What Is Kaspa – and Why Does Its Fast Network Earn Only $94 a Day in Fees?

Over the past year and a half, Kaspa has delivered almost everything its community asked for. Since May 2025, it produces ten blocks per second instead of one. Since June 2026, the chain runs smart contracts. Two add-on networks have arrived as well, hosting exchanges and lending protocols. For a proof-of-work chain, one secured by computing power like bitcoin, that is a lot.

If the story ended here, Kaspa would be a textbook case of a team that keeps its promises.

But between 12 September and 11 October 2026, users paid the network about 94 dollars in fees per day on average. Dogecoin took in 776 dollars over the same period, Litecoin 510. Meanwhile, new KAS worth about 71,500 dollars go to miners every day.

If you buy KAS because the network is fast, you should be able to answer one question: who actually pays for that speed?

What Kaspa does: bitcoin's principle, as a web instead of a chain

Kaspa is its own blockchain with its own currency, KAS. It launched on 7 November 2021. As with bitcoin, miners race each other, and the winner may attach a block. The method is called proof of work.

The difference lies in what happens to blocks found at the same time. On bitcoin, one wins and the other is discarded. That is why a block arrives only about every ten minutes there; otherwise there would be too many conflicts. Kaspa does not throw simultaneous blocks away. It takes them all in and puts them in order afterwards. Instead of a chain, a web of blocks emerges, a so-called blockDAG. The method behind it is called GHOSTDAG and comes from Yonatan Sompolinsky and colleagues (paper from 2018).

Because no block is lost, Kaspa can produce blocks far more often. Since the Crescendo upgrade on 5 May 2025, it is ten per second; before, it was one. According to the project, a payment is visible after about one second and confirmed after about ten.

The start was not entirely smooth. Around 22 November 2021, the network stood still for about 48 hours and was restarted from the last valid state. In the code, the chain has begun at that point ever since.

Kaspa is bitcoin's security model at the pace of a modern chain.

Which raises the question of what the team built with that pace.

What makes Kaspa special: the team delivers

Most of the big promises of recent years are live today:

An add-on network, also called layer 2 or L2, is a chain of its own that secures its results on Kaspa. That is where the exchanges and lending protocols of the Kaspa ecosystem run today.

Not everything was on time. Toccata was first announced for 5 May 2026 and arrived on 30 June. Kasplex was due on 31 August 2025 and arrived in late September. DAGKnight, planned for "End of Q3 2026" in an older roadmap on kaspa.org, is still marked "Proposed". Over the past twelve months, 23 developers made 229 contributions to the main project.

Late, but it arrives: the team can deliver.

So the capacity is there, and so are the tools. Who uses them?

Who uses Kaspa: fewer than the speed suggests

No major data provider measures Kaspa's usage. CoinMetrics only carries the KAS price; Artemis says "Metric not available". All usage figures here therefore come from the public Kaspa interface and a sample of 456 time windows.

And there is a trap. Since 17 March 2026, the interface's transaction counter has reported values that cannot be right. On 21 March 2026, for example, it showed 124.9 million user transactions, while the sampled blocks contained not a single one. For March to June 2026, the sample applies. Figures such as "600 million transactions", which circulated on news sites and on kaspa.org in February 2026, rest on the same counting method and say little about usage.

In the same 30-day window as above, Kaspa compares like this:

12 Sep–11 Oct 2026. Kaspa: counter plus own sample, excluding miners' reward transactions. Other chains: CoinMetrics.

By number of transactions, Kaspa sits between Dogecoin and Litecoin. By fees, it sits below both, by a factor of 5 to 8, and about 2,500 times below bitcoin. Active addresses come to at most about 18,000 per day.

And the new tools? The two add-on networks together hold about 1.3 million dollars in DeFi protocols (DefiLlama, 12 Oct 2026). There is no stablecoin such as USDT or USDC on Kaspa; neither Tether nor Circle lists the chain. Igra runs about 35,900 transactions a day spread over 157 active accounts. That looks like automation, not like many people. Custom KRC-20 tokens make up about 2 percent of user transactions today.

Fees were high once. In September 2024, users paid about 175,600 dollars per day on average. That was the wave in which thousands of new KRC-20 tokens were created: 818 tokens in that month alone, and such operations made up 72 to 100 percent of user transactions. Since December 2025, only 2 to 11 new tokens are added per month.

The network could process ten times more than a year and a half ago. The bottleneck is not capacity but demand.

That would not matter if the network did not need fees. Does it?

Tokenomics: miners live on new coins, not on fees

Kaspa has a fixed maximum supply of about 28.7 billion KAS. Of that, 27.75 billion are already in circulation, 96.7 percent. Miners receive new KAS as a reward for every block. That reward drops a little every month and so halves once a year, which the project calls "chromatic halving". Today it is 2.06 KAS per block. On 4 November 2026 it drops to 1.94 KAS.

At ten blocks per second, that comes to:

• 1.78 million new KAS per day, about 71,500 dollars at today's price
• about 2.18 million dollars per month
• about 476 million KAS over the next twelve months, 1.7 percent of supply

Against that stand 2,321 KAS in fees per day, about 94 dollars. Fees thus make up 0.13 percent of what miners earn. How much of it miners actually sell cannot be shown. If they sell everything, it is the 2.18 million dollars a month mentioned above, against spot trading volume of about 14 million dollars a day.

Why does this matter? Miners compute for money, and their computing power protects the network. Because the reward halves every year, their pay will eventually have to come from fees. In five years, new issuance will be a thirty-second of today's. At today's price that would be about 2,200 dollars a day, a good twenty times today's fees.

How sensitive the computing power is shows in the hashrate. It is 343 PH/s today, against 1,485 PH/s at its peak in late December 2024. That is a drop of 75 to 78 percent, and it followed the price, not the reward.

Then there is the question of who holds the KAS:

• The largest address holds 5.5 percent of supply. Its owner is unknown.
• The ten largest addresses hold 25.6 percent, many of them exchanges: MEXC, Bybit, Gate, Kraken, Uphold, KuCoin, Bitvavo.
• Three mining pools build 68.8 percent of blocks together (miningpoolstats, 12 Oct 2026).

Kaspa is also known as a "fair launch", meaning a start without advance allocation to founders or investors. That is only partly true. There was no premine and no token sale. But the project wiki itself says the company DAGlabs raised about 8 million dollars in venture capital in 2018, "mainly Polychain". After launch, DAGlabs mined for about five months on rented Amazon hardware, "not more than 3% (probably close to 2.5%) of the max supply", and distributed the KAS to investors and former employees.

Kaspa pays for its security almost entirely with new coins today. With every halving, the question of who takes over grows more urgent.

And what did the market make of all this?

Price against bitcoin: the big rise came before the usage

The price data starts in September 2022, when KAS became tradable on the exchange MEXC. Since then, the record against bitcoin looks like this:

The big year was 2023. KAS rose 21-fold. User transactions in the same year, however, fell from 73,616 a day in January to 51,424 in December. The price peak came on 31 July 2024 at $0.2056, before the fee wave of September 2024 and 15 months before the highest transaction count in October 2025. Today KAS stands at $0.0401, 80.5 percent below the peak.

Since the start of 2024, KAS has lost 61.2 percent while bitcoin gained 97.8 percent. In that time, 12 of 33 months ended in the green. In the 14 months in which bitcoin fell, KAS fell with it 12 times, by a median of 19.3 percent.

Are price and usage connected at all? Over 44 months from February 2023 to September 2026, barely. The rank correlation between monthly return and change in user transactions is 0.15. That more usage in one month brings a higher price the next does not show up at all (0.04).

You cannot read the 2023 chart as proof of usage. The usage came later, and the price fell while it did.

How did things go after the big months?

After big months: until 2023 it kept going, since then it has not

Nine times since September 2022, KAS has risen more than 50 percent in a month. What came next changed at the end of 2023:

Until mid-2023, a big month was almost always followed by further gains. That fits a young, small asset in the middle of being discovered. From November 2023, the month Binance launched futures on KAS, the six months after each big month lagged bitcoin. After February 2024, they were negative in absolute terms too. A sharp spike that fully reverses within weeks does not show in the monthly data. Along the way, however, there were three drops of 51 to 64 percent.

The early jumps came during the discovery phase. After both big months since late 2023, KAS lagged bitcoin.

And the deliveries so many had waited for, did they not help?

What the deliveries did to the price

Seven dates can be pinned down exactly. Measured is the price change from the previous day's close to 30 and 90 days later:

n = 7 events, listed individually.

After all seven, KAS was down and behind bitcoin 30 days later. After 90 days, it was behind bitcoin six times. The one exception, Toccata, owes its gain to September 2026.

And September had nothing to do with Kaspa itself. KAS rose from its low of $0.025 on 14 August to $0.050 on 26 and 27 September, 56 percent for the month. No Kaspa-specific event could be found for it. An attack even fell into the middle of the rise: on 20 and 21 September, a flaw in Kasplex's KRC-20 indexer let tokens be moved out of bridge custody, and ZealousSwap's pools lost 94 to 99.6 percent of their KAS side. The price did not collapse. By 12 October, KAS had given up 7.7 percent in October.

Buying on the upgrade has not worked on Kaspa so far. The delivery came every time; the price rise afterwards did not.

If not the deliveries, what about the expectations circulating around Kaspa?

What was announced, and what can be verified

What does not exist on 12 October 2026 can be checked directly. Binance, Coinbase, OKX and Upbit do not offer KAS spot trading. Binance has had only a futures contract since November 2023, Coinbase one on its international platform. Kraken has listed KAS since 19 November 2024. The full-text search of the US Securities and Exchange Commission shows no application for a Kaspa ETF.

Kaspa delivers technology more reliably than adoption. The story runs ahead of the usage.

The obvious objection

"Smart contracts have only been live since June. Applications and fees take time."

True, and that is why the question is open rather than settled. The first three months after Toccata show no movement yet, though: fees averaged 43 dollars a day in July, 148 in August and 21 in September. The 2024 fee peak also shows what demand on Kaspa has looked like so far: a wave of new tokens that was over after three months. And the project's next big goal is 100 blocks per second, even more capacity for demand that does not exist yet.

What this means for you

Kaspa's technology is real, and the team delivers. But the KAS price has so far not followed what happens on the chain. If you hold KAS, watch three numbers rather than the roadmap:

• Fees per day. As long as they stay in the tens or hundreds of dollars, usage does not carry the network.
• Money in the add-on networks. About 1.3 million dollars today. Only when stablecoins and real amounts arrive there will fees start to matter.
• The next reduction on 4 November 2026. With every step, what miners get from new coins shrinks.

What is not claimed here: that Kaspa is failing. What was measured is only that capacity and deliveries have so far not created demand that shows up in fees. The open question is whether smart contracts change that. The first answer will come from fees over the coming months, and how September 2026 looks after 90 days will be clear at the end of December.

How it was measured

All values retrieved on 12 October 2026 between 13:05 and 13:45 UTC. Usage: api.kaspa.org and a sample of 456 windows of the block sequence (12 windows per month from January 2024 to September 2026, plus 60 in the 30-day window). Counted are accepted user transactions, excluding miners' reward transactions. Fees are highly uneven, with single windows dominating; the median window came to 197 KAS a day. Comparison chains: CoinMetrics Community. Price: MEXC monthly candles KASUSDT from September 2022 (start of trading there), checked against Gate and KuCoin; bitcoin: Binance. Event windows from the previous day's close (KuCoin or Gate, bitcoin Binance). The calculation for 2031 assumes today's price and is not a forecast.

FAQ

Why not use the transaction count shown by explorers? Many explorers count a transaction in every block it appears in, and Kaspa often includes the same transaction in several parallel blocks. Miners' reward transactions come on top. In a sample of 247 blocks, 67 entries stood for 12 actual user transactions.

Is Kaspa a fair launch? Partly. There was no premine and no token sale. But according to the project wiki, DAGlabs, funded with about 8 million dollars in venture capital, mined up to 3 percent of max supply after launch for investors and former employees.

Why are prices before September 2022 missing? Before trading began on MEXC, there is no freely accessible, verifiable price series. The year 2022 therefore only covers September to December.

All KAS monthly returns in US dollars

Percent, monthly open to close, MEXC KASUSDT. September 2022 is the first trading month there. Of 49 months, 22 ended up and 27 down.

Not investment advice, not a recommendation, not a forecast — historical patterns are no promise.

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