if you solve verifiable real-time truth in a way that actually scales and can't be taken down, you're not pricing a protocol you're pricing the infrastructure layer for every prediction market, every agent, every oracle, every dao that needs to know what's real look at what Chainlink does with basic data feeds and think 100x that scope the products built on top would dwarf the protocol value itself. classic picks and shovels except the shovels become more valuable than the gold re: rtd and tangfi, real-time verifiable data is the unlock for bringing real assets onchain without trust assumptions believe in something

Tic-tac-toe is live on Kaspa testnet: the first vprog, a verifiable program with real execution and real settlement, running since yesterday. You can play it here: vprogs-tt.izio.fr/ (Requires private key and some testnet funds) We still need to review and merge a stack of PRs, however this is already a working POC. UI/UX was never a priority; the frontend can be enhanced or built separately I'm gonna work on mdBook covering the parts of the system I consider meaningful and a workshop on vprogs and building apps on top For Devs: this is the invitation. Play the game, read the code, build your own vprog. Game code: github.com/biryukovmaxim/vpr… vprogs framework: github.com/kaspanet/vprogs/t…

Finally, Silverscript v1 is out [Link in the reply]. This completes the journey we started eight months ago with Toccata — it's finally possible to write human- (and AI-) readable smart contracts on Kaspa. This language started simply as "CashScript with loops", but eventually grew into a full-fledged smart contract language capable of expressing complex, stateful contracts. It's always fun to look back at the first token mechanism @IzioDev and I worked on using raw opcodes, which took thousands of lines of code, and see the same thing implemented in just 60 easy-to-read lines of Silverscript. I'm excited to explore the possibilities of UTXO programmability together with the Kaspa community, and this is only the beginning - Silverscript will evolve, Argent will add higher layers of abstractions, and I'm sure more people will find their own way of extending this new ecosystem.

The intern has been informed that yesterday’s post about Covenants needed an ELI5. The intern has also been asked to stop using the words “successor” and “lineage” until further notice. So we are going to use noughts and crosses. state = what the board looks like right now covenant = the rulebook transaction = someone trying to make a move the kaspa network = the referee Look at the empty board. Nothing has happened yet. That is the starting state. Put an x in the middle. the board has changed. that is the next state. Now someone tries another move. The network checks it against the rulebook. If the move is allowed, the board changes. If it is not, the transaction fails. The rulebook does not disappear after one move. The new board stays protected by the same rules, so the move after that has to follow them too. One starting board can also open game A and game B. Each game keeps its own board. both can continue without waiting for the other. This is the noughts and crosses version. The same pattern can be used for vaults, escrow, time locks, asset issuance, transfer rules, tickets and positions directly on the Kaspa L1. If that still made no sense, the intern accepts full responsibility and no follow up questions.

The case for the uniqueness of fast pow tl;dr Finality has two moving parts: (i) fast inclusion (= high bps, how quickly a tx gets into a block), and (ii) fast confirmations (= how quickly that tx becomes irreversible). Any system with rapid block production can achieve the first. The second is where the tension shows: in pos, fast confirmations press directly against decentralization. In fast pow, the two properties are decoupled. prologue A few weeks ago I came across Solana’s founder claiming: “Solana is the fastest monetary system in the world”. Since Kaspa already runs at a faster block rate, I was curious to check Solana’s finality times. That curiosity quickly pointed me to a deeper issue: not raw speed, but how speed interacts with decentralization. —————— The tension is structural. In pos, finality means accumulating staked votes, and the more decentralized the stake distribution, the more time is required to reach finality. Here I’m not talking about hardware requirements or validator specs. The axis I’m discussing is centralization around the security mechanism itself: stake in pos vs. hardware in pow. To be secure, a block must be confirmed by a supermajority--typically >66.7% of the total economic stake. In a truly decentralized network, where n stakers with uniform share grows without bound, the time to coordinate this supermajority becomes a real bottleneck. Pow works differently. It samples the hardware space without requiring the protocol to explicitly collect evidence from a majority of miners. Each block is itself a statistical proof that the finder out-competed the full network’s hash power. This process--and its timing--remains independent of how many individual miners participate. Ethereum’s researchers understood this when moving to pos. Unlike Solana, which tolerates concentration to reach ~13-second finality, Ethereum’s designers could not accept that trade-off. Their solution was to introduce rotating committees. A rotating committee is a smaller subset of validators, randomly chosen from the full set, that votes on behalf of everyone else. But this comes with a different security model, known in the literature as exposure to a BFT adaptive attacker. The committee is selected first and then votes. That “select-then-work” sequence is theoretically exposed to adaptive attackers, since members are known in advance. Pow, by contrast, is “work-then-select”: the winner is only revealed after the work is done. Think of it this way: in pos, you know who the referees are before the game starts, which gives an attacker time to pressure them. In pow, you only learn who won after the work is already done, which removes that attack surface. So n confirmations provide consistent confidence regardless of miner granularity, and the system stays secure even under adaptive targeting. Beyond attack subtleties, the real issue is economic weight. When I send a billion-dollar transfer in a pos system, the question I care about is simple: how much stake is actually securing it? A committee vote provides strong statistical evidence, but only a true supermajority puts the full economic stake of the network behind my confirmation. In other words, a sampled committee may convince me that things are probably safe, but only the weight of the entire stake provides an overwhelming guarantee. And this is exactly where pow shines: each confirmation is not just a probability estimate, but a direct proof of work done against the full hash power of the network, no matter how many miners there are. closing remark I don’t claim to know every engineering detail of Ethereum or Solana. But I’m convinced the core principle holds. I’ll state it simply: fast pow uniquely enables fast finality without forcing a compromise on decentralization.