Kaspa KAS

Kaspa launched in 2021 with no pre-mine, no token sale and no allocation to founders or investors — an unusually clean start, and one drawn directly from Bitcoin's. Its research lineage is genuine: it implements GHOSTDAG, work developed by Yonatan Sompolinsky, whose earlier paper on chain selection was cited in Ethereum's own design.

The idea addresses a specific limitation of proof of work. Normally, when two miners find blocks at nearly the same moment, one is discarded and the effort wasted — which is why block times cannot be reduced very far without weakening security. Kaspa instead keeps both, arranging blocks into a graph rather than a single chain and ordering them afterwards. Blocks can therefore be produced far more frequently without the usual penalty.

Its limitations are the ones that come with being a base layer and little else. It began as a payments and settlement network without smart contract capability, so the application ecosystem taken for granted elsewhere largely does not exist. Early emission is high by design and declines on a smooth schedule. And a fair launch, while a real virtue, says nothing about whether the network attracts use — the honest measure of that is transaction demand rather than distribution history.