Kaspa dev shake-up: L1 upgrade momentum surges

Hey, welcome to Kaspa Daily Pulse – here’s what the Kaspa community’s been buzzing about today.

So first up, some real builder energy. One dev casually dropped that they’re going to be paid for a full year to work on Kaspa L1 as a core developer – literally “I will be paid for 1 year to work on Kaspa L1 as a core developer.”

On top of that, people are stoked about having a public, two-way channel with Yonathan and Michael, saying it “breaks boundaries” even if it’s time-consuming for them.

So yeah, vibes are very much “devs are here, reachable, and actually shipping.”

Highlight two: the eternal roadmap anxiety – vProgs and DAGKnight. Someone came back from a London event saying they’d heard timelines for things like vProgs and DAGKnight could take years to hit mainnet. Cue the drama: replies ranged from “ decades, centuries even” to a more hopeful “Nah, DK is going to be public soon.”

There’s this tension between Somp’s “do it perfectly or don’t do it” approach and folks who want programmability now, even through L2s. Some are worried that waiting too long means more “downtime” for Kaspa, while others insist that smart contracts and vProgs have to be done right, even if it’s slower.

That flows into highlight three: DeFi and L2 frustration. People reminisced about the KRC-20 days, when some blocks paid around five hundred KAS and more than half of that was just transaction fees – “insane” in their words – and then asked why that momentum disappeared. Chain Finance caught a lot of blame, called the “best CeX disguised as a DeX” and accused of hampering Kaspa DeFi. Meanwhile, Igra gets defended as ready infrastructure right now, with talk of a Kas treasury and multiple node types coming.

Highlight four is pure popcorn: the Ethereum-versus-Kaspa bot war. People literally jailbreaked an LLM to argue as an ETH maxi, then countered it with Kaspa-maxi copypasta. Out of the chaos, a few narratives kept repeating: Kaspa as a GPU-friendly PoW blockDAG doing around three thousand transactions per second on mainnet and roughly ten blocks per second, with kHeavyHash aimed at avoiding ASIC dominance and no single mining pool near majority. Meanwhile, ETH got dragged for fragmented L2s, bridge hacks, and staking concentration. Totally chaotic, but honestly, it doubled as a crash course in Kaspa-vs-ETH talking points.

Finally, market mood. Price chat is quieter, with some saying people “aren’t degens anymore or gave up on Kaspa,” but you’ve also got folks flexing that wallet one bought more, celebrating a bounce from around five cents, and talking about holding ten years for serious upside. Classic mix of doomposts, shorts calling for zero… and die-hard conviction.

That’s it for today’s pulse. Let’s see what tomorrow brings. Catch you then.