By Roy Katsiri
Investing.com – A new cryptocurrency enters the crypto market: Yonatan Sompolinsky, one of the researchers behind the GHOST protocol, which was part of Ethereum’s original roadmap, founder, and CEO of DAGLabs, debuts Kaspa, a new digital currency network.
Sompolinsky says that Kaspa implements an upgrade to the technological concept of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Proof of Work, which stands at the foundation of Bitcoin, creating a DAG- a branched chain of information, that as opposed to the regular Blockhain can handle an almost limitless speed of block creation, with the first target being roughly 100 blocks per-second.
Investing.com learned that Kaspa will be launched as a testnet allowing researchers and developers to test the networks capabilities. Mainnet will be launched in the near future, thus becoming the fastest proof-of-work cryptocurrency network.
DAGLabs was founded in 2017 by Sompolinsky and Guy Corem, and raised $8mln from Polychain and Accomplice. The company is headed by Sompolinsky and Elichai Turkel. Gadi Glickberg, Former VP at Bitmain also joined the leading crew recently. Kaspa's protocol is based on Sompolinsky and Prof. Aviv Zohar's work who developed DAG-based SPECTRE and PHANTOM protocols which are now first implemented in Kaspa's technology.
No pre-mining launch
The goal of the coin's developers is to create a system which provides the speed of Proof of Stake with the safety and security of Proof of Work, keeping faithful to Bitcoin design and principles. After ending the launch of the testnet Kaspa will prepare for their mainnet launch, which will be deployed in a similar model to Bitcoin's debut in 2009 - no pre-mining, no special allocations to founders or other pre-allocations, but instead in equal manner for everyone.
With the testnet launch, Kaspa contributors had already made a full node, web wallet and a faucet available for the user community. The network can also be monitored by a new block explorer (Katnip), Kaspa graph inspector, and Kashboard, that displays analytics and graphs about the presently-running Testnet.
Kaspa's goal is to serve as stable resistant DeFi (Decentrelized finance) infrastructure.
"The idea is to address two pain points, speed and privacy," Sompolinsky said. "At its foundation, decentralized currency is an understanding of the order of events in a network. The question of when the money was sent is crucial, because if you can pay with a wallet which has already been emptied, the coins are meaningless. With Bitcoin we use a blockchain, and the longest chain rule. We are taking Nakamoto’s Proof of Work algorithm to the next level by utilizing a DAG, which is a different mathematical ordering of complex chains, that in practice allows us to speed up the chain more than tenfold. Today we are already 15 times faster than Ethereum, and with optimization we think the technology can get us to roughly 100 blocks per-second.”
The main demand for this Internet’s transaction sequencer comes from DeFi applications such as decentralized exchanges, lending services and more. These use cases must today use the Ethereum network, though it is increasingly clogged, and its transaction fees are skyrocketing. Kaspa is meant to be used as the base sequencing layer, dictating the order of events with much higher speed and cheaper fees for such applications.
Besides the speed of the network, Kaspa is seeking to solve the transaction privacy problem.
“We recognized the problem of Front Running. Traders transfer requests to the network, and before they are accepted, sophisticated algorithms detect them and replicate their actions. It is like a person who tries to buy a ticket to a concert, but dozens of scalpers hurry to buy up the inventory and offer him the same ticket at an exaggerated price. The idea of Kaspa is to create transaction stealthiness, so that competing entities will not be able to eavesdrop on the network and thwart purchases in similar ways,” explained Sompolinsky.