I suspect one of the biggest questions an institution evaluating Kaspa would ask has very little to do with whether the technology works. Kaspa has already demonstrated high-frequency Proof of Work, 10 BPS operation, fast confirmation, and substantial unused transaction capacity. The harder question is economic: who is going to consume that capacity?
Kaspa’s security budget is still overwhelmingly subsidy-driven. That matters because Kaspa’s emission schedule is unusually aggressive. Roughly 95% of the eventual supply has already been mined, and issuance continues declining geometrically toward effectively zero. The long-term security model therefore increasingly depends on transaction fees becoming meaningful enough to compensate miners as subsidy disappears.
Right now, that fee market is still extremely immature. Recent standard transaction activity has been roughly 1–2 TPS while the network is capable of processing vastly more. That is excellent from a user-experience standpoint because blockspace is cheap and abundant, but from a security-budget perspective it means there is currently little competition for that blockspace.
This is why I think Kaspa outreach should increasingly target builders before institutions.
DeFi protocols create settlement transactions. DePIN networks generate machine payments, attestations and economic events. AI agents potentially generate enormous quantities of autonomous micropayments, escrow transactions, service purchases and machine-to-machine coordination. Toccata, covenants, Silverscript and eventually higher-level tooling like Argent give these applications increasingly sophisticated ways to use Kaspa directly.
Those are the boots on the ground.
An institution can buy KAS, but an application can generate millions of transactions. And millions of economically meaningful transactions create fees, liquidity, infrastructure, wallets, users and observable demand for blockspace.
If Kaspa wants institutional adoption, the strongest argument may not be convincing institutions first.
It may be building an economy underneath them that becomes impossible to ignore.