Kaspa Tokenomics: Emission, Supply, and the Deflationary Schedule

Kaspa (KAS) launched fairly on November 7, 2021 with no premine, no ICO, and no pre-allocation. Its block reward shrinks on a smooth monthly schedule that compounds to a 50% reduction each year — a continuous version of Bitcoin's halving — and emission converges toward a finite maximum of approximately 28.7 billion KAS. For miners, the takeaway is simple: the reward per unit of work declines predictably over time, so efficiency and transaction fees matter more with every passing year.

Was Kaspa fairly launched?

Yes. According to the Kaspa Wiki, the mainnet was opened on November 7, 2021 "without premining or any other preallocation of coins." Kaspa was initially built by DAGLabs, which renounced ownership and transferred the project to the public domain roughly six months before launch. There was no insider distribution: DAGLabs and its employees received the same access as everyone else when mining began.

This is more than a marketing claim. Every coin traces cryptographically back to an empty genesis block. Kaspa's genesis proof follows the chain of pruning-point block hashes back to the original genesis and verifies that its UTXO commitment matches an empty set, while Bitcoin block hashes embedded in the genesis coinbase act as a timestamp that rules out hidden pre-mining. In short, the supply started at zero and has been minted entirely in the open through proof-of-work.

How does Kaspa's emission work?

Kaspa's monetary policy, documented on the official Tokenomics, Emission, and Mining page, unfolds in two phases.

1. The Pre-deflationary Phase

This ran from the mainnet start on November 7, 2021 until May 8, 2022. For the first couple of weeks the reward was randomized between 1 and 1000 KAS per block, then the first hard fork fixed it at a constant 500 KAS per second. Because the block rate was 1 block per second at the time, that worked out to 500 KAS per block. The phase lasted six months.

2. The Chromatic Phase

Since May 2022, Kaspa has been in its Chromatic Phase, where the block reward decreases geometrically over time. The mechanism borrows from a musical 12-note scale: the initial Chromatic reward was 440 KAS — the frequency, in hertz, of the note A4 — and the reward is reduced every month by a factor of (1/2)^(1/12). That is the same ratio as the frequencies of two consecutive semitones in an equal-tempered chromatic scale. Twelve of those monthly steps compound to exactly one half, so each year the reward halves. In Kaspa's framing, a year is an "octave" of 365.25 days and a month is a "semitone" of one-twelfth of that year.

The practical contrast with Bitcoin is the shape of the curve. Bitcoin cuts its block subsidy in half abruptly every four years, producing a stair-step emission curve. Kaspa achieves the same long-run scarcity but spreads the reduction across twelve small monthly steps, so the decline is smooth and continuous rather than punctuated by sudden cliffs.

Why is emission measured per second, not per block?

A defining design choice is that Kaspa's policy specifies how many coins are minted per second, independent of the block rate. The reward table maps each emission month to a per-second reward; the per-block reward is simply that figure divided by the current blocks per second. This decoupling became essential when the network raised its block rate. The Crescendo hard fork, specified in KIP-0014, moved Kaspa to 10 blocks per second while keeping the emission schedule precisely intact by converting the existing per-block reward into an equal-value per-second reward. The result: more, smaller blocks each second, but the total KAS issued per second is unchanged.

What is the maximum supply?

Kaspa converges toward a finite asymptotic maximum of approximately 28.7 billion KAS, as stated on the official tokenomics page. Because the reward shrinks geometrically rather than stopping at a hard cutoff, issuance approaches that ceiling without ever technically reaching it — the reward keeps getting smaller until it rounds to nothing. At a base rate of one block per second, the per-block reward is expected to fall below one sompi (the smallest unit, one hundred-millionth of a KAS) roughly 36 years after launch, at which point effective new issuance ends. A higher block rate shortens that horizon by log2 of the rate, since the per-block reward is smaller while the per-second emission stays the same.

Why does this matter for miners?

The block reward is the bulk of mining revenue today, and it falls every month. That has direct consequences for anyone running hardware:

• Declining subsidy. The KAS you earn per unit of hashrate trends down each month, even before accounting for changes in network difficulty or price. Revenue models built on today's reward will overstate next year's.
• Efficiency compounds. As the subsidy shrinks, electricity cost per terahash becomes the dominant variable. Lower power draw and lower electricity rates extend the profitable life of a rig.
• Fees grow in relative weight. As issuance asymptotes toward the supply cap, transaction fees become a larger share of miner income — the same long-run transition Bitcoin faces, but on Kaspa's smoother curve.

None of this is a reason to avoid mining; it is a reason to plan with the schedule in mind. Model your hardware against a declining reward, not a static one, and keep fee revenue on your radar as the network matures.

Putting it together

Kaspa pairs a genuinely fair launch with a transparent, rules-based emission curve: smooth monthly reductions that compound to an annual halving, a per-second policy that survives block-rate changes, and a finite ceiling near 28.7 billion KAS. To turn the schedule into concrete numbers for your setup, run your hardware through the Kaspa mining calculator, read the full mining guide to get started, and see whether the economics still work today in Is Kaspa mining profitable in 2026?