The Kaspa blockchain is set to activate its highly anticipated Crescendo upgrade later today, 5th May 2025.
Author: Sahil Thakur
The Kaspa blockchain is set to activate its highly anticipated Crescendo upgrade later today, 5th May 2025. This hardfork will mark a significant technical milestone, boosting the network’s speed tenfold—from 1 block per second (BPS) to 10 BPS.
The upgrade is expected to go live on mainnet within hours, with wide-ranging implications for Kaspa’s performance, scalability, and infrastructure.
One of the core changes includes a 90% reduction in block rewards. A current reward of 55 KAS will drop to 5.5 KAS after the fork. However, because blocks will be produced 10x faster, the overall emission rate remains unchanged.
This shift means more frequent coinbase transactions and a corresponding rise in UTXO creation, which will be addressed through improved storage management.
To support the increased throughput, Kaspa developers have recalibrated core consensus parameters:
These changes are aimed at preserving network security and operational efficiency under the faster block cadence.
Crescendo also activates several key Kaspa Improvement Proposals (KIPs):
The upgrade also completes KIP-1, the final milestone in Kaspa’s transition to its high-performance Rusty Kaspa client, which makes 10 BPS feasible.
Post-fork, native transactions will support custom data payloads, opening the door to metadata-rich interactions and second-layer smart contract development.
Kaspa’s script engine will also shift to runtime signature operation counting, reducing transaction mass and optimizing fee calculations.
To handle the jump from 1 BPS to 10 BPS, Kaspa will reset its difficulty adjustment window at the moment of activation. Early blocks post-fork will operate under adjusted rules to avoid instability.
Pruning depth will also increase to ~30 hours to handle the higher block rate, though the pruning point itself will transition gradually.
This hardfork positions Kaspa for future developments, including smart contract layers, ZK-bridging, and other emerging applications. The changes have been stress-tested on the TN11 testnet for over a year, providing confidence in network readiness.
If you’re a Kaspa user, miner, or node operator, expect a faster and more capable network. Block rewards will drop, but frequency will rise. Node operators may need to monitor resource usage due to increased storage and bandwidth requirements.
If you’re a developer, Crescendo expands what you can build on Kaspa. For investors, the upgrade could influence trading behavior and network activity in the near term.
As always, do your own research. Not financial advice.
As expected from one of the strongest communities in the space, the Kaspa industry has been super pumped up about the release. A lot of watch parties all over X and a lot of shouts to Binance and Coinbase to list Kaspa.
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