My view on Kaspa (KAS) has not moved much since I first reviewed it in June 2024. I think it is a ghost chain, I think it is overvalued, and I think it goes to zero. Kaspa is a proof-of-work coin built on the GHOSTDAG protocol, which keeps blocks that Bitcoin would orphan, and I have never seen anything in the technology that justifies the hype. What I see is a coin you can only hold for a reason if you expect the price to rise.
The reasoning, in short: on chain, Kaspa mostly moves coins from one wallet to another and pays miners, it has no smart contracts, its core team is small, and its development is funded by donations to a dev fund. I am also biased. I hold tens of thousands of ICP, and the comparison I keep making is to the Internet Computer. I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice, but I would rather you know my position than guess at it. Every Kaspa post I have made is on this page, in full, so you can check my reasoning yourself.
My first review, Kaspa (KAS) Crypto Review: A Ghost Chain I Think Goes to Zero from June 2024, was the most aggressive. At that point Kaspa was around 17 cents, I said it was valued right next to ICP at about $5 billion, and I called it basically a copy of Kadena. I pointed out that Kadena ran from around 30 cents to about $22 and then fell back to around 15 cents, and I expected Kaspa to get one bull market and then fade. I also flagged the donation-based dev fund and a team page that listed none of the developers. I started logging it on a public spreadsheet of my calls so I could see whether I was right.
The three posts I published on 17 June 2026 narrow the argument. By then I was calling Kaspa a $2 billion project, and the focus moved to the parts I think matter most. In Kaspa in a Nutshell: Why I Think It's a Ghost Chain I went after the fair-launch story and the thin on-chain activity. In Why I Think Kaspa (KAS) Is Headed to Zero I argued that proof of work is a dead narrative that most people cannot take part in, and that holding the coin gives you nothing except hope.
The most direct of the 2026 posts is Dear Kaspa Holders: Why I'm Worried About the Tech, which is written to people who own the coin. In it I raised the funding problem, the absence of listings on major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, the fact that the top 100 addresses still hold 20 to 30 percent of the supply, and the Steemit split as an example of a hard fork not being decentralization. The team count moved as well. After my criticism, Kaspa added a team page, and I counted six core developers and researchers in 2026, where I had counted five in 2024. I still do not think that is enough for a project of this size.
Looking back across the four posts, the core of my view has stayed the same. The technology is not new enough, the chain does little beyond transfers and mining, and the launch story matters more to the coin's believers than the product does. What changed is the focus: from the Kadena comparison and the price history in 2024, to the funding model, the team and the bots in 2026.
The test I use for every coin, and the one I would apply to Kaspa, is whether you use the chain every day. I use ICP daily, because this website is hosted on it and my OpenChat community runs there. If you cannot name a reason to use Kaspa beyond the price, I think you should look hard at why you hold it. My full approach to checking any coin before buying is in how to research a crypto before you buy, and for the comparison that runs through all of these posts, see my Internet Computer (ICP) page.
If you hold KAS, read the 2026 posts first, then go back to the 2024 review to see where the argument started. If you want a personal opinion on your own position, you can book a personal video review from me at the review page.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Kaspa in a Nutshell: Why I Think It's a Ghost Chain (June 17, 2026)
- Why I Think Kaspa (KAS) Is Headed to Zero (June 17, 2026)
- Dear Kaspa Holders: Why I'm Worried About the Tech (June 17, 2026)
- Kaspa (KAS) Crypto Review: A Ghost Chain I Think Goes to Zero (June 12, 2024)
Kaspa in a Nutshell: Why I Think It's a Ghost Chain
From my video published June 17, 2026.
Kaspa in a Nutshell
You're about to hear my easy explanation of Kaspa in a nutshell. In my view, Kaspa is basically a copy of Bitcoin where they made a small change, called it a directed acyclic graph so that blocks aren't orphaned, and made it go a little bit faster. Wow, that's incredible innovation. Easy money, isn't it? For the insiders who were mining it before everybody else found it. When I look at Kaspa, I see a coin with no real value behind it. That's Kaspa to me.
People use the narrative like, oh, it was a fair launch. Well, all the people proof-of-work mining it back when nobody knew or cared about it had a nice head start. That's a nice "fair launch" where insiders just sat there and proof-of-work mined it for a year and loaded up their bags before everybody else knew about it. That's great. In my opinion, proof of work does not equal fair launch, because most people cannot set up proof-of-work miners. I've come to believe that proof of work as a narrative in crypto is dead and useless. Bitcoin mining is an absolute dumpster fire with only a handful of mining companies controlling the whole blockchain, and from what I can see it's just as bad on Kaspa.
Look at it yourself. To me, this is a ghost chain. This is easy money for them. All they did is mine some Kaspa and then pay some people. This is how easy this protocol was to make. A single guy created this. That's how easy this was. As I understand it, a single guy basically copied the Bitcoin blockchain, copied the directed acyclic graph concept, put the two of those together, and called it Kaspa. He invented this with his PhD advisor. That's how easy this was. Two guys got together and invented this, and now they're in a position to make huge amounts of money for themselves. And folks are just buying this and hoping that the price goes up? That looks ridiculous to me.
A Ghost Chain With Almost No Real Activity
Look at what a ghost chain this is. Most of the blocks have one transaction, and that one transaction is the miner getting it. Most of the mining transactions go to the same wallets over and over, getting the blocks. To me, this is not decentralized at all. That's how Kaspa was made: two guys, and it doesn't even have smart contracts. In my opinion this is an absolute trash chain, and this is easy money for them. The way I see it, they took a weekend to make their own blockchain and now they've made themselves rich. Maybe the founder didn't even get rich, I don't know exactly who got rich, but whoever did, this was easy for them.
Then look at a block like this one. For some reason there was a 12,000 Kaspa transaction in it. That's somebody probably on the inside selling. And if you look over on the founder's X account, he's only posted once in the last week. A hundred thousand reach, but only 30 or so reposts and 132 comments. When the Kaspa price was shooting up, all the hypers were like, yeah, it's better because of the price. But then look at it now. What substance is there in Kaspa? Everybody is just responding to the one founder's post. There's no substance there. There's nothing building on Kaspa, because Kaspa is a layer one that's basically a copy of Bitcoin, and you can't hardly build anything on it.
Comparing Kaspa to Real Innovation
Solana has way more. It's like practically infinitely more liquidity, and all these people are building on it. Internet Computer Protocol has the best technology in crypto in my opinion, and it's only valued a little bit more than Kaspa. And Kaspa uses bots. If you look at the people posting about Kaspa, they have bots that push their posts. They have bots that push the videos on YouTube. The only reason people even think of Kaspa, in my experience, is because bots push it.
If you look at what Kaspa actually is, it's a proof-of-work currency that implements the PHANTOM GHOSTDAG protocol. Basically all that does is allow it to go faster, but it's still not fast compared to Internet Computer Protocol. Right now, when you compare what ICP is doing with just a little bit bigger market cap than Kaspa, ICP has seven terabytes on chain and the most advanced tech in crypto. And look at the amount of blocks it's doing: 72 blocks a second. Then look at Kaspa's explorer. Oh, there's a block. There's one. Oh, look, there's a couple of blocks. In my view this is slow compared to ICP.
There's also absolutely no reason to hold the token unless you speculate on price. There are too many coins today. There are way too many coins. Marketing and hype and community and talking is only going to last so long when there are this many coins. Scroll down and there are 10,000 pages of garbage coins, and Kaspa just gets lost in all these garbage coins. The only way your coin is going to stand out is if it truly is amazing. Look at this ghost chain: literally an entire page full, and not one single actual transaction on it. Internet Computer in that same amount of time is done with around 4,000 transactions a second multiplied by ten, so something like 40,000 transactions on Internet Computer in the same time that Kaspa's done two, plus the person mining the block getting that one.
Why I Wouldn't Touch It
This is not something the masses should mess with, in my opinion. This is easy money for them. They copy some open-source code, make a couple of changes. I realize I'm oversimplifying slightly, but you've got to think of the simple people I'm talking to, the ones investing in blockchains they've never even taken off the exchange before. Do you use the Kaspa blockchain every day in your life? Because if you don't, why would you invest in it? I do use ICP every day. There hasn't been a day in the last year and a half I haven't used ICP, because my website is on ICP and my OpenChat community is on ICP. I use the ICP blockchain every day. It's easy money when people can trick you into investing in something you don't use, because then you don't have any idea about the real value of it. Why would you invest in a car company whose car you don't drive and have never even driven before?
If you are hoping that Kaspa is going to pump on these narratives of getting listed on exchanges, that looks insane to me, and you're paying an opportunity cost. You could have your money somewhere better. You could be investing in real innovation. ICP has the largest research and development team in crypto. Kaspa has six core developers and researchers. Come on. The projects are valued close to the same. Someone might say, oh, you're just butthurt that ICP, your little gem of an altcoin, only has a tiny bit bigger market cap than Kaspa. I am butthurt, because that shows how insane crypto is. A project created by two guys on a weekend, maybe not the exact story but probably close to it, two guys could spin up a little blockchain practically on the weekend together, and that's worth $2 billion in market cap. Meanwhile you have the largest research and development team in crypto that's built the most advanced tech.
The reason the price is where it is today, the way I see it, is because people are tricked into investing in worthless crap. The masses don't even do anything besides watch stupid videos saying that Kaspa is easy money, from people who are more than likely getting paid to say that, who are ambassadors for Kaspa, or who are getting bots to push their videos, because in my experience Kaspa uses tons of bots on YouTube. That's why I try to put more discreet titles, so the bots won't realize I'm trashing it. If you want to dig deeper into how I think about all of this, you can explore my Crypto Reviews playlist.
Why I Think Kaspa (KAS) Is Headed to Zero
From my video published June 17, 2026.
Here is a realistic price prediction for Kaspa that is not pushed by bots or built on blatant lies. In my opinion, it is going to zero. This project is an absolute dumpster fire. I have said it over and over again: I see nothing of value here. And I have got some new material to add to my previous videos on Kaspa.
The number one issue with Kaspa, as I see it, is that it gets blatantly pushed with bots, both on YouTube and on X. You see creators who do not have any kind of quality message hyping up useless, ridiculous narratives and pulling in huge numbers of viewers who do not even engage that much. Bots are clearly pushing the content, and from what I have experienced, Kaspa supporters have actually used their bots against my videos in the past to try to keep you from finding out what a pile of crap I believe this is. I have been saying this all along, even when it was at two cents. There are just no fundamentals for Kaspa, in my view. And now that it has started the downtrend, the chart is not in its favor either.
This is a $2 billion market cap project. For that, I expect some serious innovation, because for twice this market cap I could get what I consider the best technology in crypto, which is Internet Computer Protocol. When you compare Kaspa to that, the only reason I can think of to hold Kaspa is that you got easily tricked by bots into the project.
Proof of work is a dead narrative
Let us look at some of the critical issues. First, proof of work is just a narrative at this point. In my opinion it is worthless, it is old, it is decades old. In crypto it started with Bitcoin. I believe proof of work fails because the masses have no real chance of getting involved. Proof of work is set up to benefit the elite, the tiny portion of people who can buy the computers and set up the mining. So this is clearly an insider game. The regular person has no chance of doing anything besides buying Kaspa and hoping the price goes up on an exchange, which to me is worthless. That is not adding any value to humanity.
And is there any transparency about the team and who is actually inventing this? Now there is, after I was brutally critical of having almost nobody on the page. If you go to the Kaspa site now, the founder at least has his picture up, and they have done a good job of putting six core developers up there. But when you compare that to ICP, which has double the market cap and hundreds of people, including some of the biggest talent in crypto, you have got this one guy and a relatively small team of six core developers for a $2 billion project. It does not look good at all, especially when they are taking donations on their website. Nothing says "we do not even make enough money from this and have such a bad business system that, outside of mining, we need donations" quite like that. I have been critical of that the entire time, and I will guarantee you this does not work out, because you need a real business system.
ICP, through DFINITY, has an incredible business system, and proof of stake is great for a sustainable business system. Proof of work, by contrast, requires the Kaspa team to run all these machines to do proof of work mining, which I find insanely wasteful. And the Kaspa block times are not impressive enough to compete with something like Internet Computer.
A ghost chain with no smart contracts
The Kaspa blockchain cannot even do smart contracts. This is 2025, not 2014. The Kaspa chain is a ghost chain. Look at it for yourself: there is almost nothing happening from block to block. It is the same few miners mining most of the blocks, and most of the blocks have one single transaction, which is the miner getting paid to mine. To me this is absolutely a project with no substance, a ghost chain, a zombie chain. There is no reason to hold this.
The Kaspa narrative is that somehow proof of work mining is better than proof of stake. I will give them this: I am impressed that somebody behind Kaspa made an archive site dedicated to debunking myths and revealing facts. So let us go straight in. Almost everything they try to debunk is, to me, actually true, or at least there is some truth to it.
They say Kaspa was unfairly launched and secretly controlled by DAG Labs. In my view it absolutely was unfairly launched, because if you did not know about proof of work mining on Kaspa, you got nothing. All the insiders were doing the proof of work mining and got all the early tokens, super easy, with no competition. To me the fair launch narratives are absolute garbage.
Then they take on "proof of stake greater than proof of work." Absolutely it is, in my opinion. Look at most of the top coins today; they are proof of stake chains, or built on proof of stake chains. Plain and simple, and you can look it up yourself. Aside from Bitcoin, you have Ethereum and Solana. Most of the top cryptos are either proof of stake chains or live on proof of stake. Proof of work, I believe, is a dead, wasteful, useless narrative. Proof of stake gives you a very clear reason to hold the coin; proof of work does not. With proof of work you sit there and hope the price goes up. With proof of stake, you stake it, like on Internet Computer. On the Network Nervous System you hold the coin, you stake it, and then you can vote on changes. With Kaspa you sit there and wait and hope the development team does something. You get nothing for holding the coin.
Centralization, scalability, and speed
Here is more proof: 0.28% of Bitcoin addresses own 80% of the supply after 15 years. In my opinion proof of work sucks and excludes the masses from being able to participate in governance.
Kaspa's scalability is absolutely limited by depending on a layer two. Ethereum's scalability has suffered because it is dependent on layer twos. Those layer twos have extracted all kinds of value off of Ethereum and, in my view, made the entire protocol much more worthless, with a ton of value slipping onto other chains. Kaspa cannot even do smart contract transactions on chain. This is horrible, and it is absolutely unscalable, because you can hardly build anything directly on Kaspa. You have to use stuff off of Kaspa. No developer who has heard of Internet Computer, and more and more of them have, would build on Kaspa instead of Internet Computer Protocol, because with Kaspa you have to set up everything else first and then try to make it work. And nobody is going to build on Kaspa when they could just go to Solana and get so much more liquidity and a much bigger ecosystem.
So when you look at this, I just do not care about this one. I have said proof of work is definitely unsustainable. You have people like Elon Musk who would not support Bitcoin because proof of work mining is insanely wasteful in computing power and energy. Proof of stake not only eliminates the need for that, it creates a reason to hold the token. Proof of work mining is, in my opinion, way too expensive for average users. It does harm the environment, and it absolutely leads to centralization. One single Bitcoin miner controls a third of all Bitcoin mining hash rate. From Bitcoin we can see that proof of work is unsustainable, centralized, and inaccessible, and Kaspa is sitting here saying the opposite.
Kaspa's speed is not fast enough to keep up with Internet Computer either. Ten second finality is nothing compared to one second finality on ICP. It lacks utility. Absolutely it does, and as proof of that, just look at the transactions. Go to ICP and see how many transactions it is doing for twice as big a market cap. Kaspa is just another one of these proof of work layer ones. It is basically a copy. It offers nothing truly new or groundbreaking. It is like they watched my videos and then tried to make stuff up. It is not a major leap forward in blockchain technology, and I think that claim is ridiculous. Now, if you said this about Internet Computer Protocol, that would be true. Nothing else in crypto outside of ICP, in my opinion, can make that comment. Quantum secure? I am not too worried about that.
My realistic price prediction
Look at the people who are talking positively about Kaspa. When I watch them, I can tell they know almost nothing about crypto, and I believe they care nothing about you as an investor. To me, Kaspa is an absolute junk project that will go to zero. That is my realistic price prediction. I have come to believe the only reason people are buying Kaspa is because they are easily tricked by narratives. If you want to dig deeper into how I think about these projects, I have put together my Crypto Reviews playlist.
Here is the one honest test I would apply. Do you use the Kaspa blockchain every single day? If you do, then maybe it makes sense for you to hold it. But if you do not use the Kaspa blockchain every day yourself, in my opinion there is no point in holding it.
Dear Kaspa Holders: Why I'm Worried About the Tech
From my video published June 17, 2026.
I made this for you, the Kaspa holder, and I'm saying all of this because I care about you. Someone who loves you and cares about you should be willing to give you the constructive feedback that might actually benefit you, and that's what I want to do here. I want you to be a successful crypto investor. I have been in crypto for 11 years, I've researched thousands of altcoins, and I want to be completely upfront: I'm not a financial advisor, and this is not financial advice. I'll also disclose my position so you know exactly where I'm coming from. I hold tens of thousands of ICP, which is worth more than fifty thousand dollars. So that's my bias, and I'd rather you know it.
What concerns me is that I see some serious problems with Kaspa that, in my view, no one has effectively addressed. I've made a bunch of videos about them, and you can look all of this up yourself, exactly like I did. I've shown the research in past videos. Here I just want to focus on what I'm saying directly to you.
Kaspa Is a Narrative, Not a Reality
What I'm saying is that Kaspa right now is a narrative. When I look at the technology, I don't see a compelling reality behind it, especially compared to Internet Computer Protocol. Kaspa has gotten attention for some of its technical innovations, but in my experience those innovations are minor compared to the best tech in crypto.
One of the things that has really stuck with me after listening to thousands of crypto videos is that you have to think about where things are going. Are we heading toward a future of proof-of-work mining, or is proof-of-work the past? All of the proof-of-work mining narrative I see around Kaspa has one absolutely critical flaw.
Proof-of-work mining sounds good on the surface. "Oh yeah, it's fair, anyone can just start mining it." But the reality is, if you look at Bitcoin mining, it has continued to get more and more centralized over the last decade and a half, because the average person cannot just jump in and start Bitcoin mining. In this day and age, you realistically need tens of thousands of dollars of computers, the technical expertise to set them up, and a lot of cheap power to run them. And even then, you're unlikely to mine a single Bitcoin in a year. Technically you'd mine several at once if you mined any, but to have a realistic shot at mining a Bitcoin yourself, you'd need to put in hundreds of thousands of dollars in computer equipment and have cheap power. Because it's so hard for the masses to get into that, it becomes a system where the rich get richer. The majority of people can't participate, and only the elite are able to do it, so they end up with almost all of the mining.
That's the same issue I see with Kaspa. Kaspa's mining profitability is currently a significant concern. Even if the price went up, the mining still remains unviable. That means the average person is not going to participate in Kaspa mining either.
What Can You Actually Do With the Token?
When you compare proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake, you have to think about the utility of the token. Why would I hold Kaspa? Because I think the price is going to go up. That's the only reason. There's almost nothing you can actually do with it.
And you should always compare, because comparing helps you. Here's an analogy. If you were trying to date and you put two ugly people with nasty personalities together who steal from you and lie and cheat, it'd be hard to tell one apart from the other, wouldn't it? That's most of crypto. But if you had a really beautiful person who is in shape, athletic, makes money, has a great personality, and contributes a lot, and you compared them to the ugly people I just described, most of you wouldn't even think about the first ones. You'd go for the attractive option. Internet Computer Protocol, to me, is the hot sister, the attractive option.
When I'm holding my Internet Computer Protocol, there are a ton of things I can do with it. Even if the price goes nowhere, I can vote and actually participate in governance. Holding Kaspa does not allow you to participate in governance. To me, over the long term, we are going toward proof-of-stake coins, or we're going toward centralized entities holding all of your crypto for you and doing all the transactions on your behalf. That's exactly what we see in Bitcoin right now. Almost all Bitcoin transactions go through third parties like crypto exchanges, and they don't even touch the blockchain itself.
Two Possible Futures, and Kaspa Fits Neither
So to me, crypto is going down one of two basic paths in the future. The first is that centralized entities hold everything and do everything for you. In that case, the blockchain itself is irrelevant. I don't see that as sustainable, because it defeats the entire purpose of crypto.
The second path is one where the blockchain itself does everything. Where the blockchain hosts websites, hosts entire games, where you can stake it and participate in governance, where the blockchain is your home. That's your website. That's your community, like OpenChat. On Internet Computer Protocol, this actually exists today, and it's the only crypto where this is already the reality. I think more projects like this will pop up in the future, but the others are behind, much like Bitcoin has a first-mover advantage.
Where I see Kaspa is completely left out of either path. If we go down the first path, centralized entities already hold so much Bitcoin and so much of these other coins that Kaspa isn't really needed. Sure, it's one more coin they could make profits off of by letting people trade it, but the value proposition of Kaspa being "a new Bitcoin" doesn't make sense in that first scenario. And in the second scenario, Kaspa is utterly useless, because what I see the blockchain being able to do is send transactions, and that's it. So to me, Kaspa is essentially irrelevant in the future of crypto.
I don't see why anything would change, because from what I can tell, there isn't a big enough engineering team to push the technology forward. I've been concerned about Kaspa for a long time, because if you're accepting donations on your website, and your crypto is competing against cryptos with huge amounts of money, I just don't see how that's viable long term, where the core team is operating by asking for donations.
The Funding Problem
What I've noticed about myself as a content creator is that if I'm not making enough money, I'm going to quit creating content about that category. Applying that same logic, it seems highly probable to me that the core team will at some point simply run out of funding and donations. And there's a very high likelihood that when insiders dump, this thing could go to zero, like we recently saw with Mantra. Again, this is not financial advice. Anything could happen. It's up to us, we're creating the world in real time.
As evidence of this money problem, there's an absence from major exchanges like Binance or Coinbase, and that hinders Kaspa's ability to compete with Ethereum, Cardano, and Solana. Do you know what the key to getting listed on these big exchanges usually is? Huge numbers of users and a lot of money. Does the core team have enough money to pay Binance and Coinbase to get listed? And even if it does get listed, what's the marketing plan for the long term? And then what's the real underlying technology? Ultimately, marketing and technology interact with each other. I don't see why anyone who does their research at this point would buy Kaspa instead of Internet Computer or some other crypto.
Obviously, I hold a lot of Internet Computer and that biases my opinion, but I hold Internet Computer because I believe it has the best tech in crypto. I don't care about the cult or the narratives or any of that. I care about the reality of the technology.
The "Fair Launch" Narrative and the Bots
You'll hear people say that Kaspa had a fair launch, that there was no pre-mine and no ICO. But the top addresses still control a lot of the supply. According to the newest charts, 20 to 30 percent of the supply is still controlled by the top 100 addresses. And with a narrative like this, it's very easy to intentionally spread the Kaspa out among different addresses so it doesn't look so centralized.
I hardly know anybody in crypto who is actually holding Kaspa themselves. I've seen a lot of what appear to be bot comments and bot views across different platforms promoting it, but I barely know anybody who actually has it. So this is just my view, and I have no proof of it, but I've been a YouTuber for 14 years and I've seen a lot of bot activity across every social media platform. It appears to me that there are a lot of bots pushing Kaspa content. If I made videos promoting Kaspa, I'm confident I would get pushed by a lot of bots, because it looks like other creators making Kaspa videos have a ton of bots on theirs. I've seen a lot of what look like Kaspa bots come through my live streams and hype Kaspa up, but the people never talk back. The bots just post comments hyping it up, and they never go back and forth or respond. That's a really bad sign. Plenty of other cryptos are doing this same thing with bots too, in case you didn't know how this game works.
The Engineering Race and the Real Blockchain Dilemma
The Kaspa development team is also relatively small, and you're competing against projects like ICP that have hundreds of people, including some of the most PhDs working on a single crypto project anywhere. Going into the future, if this is a race, Kaspa is already way behind in either scenario, and I don't see how it's going to catch up. I don't see how anyone buys into this without purely the narrative hype and without thinking any further.
Some people say Kaspa solves the blockchain trilemma, but I'd argue that's a fraudulent trilemma the way it's presented to you. To me, the real number one issue in blockchain is that, besides Internet Computer Protocol, there's no other crypto that can provide the full stack, meaning the website, the backend, the interface, and the blockchain all running on chain. That's the most critical issue we have in blockchain. Whatever you want to say about the Bitcoin blockchain, you can't go to a website and interact directly with it without a third party involved.
That's the real dilemma. Even with Kaspa, you need a third-party wallet, or a wallet from the development team, whatever it is. It doesn't matter, because in every case you're not going straight to the Kaspa blockchain, you're going through some kind of third party, and that third party is interacting with the blockchain for you. For example, if you have a Ledger hardware wallet and you're doing Bitcoin transactions, you're going through the Ledger third-party hardware wallet to interact with the blockchain. That's the number one actual dilemma in crypto. If there were no Internet Computer, it would be a different story.
Serving the web on-chain is the real test
To serve the web the way Amazon and Google do, to be able to deliver a full application instantly to a user, you need an enormous amount of computation behind the chain. In my experience that is the real dilemma in crypto, and it is the one thing that only the Internet Computer actually solves. So when you hear all the talk about Casper and the blockchain trilemma, remember what the trilemma really demands: you need security, scalability, and decentralization across the full technology stack. Casper does not do that. It only does that for sending transactions.
Whatever security, scalability, and decentralization the blockchain itself has becomes mostly irrelevant if you are using some third-party browser extension like MetaMask for all these Ethereum coins, a Coinbase wallet, or some Casper wallet. It does not matter what the underlying blockchain is doing, because the third-party entities have got you. They can drain your wallet. They can cut you off from using the wallet. Their wallet can be hacked or infected with malware. Again, that defeats the entire point of crypto.
Right now I have looked at the Casper Explorer, and I do not see that there is even that much activity on the blockchain itself. So the scalability of the blockchain is untested, and it does not do what you really need it to do, which the Internet Computer does. There are more issues with Casper on top of this. From what I can see, they do not even have functional smart contracts, because the CEP-20 token implementation has been described as a flop. A decade ago, delivering smart contracts and tokens was a big deal. This is not the early Ethereum days anymore. So many blockchains have fully functional smart contracts and built-in systems to create meme tokens and pump them. You can create a meme coin for free on the Internet Computer with a few clicks, and Casper is still working on an implementation that, so far, is not very impressive, just to get the absolute basic stuff that other chains have already built better.
Why confirmation bias keeps people in
I mean, guys, this looks so obviously bad to me that it is insanity to me that people are in Casper. But the main thing seems to be confirmation bias. Once you see these narratives and you do not really think them through, you just feel that get-rich energy, you jump in, and then confirmation bias sets in. I am genuinely impressed by any of you who have been able to think this through with me this far.
And there is more like this. If you compare Casper to other ecosystems, Casper's ecosystem is extremely underdeveloped. I see no reason, if I were a developer, that I would want to try to do anything in the Casper ecosystem. There are not enough people involved. There appear to be a lot of bots pushing the content, but I do not see a lot of real people actually using it, especially compared to the Internet Computer and even bigger ecosystems. If you are looking to compete with Bitcoin, that does not seem like a good market to be in. There is no clear real-world use case for this. As I described before, it is all hype and people throwing out price targets for Casper. And I do not see any institutional backing. Outside of bots and creators producing content driven by confirmation bias, I do not see any reason this goes anywhere.
A hard fork is not decentralization
Here is something else. They have to hard fork the blockchain to upgrade it. That is not decentralized. Did you hear what I said? They have to hard fork the blockchain to update it. Now, I know you take this for granted on other blockchains, but that is not decentralized. That is a centralized group of people changing the blockchain to upgrade it. That is not decentralized. And all it takes is the community disagreeing on an update, like we saw with Steemit when Justin Sun bought Steemit Inc. The community disagreed with that and split the blockchain into Steem and Hive, and both of them went close to zero.
So I do not see any key selling point, any real reason I would hold Casper outside of just hype and speculation. And hype and speculation is what all of crypto feels like to me. You need real substance, and in my view the Internet Computer is the number one crypto with real substance. Now, these are just my criticisms of Casper. I am not going to go over the hype narratives, because there are a hundred other videos that do that.
My goal here is different. I am very well versed in all of the Internet Computer criticisms too. I have come to believe that if you are going to hold something, you should be very aware of all of the downsides and all of the problems. You should have a holistic picture of it. I have a very holistic picture of my wife, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and of myself, the good, the bad, and the ugly. For every investment, you should always know the good, the bad, and the ugly. The way I see my job when it comes to crypto is to fill in the gaps. There are a lot of people talking about the good parts of the Internet Computer, and there are not a lot of people talking about the bad parts of most cryptos. If you want to go deeper into how I think about money, holding, and risk, you can explore my Crypto Reviews playlist.
Kaspa (KAS) Crypto Review: A Ghost Chain I Think Goes to Zero
From my video published June 12, 2024.
Kaspa is a cryptocurrency that gets hyped up for its technology, and I see no evidence that it has any exciting technology. It also gets hyped up for being a fair-launch, proof-of-work coin, which people say is better than proof of stake, but I don't see that either. So I'm going to destroy Kaspa, because in my opinion Kaspa is a crypto investment that is more likely to go to zero from where it's at today than it is likely to beat Bitcoin. Almost no altcoin even beats Bitcoin over the long term, and Kaspa to me looks drastically overvalued today based on what I'm about to walk through. If you're holding Kaspa (KAS), you might want to hear all of this so you can decide whether you want to keep holding it, because to me there are some obvious, critical problems.
This is my opinion and my own experience as an investor, not financial advice. I record these reviews live, so some of the people who love Kaspa are telling me why they're hyped about it while I'm coming in like Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball ten years ago.
Kaspa is valued right next to the Internet Computer
First off, look at the fully diluted market cap on this crypto. Before we even discuss anything else, Kaspa is valued right around where the Internet Computer is today. It sits right next to ICP on market cap, so I'm going to compare the two a lot. All of my money is in the Internet Computer, based on the technology I'm actually using, and I'll bet you that 99% of the time that bet holds up. At the same market cap, I believe Kaspa is overvalued by at least 100 times right now, based on hype, speculation, and people not understanding the technology, both what Kaspa is and what else is already out there.
So what is Kaspa? Kaspa is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency that implements the GHOSTDAG protocol. Unlike traditional blockchains like Bitcoin, GHOSTDAG does not orphan blocks but rather allows them to coexist. So we're seriously comparing this to Bitcoin right now. It's 2024. Bitcoin didn't just launch, and here is another coin hailing itself as better than Bitcoin. Last time I checked, there were a lot of other altcoins with the exact same pitch. Seriously, we're still making "better than Bitcoin" blockchains? Bitcoin is dominant and number one. It already is the best at what it does. Look at all these other blockchains and layer ones that think they're better than Bitcoin. Is Kaspa a Bitcoin layer 2? No. Is it an Ethereum layer 2? No. Can you even do smart contracts on it? No. They say that's coming, but look at the price too.
Kaspa over the last year: I did not like Kaspa at two cents, and now it's up to 17 cents. Do I find that infuriating? Yes, because people are going to lose money on Kaspa, and I don't want my neighbors to be broke because some group of people deceiving them ripped them off on a cryptocurrency that, to me, has no real value proposition.
Kaspa is basically a copy of Kadena
In the simplest terms, they basically copied Kadena. Kadena was all hyped up before as a "better than Bitcoin," next-generation proof-of-work blockchain. Kadena is a proof blockchain that combines proof-of-work consensus from Bitcoin with a directed acyclic graph. Does that sound familiar? Yes. Kaspa is basically, in the simplest terms, a copy of Kadena. I know there are small differences, but the average person wouldn't pay any attention to those small technological differences.
Now look at what happened with Kadena. Kadena went from like 30 cents, all hype and speculation, up to around $22 at the peak of market euphoria. And then it died right back to where the price was before. It's now back down around 15 cents. It has gone nowhere in four years. Kaspa is basically like a copy of Kadena. Somebody took the same basic technology, made some slight modifications to it, and this is a drastic simplification, but everybody else will complicate things for you. Genius is being able to simplify. This is basically just like Kadena, and I think it's going to have the same trajectory: it has one bull market in it, one market of hype and speculation, and it's dead after that. Just like Kadena, that is what I expect happens with Kaspa.
If you want my honest take on other overvalued coins, this is the same pattern I broke down when I argued HYPE is the most dangerous altcoin in the top 20.
The on-chain data shows a ghost chain
You want some proof of this? Let's go look at the Kaspa blockchain, and I'm going to compare it to the Internet Computer, because when you put it next to ICP and consider the same market cap, you can see it for yourself. The Kaspa dashboard is linked on CoinMarketCap as the official explorer. Can you read that transactions-per-second figure? That's 2.2. I mean, I guess we need decimals because it's so small. 2.2 transactions per second. And everyone is getting hyped up that the tech is so great here that this is going to be a fair version of Bitcoin. Then the transactions per second just dumped to 0.2. This is a ghost chain.
Now look at the active addresses. This is people sending Kaspa from one wallet to another. These can easily be faked by bots, where you set up 10,000 bot accounts, have them send small amounts back and forth between exchanges. They're very easy to fake. Over the last 90 days, the Kaspa transactions have been pretty constant, which to me is a good indication of some solid bot activity at the foundation. But what are people actually doing in these transactions? They're just sending money from one wallet to another.
What can you actually do with Kaspa? Well, you can send money from one wallet to another, for a $4 billion market cap. You know what else can do that? Just go down the list of coins. Solana can do that. Ethereum can do that, though the gas fees are a bit higher. Solana has cheap fees. USDC is on a bunch of chains. XRP, you can send rapid transactions. Dogecoin has pretty low transaction fees. Cardano is slower, but you can send it. AVAX, you can send transactions on that. Tron, Bitcoin Cash, Near Protocol, Polygon, all of these send transactions from one wallet to another. Kaspa does nothing special at all. It is all hype and speculation, and almost nobody is even using it.
Now let me show you the Internet Computer dashboard. This is doing 4,000 transactions a second, which blows Solana away in raw transaction numbers. But if you consider the computation that's driving these transactions, the Internet Computer is doing the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of Ethereum or Kaspa transactions per second. This is serious computer infrastructure that is worldwide and allows you to build an entire website, app, game, or metaverse all directly on chain. And half of the value on the Internet Computer is locked in almost indefinitely. What about Kaspa? On Kaspa, nothing's locked. You can just send all of it and dump it anytime you want to.
The hype is pure fluff with no substance
Now, the people hyping Kaspa, if you look on their X account, where is there some substance where they're talking about the actual technology? "The evolution of a project like Kaspa impacts the world in many ways." How exactly does it do that? You've basically copied other people's technology. You've spun up your own blockchain and you're bringing a whole bunch of money in for the core team. But how is this making anybody else's life better? Is copying off of somebody else's paper in school making a better classroom for everybody else? No, this is ridiculous. "Kaspa is a holistic movement, allowing many to shine." This is pure fluff. It is absolute pure fluff. There is no substance.
If you go to kaspa.org, we can look for some more substance. I'll give them credit: when I was first extremely critical of Kaspa for not listing any of the team members, shortly after that they did make a page with some contributors. Now you've got the founder, Yonatan. And think about this. DAGlabs was founded by one guy who collaborated with his PhD advisor. One guy. This was so simple technologically to invent that it looks like basically two people put this together, based on what I'm reading. One guy and his PhD advisor threw this together. That's how easy it was to make Kaspa.
That's a brutal, ugly truth, isn't it? But most of these blockchains are really easy to make. You just don't know how to do it yourself. Somebody who's a developer could pretty easily take another blockchain, copy it, and start their own blockchain. And this is what I see has happened here. I broke down this exact same problem when I reviewed Humanity, a $6 billion coin with a 404 team page.
Compare that to the team and tech behind ICP
Now compare that to something like the Internet Computer, which has taken thousands of years of person-research from the largest research and development team in blockchain. They have full-time dedicated people, a huge, massive team, and they have built the most advanced blockchain in the world. This took years just to launch, and it has been running successfully for years. It does things like letting you put a gigabyte of data directly on chain. No other blockchain can do that for a fraction of the cost. Even on the layer-one comparison, it costs something like $10,000 to put a gigabyte on Solana, and Kaspa can't even do smart contracts, last I checked.
So I'm holding the Internet Computer, which means I've got my money invested in this massive team of technical staff: engineers, PhDs, computer scientists, superstar cryptographers who are cited and who hold a whole bunch of patents, working to make technology that nobody else can even copy right now. And that's the same market cap as Kaspa. So let's look at Kaspa's core developers and researchers. I'm proud of them for at least putting this up there, but it's five people. Even assuming six or seven people built Kaspa, it's not great technology if it was that easy to make. If it's really game-changing technology, you'd expect a lot more behind it.
Now, I know so many of you are saying, "Well, crypto is not about the technology, it's about the money." In the short term, the charts often are just manipulated by money. But in the long term, it truly is the technology that's going to make it happen. The technology is the driving force behind the money in crypto. So my question is: does the technology at Kaspa merit a $5 billion valuation? You have a core team of researchers and developers of five people, and then you've got five people on the marketing team.
Why "donate to the dev fund" was a red flag for me
Here's where I really trolled Kaspa hard the whole time: donate to the dev fund. Just logically, would I want to invest my money where the developers need to accept donations to a development fund? When I saw this, I thought, there's no way this is a good investment. If the developers are surviving off donations, that's a problem. In theory, I love going to yoga classes that are donation-based, but practically I spend almost all my money at the yoga studio. I pay a thousand bucks for the whole year of yoga so I don't have to worry about anything else, versus donation-based yoga. These five people are accepting donations, but here's what's even worse.
For those of you who are excited about proof-of-work mining, proof-of-work mining means that the only way the development team can even make money is by holding Kaspa and speculating on the price themselves, or by running proof-of-work miners to mine the transactions. This has proven to be a critical flaw with Bitcoin. On the Internet Computer, you have the network nervous system and you have voting rewards. So DFINITY is able to make a huge paycheck just by keeping their ICP locked. They've gotten over 20% in voting rewards because of age bonuses and such. DFINITY has an incredible business system where they can literally just hold the tokens and print, even at current prices, millions of dollars every year. I've calculated the salaries at DFINITY. When you work out how much money this team needs to make, you have tens of millions of dollars in salary a year to support this team. The Internet Computer has one of the absolute best business systems and most transparent governance in all of crypto.
And Kaspa? The only way the developers can make money is to speculate on price or to proof-of-work mine all by themselves. Each of these blocks is mining 103 Kaspa right now, which comes out to like 20 bucks. So the developers basically have to run proof-of-work hardware to mine. But if we've looked at the history of Bitcoin, the more successful a crypto is, the more outside companies come in and buy up mining hardware cheaper than everybody else through big bulk deals.
And it looks like a lot of the Kaspa transactions are purely mining. If you calculate it out, there are 3,600 seconds in an hour and over 86,000 seconds in a day. Depending on whether they're counting the mining or not, and it looks like they've filtered those out, the vast majority of Kaspa transactions are mining transactions. There's hardly anything besides mining. And if Kaspa actually did well and you got outside investment into the mining, then the developers are looking at not having any funding at all. The only way they can continue developing is to sell their Kaspa, and eventually the developers will run out of Kaspa. Then who's paying the development team to innovate the technology? If the technology is not constantly innovating and adapting like the Internet Computer is, this is never going to succeed.
Why I think Kaspa is more likely to go to zero
So this, to me, looks like the absolute epitome of hype and speculation, with nothing exciting that I see at all in the technology. You can't host a website on chain. You can't put an NFT on chain. Some people are saying, "Well, this is going to be the next Bitcoin." That is ridiculous. Why would this be the next Bitcoin when you have massive ecosystems like Solana already? And I think Solana is going to zero too. But you compare Solana and Kaspa, and Solana has way more users and has proof of stake to lock up the tokens. With Kaspa, the only way you make a profit is by holding the tokens and hoping the price goes up.
So far that has gone well, but as we've seen over the long term, that doesn't work out well. What happens over the long term is you'll have this climb up in one bull run, and then it's dead. And there's no guarantee Kaspa is even going to have a bull run like Kadena did, especially since Kaspa has already done a 10X. How much higher is it going to go? It's already up to $5 billion. There's nothing that I see that excites me at all about Kaspa, literally nothing. It's an example of something relatively easy to create, which is most of crypto, that's hyped up, where you see a lot of conversation that has no talk about the actual technology but a lot of fluffy, emotional, narrative-based stories. "Fair launch." Who cares if it's fair launch? Did you get any of it at launch?
It doesn't matter if it's fair launch. Kaspa is hyped up that it's fair launch, so what, did you get it? I didn't. Did all the people on the inside who set up proof-of-work mining since the beginning? You didn't know about it. So I don't think that's very fair, is it? And it doesn't matter if it was fair-launched or if the initial team kept all of it, because who was mining this at the beginning? The initial team would have been almost the only people mining it. So the fair-launch narrative is even false.
I think I've ripped Kaspa pretty significantly. Yes, it's on exchanges, but exchanges just want to make money. They want to list as many coins as they can to make as much money as possible for themselves. Just being listed on exchanges has gotten Kaspa traded, but people are buying Kaspa with no understanding of the bigger picture. This is the same skepticism I bring to the whole sector, and it's why I think Fractal Bitcoin is a scaling solution nobody needs.
I'm tracking this call publicly
So I'll put this on my spreadsheet, and we'll see how I do over time. I've just started this spreadsheet. I bet I'm going to absolutely go nuts on it. Occasionally I might say a coin is going to zero that does well, but the vast majority of the time I'll be correct. So I'll add Kaspa on here along with the ones I just reviewed today, and we'll see over time how right or how wrong I am. My bet is that the Internet Computer absolutely rips compared to Kaspa, based on fundamentals like technology, team, and potential use cases. I keep all of these honest reviews going in my Crypto Reviews playlist if you want to follow how each of these calls plays out.
Yes, Kaspa is absolutely a ghost chain to me. Almost the only thing happening on Kaspa is proof-of-work mining, and that mining is generating almost all of the transactions that are happening on Kaspa. How much value is there really in that?
For comparison, guess where my website is hosted: the Internet Computer Protocol. This site is actually hosted on the Internet Computer Protocol, and it generates a transaction when you go to my website. There's nothing else in crypto that can do that like this does. Open Chat, where I talk with people, is also hosted on the Internet Computer Protocol. That kind of on-chain hosting is something Kaspa has no realistic possibility of ever being able to do.