Kaspa: why the KAS block reward drops to 1.945 on November 4

Kaspa is a cryptocurrency with its own proof-of-work network that does not build one row of blocks after another, but allows several blocks at once and then puts them into a binding order. Around ten blocks per second instead of one every ten minutes: that is the technical core. For holders, a date is coming up that concerns the money supply. On November 4, 2026 the reward per block falls from 2.060 to 1.945 KAS. The amount newly created each day shrinks again with it, and that in a network where 96.8 percent of all coins ever possible have long been in circulation.

The price stood at $0.0361 and 0.0322 euros on Sunday morning, with a market capitalisation of a good one billion dollars. That is enough for 75th place among all cryptocurrencies. How far the price sits from its record, how the valuation has moved lately and which levels analysts name is set out in our Kaspa price prediction. This article explains the substance behind it: how the network works, where new KAS come from, where you can trade them in euros, how custody works and what the tax office wants to know about it.

What is Kaspa? A proof-of-work BlockDAG instead of a linear blockchain

A classic blockchain is a row: block follows block, each pointing to exactly one predecessor. If two blocks arise at the same time, one wins, the other drops out of history and its work was for nothing. That is precisely what ties down bitcoin's speed limit: whoever clocks the blocks faster produces more such collisions and makes the network less secure.

Kaspa solves this with a different data structure. A BlockDAG, written out as directed acyclic graph, is a directed graph without cycles: each block may point to several predecessors, and several blocks may point to the same predecessor. Instead of a single row, a mesh arises. No block is discarded because it was finished at the wrong millisecond.

The security comes from the same procedure as with bitcoin. Proof of work means that anyone wanting to propose a block has to demonstrate computational work whose result anyone can check in fractions of a second. Kaspa uses the kHeavyHash algorithm for this, which runs on specialised hardware. There is no staking, no validators with a stake, no delegation. Whoever secures the network pays for it with electricity and equipment.

Two things Kaspa does not have matter more for the assessment than anything else. There was no pre-sale and no allocation to founders or funds; the project started in November 2021 with an empty balance for everyone. And there is no foundation watching over the treasury and the voting rights. Both make the distribution flatter than at many younger projects, but they also deprive the network of the marketing budget with which other ecosystems attract developers.

GHOSTDAG: how Kaspa orders parallel blocks instead of discarding them

GHOSTDAG is the set of rules that turns the mesh into a list. The mechanism in two sentences: the protocol looks in the graph for the largest group of blocks that know one another mutually, declares it the honest majority and arranges all remaining blocks into that order. Blocks of the majority group are called blue, the others red; red blocks stay valid, their transactions count, they simply carry less weight in the ordering.

The practical gain lies in the waiting time. With bitcoin, the security of a payment rises with every new block on top of it, and a block takes ten minutes on average. With Kaspa, ten blocks arrive per second, and each of them increases the weight of the majority group. A payment is therefore settled firmly enough after a few seconds that a reversal becomes unrealistic, without the network having to rely on a second settlement layer.

The procedure was designed by Yonatan Sompolinsky, an Israeli computer scientist whose earlier work on block ordering was already cited in bitcoin circles. The successor procedure DAGKnight, which is meant to lower the waiting time further without a fixed security parameter, has been described for years but does not run on the main network. Whoever uses Kaspa today uses GHOSTDAG.

Ten blocks per second: what the Crescendo upgrade delivered

Until spring 2025 Kaspa ran at one block per second. Then came Crescendo, a protocol change that multiplied the pace tenfold. The developers published the necessary software at the end of March 2025 as the mainnet Crescendo release; the change became active at the beginning of May 2025, tied to a counter reading in the network rather than to a clock time.

What matters for holders is what Crescendo did not change: the issuance per second. The reward per block was cut in the same proportion in which the number of blocks rose. Ten times as many blocks, each with a tenth of the reward, gives the same quantity of new coins per unit of time. Anyone who read back then that the reward had fallen by 90 percent saw only half the calculation.

In our own count on Sunday morning, a good nine blocks per second came together: 846 new blocks in a good minute and a half. The ten is therefore a target figure that the network falls just short of in everyday use, because the difficulty adjustment always trails the actual computing power. For practical purposes the difference makes no odds; for assessing advertising claims it does.

Mining instead of staking: how new KAS come into being

New KAS arise exclusively as a block reward for mining. There is no staking yield, no lending programme in the protocol and no way to obtain more coins by holding. Anyone reading about a yield on Kaspa is reading about a third party's offer, not about a property of the network.

Mining is done with ASICs, that is specialised chips for kHeavyHash. Graphics cards were competitive in the first months and have not been since 2023. For private individuals in Germany, the sums come down to the electricity bill: a device drawing several kilowatts continuously at German household prices does not usually pay for itself at a coin price of three cents. Anyone going in regardless should do the arithmetic first rather than follow reports from regions with different electricity prices.

For tax, mining in Germany is a different matter from buying and holding. There is a separate section on that below.

The KAS supply: 96.8 percent is already in circulation

Kaspa has a fixed cap of 28,704,035,605 KAS. In circulation on Sunday morning were 27,774,126,762 coins. That works out at 96.76 percent of the final supply, leaving around 930 million KAS still to arise before issuance ends. For comparison: with bitcoin a good 5 percent of the 21 million is still missing, and those last coins are spread over more than a hundred years.

The difference from bitcoin lies in the issuance schedule. Bitcoin halves the reward every four years in one go. Kaspa lowers it every month by a fixed factor, namely by the twelfth root of one half. Twelve such monthly steps add up arithmetically to a halving, but the curve runs smooth instead of in stages. In the network this is called chromatic emission, because the factors correspond to the semitone series in music.

For investors this has two consequences. The first: with Kaspa there is no event on which a halving narrative can be built, because the tightening comes in small portions and does not culminate in a single date. The second weighs heavier: because almost all the coins have already been distributed, hardly any pressure comes from the supply side. Whatever moves the price moves it through demand.

November 4, 2026: the block reward falls to 1.945 KAS

The next monthly step is calculated for November 4, 2026 at 13:54 UTC. The reward per block then falls from 2.06017223 to 1.94454365 KAS, that is by 5.6 percent. At ten blocks per second that corresponds to a daily issuance falling from around 1.78 million to around 1.68 million KAS; at a price of three cents that is some $3,600 less in new coin value per day.

The date is not an event at which holders would have to do anything. No address changes, no wallet needs an update, no deadline expires. Those affected are the miners: miners' revenue falls by 5.6 percent at the same electricity consumption, and anyone calculating tightly switches off. If the computing power in the network falls as a result, the difficulty adjusts downwards and the balance settles anew.

For anyone who needs a figure for the calendar: because the factor stays the same each month, the reward will in a year's time be at about half today's value, that is at a good one KAS per block. That calculation is not a forecast; it follows directly from the schedule laid down.

Toccata: Kaspa gains programmability on layer 1

For a long time Kaspa was a pure payment network: send coins, nothing further. In June 2026 the developers released the software for Toccata, the second major protocol change after Crescendo. This version brings so-called covenants to the first layer, that is conditions a transaction can impose on its own follow-up transactions, together with a facility for checking cryptographic proofs.

That makes it possible to build applications without Kaspa acquiring a virtual machine of its own along the lines of Ethereum. The route was deliberately chosen differently: an application computes outside the main network and only proves the result there. Toccata has been live on the main network since the summer, which can be read off the protocol's progress figure, long past the switchover point laid down.

Whether an ecosystem comes of it is open. The tools are young, the number of applications small, and a large part of the activity has so far run through a single rollup application. Whoever buys Kaspa for the sake of future applications is buying an expectation, not an inventory.

Where KAS can be traded in euros: Kraken and Bitvavo carry the pair

We checked the large trading venues on Sunday morning, and the picture is clearer than many comparison sites paint it. Kraken carries a KAS against euro pair with online status; the smallest order there is 120 KAS, the minimum amount 45 cents, and the price is quoted to five decimal places. Bitvavo likewise carries KAS against euro in normal trading, with a minimum order of 5 euros or 154.96 KAS and a finer price increment of six decimal places.

Coinbase carries no KAS pair, neither against the euro nor against the dollar. Bitget and MEXC trade KAS against the dollar stablecoin USDT, that is without direct euro access. Anyone wanting to buy in euros therefore ends up, as things currently stand, at two addresses, and both are authorised in the EU. Which platform charges which fees and where the spread lands in everyday use is shown by our comparison of crypto exchanges; if supervision matters more to you than selection, the overview of regulated crypto exchanges leads straight to the providers with EU authorisation.

One point that counts for more than the fee table when buying a coin of this size: market depth. Across all trading venues together, just under $9 million was turned over in KAS in the 24 hours before Sunday morning, against a market capitalisation of a good one billion. Some 2.8 million KAS of that fell to Kraken's euro pair, around 89,000 euros converted. An order of a few thousand euros moves the price measurably in a book like that. Limit orders instead of market orders are not a refinement for the advanced here.

Kaspa against bitcoin: the difference lies in the confirmation time

Both networks secure themselves with computational work, both have a fixed cap, neither knows a pre-allocation. What separates them is the pace at which things settle. With bitcoin a block takes ten minutes on average, and merchants usually wait for several blocks before treating a payment as final. With Kaspa, several thousand blocks arrive in the same time, and a payment counts as practically irreversible after seconds.

For that, Kaspa pays a price the comparison likes to leave out. Ten blocks per second generate far more data, and whoever wants to keep the whole history of the network needs space accordingly. Kaspa solves this with pruning: older parts of the mesh are discarded as soon as their validity has been proven in another way. That keeps the storage requirement small, but it means that not every participant holds the complete history, as is customary with bitcoin.

The second difference is maturity. Bitcoin has run since 2009, has survived several complete market cycles, is carried on the balance sheets of listed companies and underlies authorised funds in the United States and Europe. Kaspa has run since November 2021, has a narrower trading base and no comparable financial products. Whoever puts Kaspa into a portfolio is putting a markedly younger and smaller project there.

MiCA authorisation: what has applied to German customers since January 2026

The European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short, requires anyone offering crypto services in the EU to hold authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. Germany ended the transitional period for existing providers at the end of 2025; since January 1, 2026 only authorised houses may serve German retail customers. Which institutions the supervisor has recorded and which permissions they hold is published by BaFin in its register of crypto institutions.

For KAS that means, concretely: the authorisation attaches to the provider, not to the coin. MiCA does not examine individual crypto-assets for quality and issues no recommendation. An exchange with an EU permission may list any crypto-asset as long as it does not securitise a monetary claim. The fact that you can buy KAS at an authorised house therefore says nothing about the coin and everything about the exchange.

What the authorisation does give you is not little: segregated custody of client funds, mandatory disclosures on fees, an orderly complaints procedure and a supervisor that can intervene. What it does not give you is deposit protection. Price losses and insolvency risks remain entirely with you.

Custody: KAS needs an address of its own

KAS lives on the Kaspa blockchain itself and not as a token on another one. An Ethereum address accepts no KAS, and sending to a wrong address is as a rule final. Kaspa addresses begin with the prefix kaspa:, which makes checking before sending easier.

There are three ways to store it. The exchange itself is the most convenient and the one with the greatest counterparty risk: whoever leaves coins there is trusting the house. A software wallet on your own computer or phone gives you the keys but ties the security to the device. A hardware wallet keeps the keys in a separate chip that never releases them; how that works technically is explained in our article on what a hardware wallet is and how the device protects the keys.

A practical note on choosing a device: KAS is not supported by every hardware wallet, because a dedicated integration is needed for it. Check support on the manufacturer's site before you buy a device, and transfer a small amount first before you move the whole holding.

Tax in Germany: holding period and the special role of mining

Purchased KAS is treated by the tax office like other crypto-assets: as another asset within the meaning of section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. If you sell at a profit within a year of buying, that profit is taxable at your personal rate as soon as the sum of all private disposals in a year exceeds the threshold. After a holding period of one year the profit is tax-free. On the state of the political debate about this period and what the German finance ministry last said about it, we have put together the state of the crypto holding period reform.

Mining runs by different rules. Block rewards received are to be recognised as income at the time they are received, at the price applying then, and where the operation is permanent and directed at profit, a trade is often present, with business registration and trade tax. The coins later sold are then no longer covered by the one-year privilege for private disposals. Anyone mining more than occasionally should settle this with a tax adviser before the first business year closes.

Documentation is more laborious with a coin like KAS than with bitcoin, because purchases often run across several platforms and additionally via dollar stablecoins. Every exchange of USDT into KAS is itself a tax-relevant event. Which programmes bring acquisition dates, holding periods and swaps together across several exchanges is shown by our comparison of crypto tax tools.

The risks: 82.6 percent below the record and a thin market

On Sunday morning the price stood 82.6 percent below its high of $0.2074, which it reached on July 31, 2024. Over the last twelve months the value is down 31.9 percent, over 30 days down 9.4 percent, over the past week up 2.3 percent. A total loss is possible at any time with a crypto-asset of this size.

Three risks are specific to Kaspa. The first is the concentration of computing power: a few manufacturers of specialised chips and a few large mining pools decide how distributed the network really is. The second lies in the absence of a foundation. What works as an advantage in the distribution is missing in development funding; the protocol lives on volunteers and donations. The third is the trading base: two euro pairs and a daily turnover in the single-digit millions mean that one larger seller can move the price on their own.

Against that stands a network that has run for five years without a standstill, has come through two major protocol changes without splitting the network and offers a property that is rare in the proof-of-work camp: confirmations in seconds without a second layer. What comes of it will be decided by whether applications arise on Toccata or whether the network remains a fast means of payment without demand.

Kaspa: from November 4 every block delivers 1.945 instead of 2.060 KAS

Kaspa is a proof-of-work network with a BlockDAG structure, around ten blocks per second, a fixed cap of 28.7 billion KAS and an issuance that falls each month by one twelfth of a halving. 96.8 percent of the coins are distributed, and the next step falls on November 4, 2026. If you want to touch the coin, these are the three steps in a sensible order:

1. Choose a trading venue. In euros, Kraken and Bitvavo currently carry a KAS pair, both with EU authorisation. Compare fees, spread and deposit routes beforehand in the overview of crypto exchanges and work with limit orders in a thin book.
2. Settle custody. Decide before buying whether the holding stays on the exchange or moves to a device of your own, and when buying a device check KAS support first. The models with their integrations are set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Set up documentation. Record the purchase date, quantity and price of every inflow, including for swaps via stablecoins, because the one-year period depends on it. Which tools manage that across several platforms is set out in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)