The Pinnacle of Ghostdag Protocol

Kaspa’s recent upgrade, termed Crescendo, marks a monumental step in the scalability and innovation of blockchain technology. Michael Sutton, a key figure in the Kaspa community, has shared insights on this pivotal development:

“Kaspa’s 10 bps crescendo upgrade, activated today on mainnet, allows the innovation and scalability of the Ghostdag protocol to truly shine for the first time.”

The upgrade decreased block time significantly from 1 second to 100 milliseconds, an achievement that fundamentally changes how transactions are processed and confirmed on the network. Here are some key points:

Block Time Reduction and Transaction Confirmation

• Latency Reduction: Dropping block time to below global round-trip times (RTTs) ensures transactions can be mined much faster after reaching miners within the same continent.
• Confirmation Speed: Although confirmation times don’t improve tenfold, they do see an enhancement by about 30%, making the network more responsive.

Throughput and Parallelism

With the block rate increase:

• Transaction throughput increases almost tenfold, with real-world efficiency rates observed at around 80-90%.
• Block parallelism enhances miner competition, promoting a fairer mining environment and potentially disrupting economic manipulations.

What’s New in Crescendo?

Beyond the increase in blocks per second, Crescendo brings:

• KIP-9 (STORM): A novel approach to managing state bloat within the consensus mechanism.
• Support for Basic Covenants and Additive Addresses through KIP-10 and 13.
• Transaction Payloads enabled by KIP-14, allowing for the carrying of arbitrary data necessary for smart contract operations.
• Archiving Transactions with KIP-15, which allows for trustless verification of transaction sequencing.

Implications for Future Systems

This upgrade paves the way for:

• Layer 2 solutions that can work over Kaspa with robust trust models immediately post-upgrade.
• The foundation for pre-zero-knowledge (zk) systems, allowing economical full smart contract execution verification.

External Resources

For those interested in diving deeper:

The achievement of running a multi-leader consensus protocol at sub-internet round-trip times without artificial network restrictions is not just an upgrade; it’s a profound statement on the capabilities of modern blockchain architectures.