Kaspa Major Crescendo Upgrade Going Live 5th May

The Kaspa blockchain is set to activate its highly anticipated Crescendo upgrade later today, 5th May 2025. This hardfork will mark a significant technical milestone, boosting the network’s speed tenfold—from 1 block per second (BPS) to 10 BPS.

The upgrade is expected to go live on mainnet within hours, with wide-ranging implications for Kaspa’s performance, scalability, and infrastructure.

Faster Blocks, Lower Rewards

One of the core changes includes a 90% reduction in block rewards. A current reward of 55 KAS will drop to 5.5 KAS after the fork. However, because blocks will be produced 10x faster, the overall emission rate remains unchanged.

This shift means more frequent coinbase transactions and a corresponding rise in UTXO creation, which will be addressed through improved storage management.

Consensus and Protocol Enhancements

To support the increased throughput, Kaspa developers have recalibrated core consensus parameters:

• Target block time will fall from 1,000 ms to 100 ms.
• Finality depth adjusts to 432,000 blocks (12 hours).
• Merge depth increases to 36,000 blocks (1 hour).
• GhostDAG K parameter updated to 124.

These changes are aimed at preserving network security and operational efficiency under the faster block cadence.

Major Feature Activations

Crescendo also activates several key Kaspa Improvement Proposals (KIPs):

• KIP-9: Introduces storage mass regulation to manage UTXO growth.
• KIP-13: Limits short-term memory usage through transient storage mass.
• KIP-10: Adds introspection opcodes for advanced transaction scripting and future smart contract compatibility.

The upgrade also completes KIP-1, the final milestone in Kaspa’s transition to its high-performance Rusty Kaspa client, which makes 10 BPS feasible.

Transaction Layer Improvements

Post-fork, native transactions will support custom data payloads, opening the door to metadata-rich interactions and second-layer smart contract development.

Kaspa’s script engine will also shift to runtime signature operation counting, reducing transaction mass and optimizing fee calculations.

Smooth Transition Strategy

To handle the jump from 1 BPS to 10 BPS, Kaspa will reset its difficulty adjustment window at the moment of activation. Early blocks post-fork will operate under adjusted rules to avoid instability.

Pruning depth will also increase to ~30 hours to handle the higher block rate, though the pruning point itself will transition gradually.

This hardfork positions Kaspa for future developments, including smart contract layers, ZK-bridging, and other emerging applications. The changes have been stress-tested on the TN11 testnet for over a year, providing confidence in network readiness.

What It Means For You [NFA]

If you’re a Kaspa user, miner, or node operator, expect a faster and more capable network. Block rewards will drop, but frequency will rise. Node operators may need to monitor resource usage due to increased storage and bandwidth requirements.

If you’re a developer, Crescendo expands what you can build on Kaspa. For investors, the upgrade could influence trading behavior and network activity in the near term.

As always, do your own research. Not financial advice.

Community Reaction

As expected from one of the strongest communities in the space, the Kaspa industry has been super pumped up about the release. A lot of watch parties all over X and a lot of shouts to Binance and Coinbase to list Kaspa.

• Christian Ludwig: “Keep in mind while block rewards are 1/10th of what they were, that there’s now 10x more blocks in a given second – neutralizing rewards for miners pre vs. post upgrade (all else the same).”
• Kasdorex: “It’s time to take your head out of the sand.”
• CryptoConer: “This is a great achievement and innovation for the who @KaspaCurrency ecosystem, this will increase the adoption and devs attention to the chain”