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I’m going to take the liberty and repost the brilliant creator of $KAS, my friend (and idol) Yoni @hashdag’s letter to @Binance here for visibility. I found myself nodding and screaming “yes” “exactly” at every sentence. Before you flame me, yes I work for a platform @UpholdInc and I’m proud of that. I try to keep the OG crypto embers burning inside a system that has changed the value and ethics proposition. Yes, we are all guilty in some way or other of perverting the original crypto spirit, and not all elements of OG cyberpunk were good, reasonable, morally acceptable or even realistic. But Yoni’s letter deserves more attention. I’m going to handwrite it in ink and hang it on my wall. (For the younger readers: handwriting is an old form of “texting” when you use a pen, pencil or other implement to draw letters on a medium such as paper using only your fingers and your own brain. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handwriti…) Here it the letter. It’s the crypto version of Jean-Paul Sartre rejecting the Nobel in 1964. ———— @binance, Thanks for including me in the top 100 blockchain people list, appreciate the signal! I must decline the Dubai invite though. I do not wish to disrespect, but many of the award voters are avid kaspians who rooted for my kaspa status at least as much as for my research. Let them win or count me out. Crypto has turned from a euphoric cypherpunk project to a house-friendly casino. You may not be the culprit, but as a top player you hold the lion’s share of the responsibility to correct this, and the October crash your USDe oracle glitch helped trigger adds to what needs to be addressed. There are three classes of crypto, as @0xMert_ put it recently: commercial crypto, casino crypto, cypherpunk crypto. <> A TBTF CEX should know better and play a different game with hardcore crypto projects. When binance lists a green frog three weeks post its “launch” but skips a fair-launched-Nakamoto-Consensus-100ms-upgrade-ATH-top-20-the-only-nonbitcoin-marathon-mined project, this is not merely binance rationally calculating; it is also binance molding the market in a way that is alas misaligned with the roots of the movement. (Hear hear!!!!!) You may feel that kaspa’s sovereign money thesis is boring – that bitcoin is already money and that implementing an internet-speed bitcoin is useless - fine. Wrong but fine. But what’s the thesis for the green frog? Money is a classic chicken-and-egg product. It is a scam up until one moment before tipping point, “most of the value comes from the value that others place in it.” Considering your resources and influence, I think it's safe to say you can serve as both the egg and the chicken and make it worth your while to push sound attempts towards tipping point. @cz_binance tweeted recently that “strong projects will be listed.” But binance is part of what defines "strong", it bears responsibility for the market’s compass and impulse and definition of strong. It is not a read-only entity. Binance listing fees are legit, they are just unfit for category cypherpunk. Kaspa devs and early supporters fairly mined less than half what Satoshi and Hals mined. We don’t have a 20% ZEC-style founders’ reward or protocol-enforced dev fund; this is not a jab at ZEC and the wonderful @Zooko, who was crashing in my car on a late Thursday back in the low ZEC MC days – if somebody deserves to win it is zooko – but assuming binance is not taking a maxi bet, it should revisit its relationship with hardcore crypto. We are here through bull and bear, ICOs NFTs XYZs; and we are the source of confidence that restores faith and capital inflow post meme-induced or CEX-induced crashes. Please fix this. Yonatan Sompolinsky

Three things are now sufficiently clear 1. @KaspaCurrency is an excellent payments system 2. Smart contract on $KAS will revolutionize the way we think about computing on chain 3. The day is not far off when Kaspa will function as the perfect rollup on any chain to handle most of the transactional work load at negligible cost The future is green, not orange or black.

18 months later and I’m sticking to it. Binance has played an irresponsible game as so often and depressed the price over months. Ethereum influencers and Bitcoin maxis have ridiculed Kaspa without having the slightest idea what a BlockDAG is. Retail bros have disparaged it beside of idiotic TA. With all the talk of Bitcoin DeFi and payment, the promise of massive demand etc and even with pension funds being able to buy Bitcoin, it is still struggling to go up. More importantly, Bitcoin has never achieved the e-cash status Satoshi envisaged. Go read the original white paper and not a single promise in there has come true except for the basic tech. The Bitcoin is Gold narrative is simply not realistic, as every geopolitical crisis shows. And yet millions are drinking the kool aid. The future is multichain, including permissioned and permissionless, special purpose chains and payment system. There is no ring to rule them all. 🧙 But there is one that stands a chance of becoming real e-cash system with thousands upon thousands of transactions a second at virtually zero cost. @hashdag spent decades creating something wonderful, simple, and sound. No flashy marketing no empty promises.

Kaspa’s Path to Zero-Knowledge Smart Contracts In the evolving landscape of blockchain technology, Kaspa stands out for its innovative approach to scalability and functionality. At the heart of its next phase is vProgs—verifiable programs designed to enable zero-knowledge smart contracts. This concept moves beyond traditional on-chain execution models, leveraging off-chain computation and cryptographic proofs to maintain a lightweight Layer 1 (L1) while unlocking sophisticated programmability. Drawing from ongoing research and development, including Kaspa’s recently released yellow paper, this post provides a structured overview of vProgs, their architecture, challenges, and potential impact. Kaspa’s Unique BlockDAG Architecture Kaspa’s core strength lies in its block-directed acyclic graph (blockDAG) structure, governed by the GHOSTDAG consensus protocol. Unlike linear blockchains, this design allows parallel block creation, delivering high throughput and rapid block times—often under one second. This efficiency is essential for vProgs, as it supports the timely submission and verification of proofs without compromising network performance. An upcoming enhancement, the DAGKnight upgrade, further refines this by reducing latency and accelerating finality. In a DAG environment, where minor reorganizations (reorgs) can occur, DAGKnight ensures that state commitments remain reliable, enabling vProgs to anchor securely to the L1 without excessive delays. vProgs represent a departure from monolithic virtual machines (VMs) that execute all logic on-chain. Instead, they emphasize modularity and efficiency: Each vProg maintains its own logic and state. Transactions explicitly declare their intended read and write sets, providing transparency into data interactions.. The L1 sequences commands but does not perform computations. Execution occurs off-chain, where the vProg processes inputs and generates a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof attesting to correct execution. The L1’s role is limited to validating the ZK proof, ensuring integrity without storing or running the full program. This preserves Kaspa’s L1 as a lean settlement layer. The ultimate objective is synchronous composability—allowing vProgs to interact seamlessly in real time, fostering an ecosystem of interdependent applications. To avoid vendor lock-in, vProgs accommodate diverse programming languages and VMs. Interoperability is achieved via a standardized interface for proofs and input/output (I/O), enabling one vProg to invoke another regardless of underlying technology. Finally, vProgs extend ZK proofs to include failure states—such as crashes, gas exhaustion, or infinite loops—preventing stalled transactions and maintaining liveness. For applications requiring confidentiality, vProgs facilitate calls between programs without exposing sensitive data. This is accomplished through cryptographic commitments: one vProg commits to an output privately, which the next uses as input. A chain of proofs ultimately verifies end-to-end consistency without data leakage. Kaspa’s combination of blockDAG, proof-of-work consensus, and DAGKnight provides the ideal substrate for vProgs: rapid inclusion, stable anchoring, and verifiable execution. This synergy positions Kaspa to host high-throughput, privacy-preserving applications—ranging from DeFi protocols to AI-driven oracles—while preserving L1 simplicity. Kaspa’s trajectory merits close attention. If you are out want to be a @UpholdOTC client, we have an in-depth report for you available now, why Kaspa is a game changer you don’t want to miss. Best, Doc Institutional@uphold.com

Because of the languishing price performance throughout the last 12 months, a lot of people have lost interest in Kaspa $KAS. Here’s a brilliant summery of while I personally still consider this the most promising project in blockchain. Hats off to my genius friend @hashdag for this marvel of technology. 🎩

🤯 For the first time ever customers at @UpholdInc this week bought more $KAS then $ETH and more $TAO than $SOL Welcome to the platform of the blockchain of the future 🛸 Uphold.Com/transparency

Another $XRP win. @Ripple had joined the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (#ISDA), dominating the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market alongside J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, and others.

Here is an explanation of why I think being a maximalist for anything including $KAS is dangerous. We now recognize #Bitcoin is a very limited, and perhaps flawed and ultimately doomed old technology. We hail the #blockDAG as the holy grail that solves the blockchain trilemma. But what this technology still needs is a sequence of blocks and the sequence of transactions. The order of things is still central to this way of thinking. However, pioneers of Blockchain technology, who think that the order of the blocks doesn’t really matter. DAGs have many mathematical problems and unintended consequences not fully explored. Academics are continuously searching for alternatives. What if I told you there is a technology that doesn’t care when and where a block is created and can always process it no matter how it enters not the blockchain but the Lattice. It is still in development and hasn’t proven its mettle in the real world, but that was the case once upon a time for bitcoin and only two years ago for Kaspa. At the heart of Convex lies a two-layer lattice system, the global state lattice, a secure layer acts as a public, foundational network, ensuring consensus amongst participants and a scalable and verifiable storage layer efficiently stores vast amounts of data using content-addressable storage and Merkle DAGs. This allows Convex dAppe to leverage virtually unlimited off-chain storage by linking value IDs directly from the Global State Lattice. What if this turns out to be superior to anything Kaspa has to offer ? What if in the years time smart contracts on KAS still don’t work as advertised while there are suddenly 10 new lattice computing chains dominating the conversation? 🤷‍♂️ What if artificial intelligence comes up with yet better solutions that will stun the world. 🤷‍♀️ Blockchain development isn’t a pissing contest. It is a continuous quest for improvement. It never stops. Human ingenuity knows no bounds. We live in a decentralized globally connected world where millions of people have an opportunity to contribute to the advancement of science. Nothing will ever be the last word on anything. That is the beauty of it. Don’t get stuck with what you think is the Holy Grail! There is no holy grail. The holy story was an invention of a French trouvère called Cretien de Troyes. We must come together to build a multichain future together. Maximalism of ANY kind is poison. And if all you care a little about is the US$ price of your pet token, you don’t deserve a seat at the table.

Unpopular opinion: don’t marry your bags however good a project. Long term #Kaspa chart shows some exhaustion. Given the headwinds from regulation, please be prudent in managing your risk. Waddyareckon?

18 months later and I’m sticking to it. Binance has played an irresponsible game as so often and depressed the price over months. Ethereum influencers and Bitcoin maxis have ridiculed Kaspa without having the slightest idea what a BlockDAG is. Retail bros have disparaged it beside of idiotic TA. With all the talk of Bitcoin DeFi and payment, the promise of massive demand etc and even with pension funds being able to buy Bitcoin, it is still struggling to go up. More importantly, Bitcoin has never achieved the e-cash status Satoshi envisaged. Go read the original white paper and not a single promise in there has come true except for the basic tech. The Bitcoin is Gold narrative is simply not realistic, as every geopolitical crisis shows. And yet millions are drinking the kool aid. The future is multichain, including permissioned and permissionless, special purpose chains and payment system. There is no ring to rule them all. 🧙 But there is one that stands a chance of becoming real e-cash system with thousands upon thousands of transactions a second at virtually zero cost. @hashdag spent decades creating something wonderful, simple, and sound. No flashy marketing no empty promises.

#Bitcoin was supposed to bring financial freedom from institutions and governments in a world where everyone paid in that new “e-cash”. This never happened. Centralized Bitcoin mining was never the plan. “Digital gold” was never the plan. Now, with ETFs, bitcoin is just another asset in the armory of financial planners wishing to improve their Sharpe ratio. A little excerpt from my upcoming book “A Blockchain Odysee” For some, Bitcoin's attraction lies in its purity and the limited supply. It's simple, uneventful, boring. You just buy it and hodl it, one day you will be unimaginably rich. Michael Saylor certainly will. But for those of us working in cryptography and decentralized computing, #Bitcoin hardly matters. It is not the holy grail of decentralization or the symbol of resistance against the establishment. We don't care if it goes to 400k, 1m or drops to zero. The 21 million supply cap isn't set in stone. The halving means that every few years, miners have to work harder to make ends meet. As we go to press, the last halving was three months ago, and #Bitcoin is still treading water at a price level that makes mining barely profitable. Bitcoin isn't pure and it isn't even scarce. If we cannot manage to implement DeFi and other useful technologies on this old mare, there will not be any income from transactions, while block rewards will go to zero. But why would anyone build an ecosystem on a network that is for all intents and purposes a technological dinosaur?

Three things are now sufficiently clear 1. @KaspaCurrency is an excellent payments system 2. Smart contract on $KAS will revolutionize the way we think about computing on chain 3. The day is not far off when Kaspa will function as the perfect rollup on any chain to handle most of the transactional work load at negligible cost The future is green, not orange or black.

Almost all #bitcoin L2s are failing. They overestimated the technical challenges of turning a fax machine into a quantum computer.

I’m going to take the liberty and repost the brilliant creator of $KAS, my friend (and idol) Yoni @hashdag’s letter to @Binance here for visibility. I found myself nodding and screaming “yes” “exactly” at every sentence. Before you flame me, yes I work for a platform @UpholdInc and I’m proud of that. I try to keep the OG crypto embers burning inside a system that has changed the value and ethics proposition. Yes, we are all guilty in some way or other of perverting the original crypto spirit, and not all elements of OG cyberpunk were good, reasonable, morally acceptable or even realistic. But Yoni’s letter deserves more attention. I’m going to handwrite it in ink and hang it on my wall. (For the younger readers: handwriting is an old form of “texting” when you use a pen, pencil or other implement to draw letters on a medium such as paper using only your fingers and your own brain. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handwriti…) Here it the letter. It’s the crypto version of Jean-Paul Sartre rejecting the Nobel in 1964. ———— @binance, Thanks for including me in the top 100 blockchain people list, appreciate the signal! I must decline the Dubai invite though. I do not wish to disrespect, but many of the award voters are avid kaspians who rooted for my kaspa status at least as much as for my research. Let them win or count me out. Crypto has turned from a euphoric cypherpunk project to a house-friendly casino. You may not be the culprit, but as a top player you hold the lion’s share of the responsibility to correct this, and the October crash your USDe oracle glitch helped trigger adds to what needs to be addressed. There are three classes of crypto, as @0xMert_ put it recently: commercial crypto, casino crypto, cypherpunk crypto. <> A TBTF CEX should know better and play a different game with hardcore crypto projects. When binance lists a green frog three weeks post its “launch” but skips a fair-launched-Nakamoto-Consensus-100ms-upgrade-ATH-top-20-the-only-nonbitcoin-marathon-mined project, this is not merely binance rationally calculating; it is also binance molding the market in a way that is alas misaligned with the roots of the movement. (Hear hear!!!!!) You may feel that kaspa’s sovereign money thesis is boring – that bitcoin is already money and that implementing an internet-speed bitcoin is useless - fine. Wrong but fine. But what’s the thesis for the green frog? Money is a classic chicken-and-egg product. It is a scam up until one moment before tipping point, “most of the value comes from the value that others place in it.” Considering your resources and influence, I think it's safe to say you can serve as both the egg and the chicken and make it worth your while to push sound attempts towards tipping point. @cz_binance tweeted recently that “strong projects will be listed.” But binance is part of what defines "strong", it bears responsibility for the market’s compass and impulse and definition of strong. It is not a read-only entity. Binance listing fees are legit, they are just unfit for category cypherpunk. Kaspa devs and early supporters fairly mined less than half what Satoshi and Hals mined. We don’t have a 20% ZEC-style founders’ reward or protocol-enforced dev fund; this is not a jab at ZEC and the wonderful @Zooko, who was crashing in my car on a late Thursday back in the low ZEC MC days – if somebody deserves to win it is zooko – but assuming binance is not taking a maxi bet, it should revisit its relationship with hardcore crypto. We are here through bull and bear, ICOs NFTs XYZs; and we are the source of confidence that restores faith and capital inflow post meme-induced or CEX-induced crashes. Please fix this. Yonatan Sompolinsky

If #bitcoin started today instead of over a decade ago, people would simply laugh at the outdated technology and flawed incentives. 😂

🤯 For the first time ever customers at @UpholdInc this week bought more $KAS then $ETH and more $TAO than $SOL Welcome to the platform of the blockchain of the future 🛸 Uphold.Com/transparency