There have been some recent new rumor that is fairly interesting, as well as two forks. And Rather than drop some small posts I thought I would combine them into one. If you found it useful please let me know in the comment section.
Kaspa gets forked twice
Kaspa has been the new hotness in crypto mining the last couple of months have been pretty crazy and it has entered a bit of a renaissance. And I would argue that this is to a very large extent thanks to Kaspa. And as with most popular cryptocurrency projects, there are always people who are looking to build on the shoulders of giants or forge while the iron is hot or a mix of the two.
Where the two new Kaspa forks, Karlsen $KLS and the more recent Pyrin $PYI. While Karlsen has been out for for some time, and like its parent Kaspa also has become popular to mine. Pyrin is far newer, but just like its older sibling it is looking like it will be popular among miners. But let us take a closer look at them to see what they are doing differently compared to their parent, Kaspa.
Karlsen
What they have done here is what we call a good old switcharoo. As in they have swapped out the SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm) part and went ahead and replaced it with Blake3 as its hashing algorithm. They are also claiming that they are ASIC-resistant. This means ASIC will not be able to mine it. Instead, they are focusing on GPU miners.
There are also a few other differences, like how Karlsen has implemented a monthly decrease in block rewards after the initial six months. They also have a much smaller maximum. It is "only" 4.961.000.000 $KLS compared to Kaspas 29.000.000.000. Despite taking advantage of Kaspa's speed, the deflationary measure taken means that the emission rate will be a fair bit slower compared to Kaspa. Karlsen will "only" have minted 49,47% of all coins after the initial 24 months, compared to Kaspas's 74,43% for its first 24 months. Do not get me wrong it is still a large portion for such a short time.
There has also been a lot of adoption in the early stages for Karlsen. Mines, exchanges, and miningpools more or less ready since day one. This hype along with the smaller block reward actually saw Karlsen do an initial rally reaching its all-time high of $0.2749 compared to Kaspa's all-time high of $0.1526. It has however come down a fair bit from that all-time high and is now trading at $0.0598.
Pyrin
While the days are still very early, they look very similar to their bigger sibling Karlsen. But there are some changes compared to it. The biggest for miners appears to be no mention of being ASIC resistant. While I will talk a little about this in the next section, I think we can take it to mean they are not planning to do anything about any ASIC or FPGA possibly coming online in the future.
The other big change is that Pyrin has clashed the block rewards even further. As they are now initially 17 $PYI compared to Karlsens 50. They have also limited the total amount of coins to 1.000.000.000. So restricting the supply even further. These in turn are things that will have a positive impact on the price. And if there were to be similar hype and adoption surrounding Pyrin as there were surrounding Karlsen. It might very well push past the $0.2749 top Karlsen had by 2-3x, going by the slower emission alone. But, of course, this is just pure speculation from my side.
ASIC resistance
While Karlsen is telling everyone about the ASIC resistance of Blake3, Pyrin is not doing the same. There can be good reasons for that. One of the bigger ones one could argue is that Blake3 being ASIC resistance should come with a big * attached. And if you read the fingerprint of it, it would say something similar to this. Only ASIC resistant due to the fact no ASICS are developed for it yet.
By that I mean this. Nlake3 has a core-centric processing focus compared to memory or memory hardening in the algorithm to percent the ASIC. This means that there currently are no ASIC or FPGA that are able to mine it. It does not stop people from simply developing one down the line. If the financial incentive is strong enough. And more or less the same goes for the other blockchains like Hypra formerly known as Rethereum, Radiant, and Alephium to just name a few blockchains that all share the Black3. But of course, they can always change the algorithm down the line if they believe that ASIC or FPGS will be a problem for the blockchain.
If we now then use this and take a look back at Karlsen and Pyrin. As I said in the section above. It would sort of imply that Pyrin has not taken a stand against ASIC. And if there will be some development down the line then so be it. But Karlsen on the other hand, has more or less sided with the GPU miners. They appear to want their network to be ASIC-free. With that, I would not be surprised if we see them take measures in the future to ensure it will stay that way.
Kaspa news/speculation
About a month ago there was news about Binance and Kaspa. And that's when we saw Kaspa enter the CEX, or at least put its foot in the door. This resulted in Binance listing Kaspa among its future trading pairs. And as a result, all this hype and buzz around it saw Kaspa jump an impressive 15% in one day. It also showed an 80% increase in trading volume that day.
twitter.com/Sompaulinsky/status/1734652016721330285
I do then percent the findings of @sompaulinsky on twitter. And what has he found you might wonder. Well, they looked into the whale wallets hiding Kaspa. A Binance wallet with a massive 136 million Kaspa in it, putting it in the top 8 in wallets. And what would an exchange need a big bag of cryptocurrency? For many reasons. But one of them is because they want to be able to offer it up to their customers as a trading pair. That would mean a Binance listing might be coming closer rather than later.
I have also included links to the whitepapers and sites for the two forks, in case you want to check them out a bit more in-depth on your own. But I would like to hear from you, are you excited about any of the forks, and why? Also, what do you make of the Binance bag full of Kaspa, think it is a sign of a coming listing or just some hopium vapor in the ventilation? Please let me know in the comment section below.
To be completely open, I am currently mining Kaspa on my two small AICS and GPU mining Karlsen on my 3060. In case you wonder. =)
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Thanks for the great overview. I am a Kaspa bag holder and the 2 forks are very interesting! Kaspa has breathed some new life into PoW chains.
Yes it have, it has started its own small mining bull run =) pretty exiting times and a nice change of pace =)