Kaspa launched publicly on 7 November 2021, with no premine and no reserved allocation. Coins were issued through proof-of-work mining from the start, rather than being assigned to founders or insiders before the public could participate. [1][2]
What “no premine” means
A premine is a supply of coins created before public mining begins, usually for founders, investors or another chosen group. Kaspa’s launch had no such allocation and no founders’ reward [3], and no coins were sold before mainnet launched. Every coin in circulation comes from mining after genesis, the network’s starting point. [2]
Proof of work means miners perform computational work to compete for block rewards. The Kaspa wiki describes KAS issuance as competitive mining from mainnet launch, with no preallocation. [1]
“Fair launch” describes those starting conditions. It does not mean everyone received equal amounts or that people joining at different times had identical opportunities. In his December 2020 writing, Yonatan Sompolinsky explicitly distinguished the absence of a premine or founders’ reward from the broader, subjective meaning of “fair.” He then preferred the phrase “community launch.” [3]
Why an old post mentions a presale
There was an earlier plan, and it is important to distinguish it from the launch that actually happened. In a post dated 14 December 2020, Sompolinsky proposed a contract through which participants would lock funds in exchange for future KAS mined by DAGlabs’ machines. The proposed coins would have come from mining, not a premine. [3]
That proposal should not be read as a record of an executed Kaspa coin sale. The community-run Kaspa lore page records the actual November 2021 mainnet launch as having no premine, insider allocation or presales. [2]
Sompolinsky later described the launch as messy and spontaneous. In his 16 February 2026 retrospective, he wrote that a few thousand CPUs found the project and that hashrate rose within days. That account describes public mining participation, not a reserved distribution to selected holders. [4]
How the no-premine claim can be checked
Kaspa provides a cryptographic way to check its starting state. The genesis proof follows linked block records backward to the original genesis and verifies that its commitment to spendable coins represents an empty set. In plain English, it checks that the network did not begin with coins already allocated. [5]
There is also a less obvious safeguard: Bitcoin block hashes embedded in the genesis coinbase, the block’s special mining transaction, serve as timestamps. These help rule out a hidden period of mining before the declared launch. [5]
Pruning, which lets nodes remove older data they no longer need for normal operation, does not remove this verification path. On 23 April 2026, Luke Dunshea published a Rust command-line implementation of the genesis proof that works with Rusty Kaspa data. He also added verification of the checkpoint snapshot used to establish the supply total after the early random-reward period. [6]