The status, overview, and phase of developments.
Dag Knight Consensus Research Publication: Completed
A published research paper discusses an innovative new consensus mechanism planned to be integrated into Kaspa. This new consensus mechanism, called DAGKnight, is an improvement over the GHOSTDAG protocol and is expected to result in even quicker transactions and confirmations. DAGKnight Paper.
Upgrade consensus to follow the DAGKNIGHT protocol: Funded — In Development
Motivation
DAGKNIGHT (DK) is a new consensus protocol that achieves responsiveness while being 50%-byzantine tolerant. It is, therefore, faster and more secure than GHOSTDAG (GD), which governs the current Kaspa network. Furthermore, in DK, there’s no assumed hardcoded parameter k (latency parameter), which can adapt to the “real” k in the network. Concretely, clients or their wallets in DK should incorporate k into their local confirmation policy of transactions.
Goals
- Complete the R&D work necessary to implement DK for Kaspa.
- Implement DK on Kaspa as a consensus upgrade.
- Add support and API for wallets’ transaction acceptance policy to correspond to DK’s confirmation speed.
Applied research
- Adapt the consensus algorithm to enforce a global maximum bound on network latency, which is necessary for difficulty and minting regulation, pruning, and more.
- Devise efficient algorithms to implement the DK procedures — the current pseudocode is highly inefficient. The implementation will partially utilize the optimized GD codebase, as the latter is a sub-procedure of DK.
- Research the optimal bps regarding confirmation times, and provide a recommendation.
Implementation
- Implement DK on the Kaspa rust codebase as a consensus upgrade.
- Design a transaction confirmation policy API and implement the supporting functionality in the node.
- Documentation of consensus changes and API additions.
Backward compatibility
- It breaks consensus rules and requires a hard-fork
- Adds (and potentially breaks) RPC API
KASPA Rust Language Coding: Funded — In Development
Developer Michael Sutton is currently conducting a rewrite of Kaspa’s programming language from Golang to Rust. This switch will boost Kaspa’s overall performance/speed, allowing for unheard-of transactions and blocks per second with conservative estimates of around 32bps. This rewrite is an integral part of the foundation to achieve Kaspa’s future goal of reaching 100bps! Rust is a high-performance programming language that allows for intense race-ready concepts to be implemented which fully utilize modern computing hardware. This enables such things as parallelism — the ability to simultaneously process different blocks on different CPU threads.
Mobile Wallet Development: Testing
A mobile-device wallet is currently being developed and in testing. Many in our community have expressed the need for a high-performance mobile wallet option. This mobile wallet will add to the already existing Kaspa wallet options: web wallet, desktop wallet, and Command Line Interface Wallet. Currently operational for use, it may have minor bugs and will be available for iOS and Android app stores.
Integrate Kaspa for use on Ledger: Funded — In Development
Thanks to a 24-hour fundraising blitz, development is underway for you to be able to send & receive your KAS quickly, securely, and easily from the safety of your Ledger. To safeguard your KAS holdings on the industry standard hardware wallet platform is just another step towards our goal of creating an everyday and safe use currency. Tangem wallet is also in Development and may arrive sooner than Ledger.
2023 White Paper: Development
Although there are numerous research papers written about Kaspa’s technology, an official white paper is being scheduled for release. This white paper will thoroughly combine Kaspa’s past research and current goals into a cohesive, consumable whole document to inform beginners and onboard developers.
Archival Node Improvements: Development
Currently, there is no P2P communication for archival nodes that allow them to exchange usually pruned data. Improvements to archival Nodes enable Kaspa to have a more thorough block explorer to revisit past transactions beyond Kaspa’s pruning point. Due to Kaspa’s pruning mechanism, transactions on standard nodes can only be visited three days in the past. With Archival Nodes, this will no longer be an issue allowing for more historical data sets to be retrieved.
Smart Contracts Implementation : Planning
Kaspa aims to become the fastest, most scalable, and most secure Layer-1 PoW crypto. And while Kaspa has already reached this benchmark, some fine-tuning still exists for peak performance. However, performance for the sake of performance is not the end goal of Kaspa. The broader goal is to create the ultimate Layer 1 to implement smart contracts, Defi, and Layer 2 applications over it. Kaspa hopes that a future ecosystem will arise on Kaspa that will be as strong as the foundation and wonderful community that helped birth it.
Tip: Development takes time. Most of Kaspa’s development is like coding into the unknown, feeling around a pitch-black cave for a way to build a house. We would instead the devs take their time and get it right than get it wrong by rushing and pressuring them. Patience is vital for success.
Feel free to comment and/or ask any questions.
You can also find me on the Kaspa discord — Bubblegum Lightning