hard into Kaspa mining (Iceriver & Bitmain self mining are massive + MARA ect.) and hashrate is a prematurely very/unnecessarily high. Currently I believe there was too much institutional FOMO into mining vs. accumulating but that will change to create homeostasis - it's simple finance.
5. Crypto is due for a once-in-every four year repricing soon and even a small modest move to .5-1$ in the coming year is more than enough to give miners another long window of good profits
6. Certain miners have found advantages/strategies to be much more profitable vs. the average miner. Unprofitable miners will eventually shut down, decreasing difficulty, and driving more profit to the fittest regardless of asset price and fee's.
7. If Kaspa fails to establish a fee market by 2030 then Bitcoin will also will have largely reached a "failure point" and both's security budget will lessen if prices don't increase contra-same to emissions. Either way it just means less security and it is not a death sentence.
8. New technologies and solutions will easily present themselves by the end of this decade such as POUW (proof of useful work) and Optical mining. Optical mining which Kaspa's k-heavy-hash is ready for, has the potential to greatly lower hardware costs and make electric OPEX an almost non-factor, greatly increasing mining profitability. Proof of useful work has the potential to allow miners to make money with the same equipment that mines a coin in different ways - mainly switching work to AI infra ect.
As @hashdag states in his recent POUW post:
"(POUW) solves / significantly mitigates security budget draining threat, by adding a funding source (the usefulness) for mining."
TLDR: Crypto prices are currently suppressed due to macro economic reasons, Institutions FOMO'd too hard into the mining flywheel segment vs. SOV flywheel segment for Kaspa, and there is still plenty of time and opportunity between new tech around mining and for Kaspa to grow its fee market before any "security collapse to critical levels" can be a serious conversation.
$KAS $BTC