How Kaspa Ships Upgrades with No VC Treasury The Kaspa network (@kaspaunchained) was officially launched in November 2021 via an open PoW blockchain. The project had no premine or ICO. Every coin was mined from genesis. This decision meant the network would have no corporate treasury or development funds. Yet the chain was supposed to keep going with major updates. Here's how it did that. (1) The Fair Launch Stripped the Funding Shortcut Before mainnet, DAGLabs had raised around $8 million to develop protocols like GHOST, PHANTOM, and GHOSTDAG. After the launch, the funding sources received no special allocation of KAS. They were distributed through mining rewards, like everyone else. Later, founder Yonatan Sompolinsky described the arrangement as "absurd": funded like a fair launch coin, yet expected to innovate like a well-funded laboratory. (2) The Community Footed the Bill for the Hard Work • Development shifted toward volunteer labor, crowd-funding, and non-profit grants. One initiative raised 70.23 million KAS for DAGKnight consensus development. • A community grant worth roughly 100 million KAS funded the Rust-based node rewrite project called rusty-kaspa. The community also raised a further 750,000 KAS for marketing efforts. • There is a public development fund held in the community multisig address. • The Kaspa Ecosystem Foundation started distributing grants to core developers. None of these organizations own the token or the protocol like a venture capital-funded corporation. (3) The Big Forks Were Still on Schedule Crescendo forked on May 5, 2025, and bumped the block time up from ~1 block/s to 10 blocks/s. Toccata forked on June 30, 2026. This brought native covenants on layer 1, zero-knowledge verification infrastructure, and a new transaction concept. This made Kaspa shift from a payment system to a programmable base layer. (4) The Current Update Is About Improving Security Rusty Kaspa v2.1.0 has already been released. (5) The Model Is Still Designed to Be Fragile Kaspa has launched the rewritten full node, a 10 blocks per second fork, and covenants natively built without any protocol treasury claiming its part from issuance. The compromise here is exactly what Sompolinsky pointed out: the whole thing relies on volunteer work, grant funding, and continuous effort. The next consensus improvement, DAGKnight, is ready to go on exactly this funding pattern. The improvements keep coming. The treasury doesn’t.