You cannot stake Kaspa. New KAS is created by mining and only by mining. There are no validators to delegate to, no staking contract on layer 1, no masternodes and no governance token. Holding KAS in your own wallet earns exactly nothing, forever, by design.
Every service advertising a "Kaspa staking APY" is doing one of two things: taking custody of your coins and lending them out, or offering a DeFi product on a layer 2 where what you deposit is not native KAS. Neither is staking. Both carry a risk that holding KAS does not.
Staking exists in proof of stake networks for one specific reason: the chain has to decide who is allowed to write the next block, and it decides by asking who has locked up the most coins. The reward is the fee the network pays validators for doing that job and for having capital at risk.
Kaspa answers that same question with work instead of capital. Blocks are produced by miners solving kHeavyHash, and the GHOSTDAG protocol orders every block that arrives rather than throwing competing ones away. There is no role for a locked coin anywhere in that process. No validator set exists, so there is nobody to delegate to, and no slashing, no unbonding period and no staking APY, because none of those concepts has anything to attach to.
The blunt consequence, which the yield sites do not print: the correct return on holding Kaspa is zero. A proof of work coin does not pay its holders. It pays the people spending electricity to secure it.
No, and it is worth being precise, because both upgrades were widely misreported.
Neither upgrade introduced a stake, and none is proposed. Anyone telling you Kaspa staking is "launching soon" is describing a roadmap that does not exist.
Search "stake Kaspa" and the first page fills with platforms quoting double and triple digit annual returns. The most visible of them, CoinUnited.io, headlines "earn up to 125% APY" — a figure that is not the Kaspa rate at all. On its own Kaspa page the advertised number is 37%. The 125% is a maximum across all assets, used as the headline on the page you land on.
More useful than the number is their own description of where it comes from:
Read it once more. The rate depends on how many coins customers hand over and how much other people want to borrow them. There is no mention of a Kaspa protocol reward, because there is none to mention. Strip the branding and the product is an unsecured loan: you give a company your KAS, the company lends it to someone else, and it promises to pay you part of the interest. Your coins are on their balance sheet, not in your wallet.
CoinUnited.io has been on the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission alert list since 25 july 2024, in the category "suspicious virtual asset trading platforms", as suspected of conducting unlicensed activities. That is the regulator's own published entry, not an opinion of ours, and you can read it directly at sfc.hk/en/alert-list/3058.
To be exact about what that does and does not say: it says unlicensed and suspected. It is not a finding of fraud, and we make no such claim. We also found no credible reports of unpaid withdrawals. What it does establish is that the counterparty asking to hold your coins is operating without a licence in at least one jurisdiction that has said so publicly. With an unsecured loan, the counterparty is the entire product.
The same structure sits under most of the others: thecoinearn, stakingy, coinando and the rest of the first page are either the same custodial lending model or affiliate pages sending you to one. The tell is always identical. Ask who pays the yield. If the honest answer is a company rather than the protocol, it is not staking, whatever the button says.
| Real staking, e.g. Ethereum | "Kaspa staking" offers | |
|---|---|---|
| Who pays you | the protocol, in new coins | a company, out of its own revenue |
| Who holds your coins | a contract you can audit | the company |
| Can the payer stop | only by consensus change | at any time, unilaterally |
| Enforced by | consensus rules | terms of service |
| If it fails you lose | the reward | the principal |
| Exists on Kaspa | does not exist | exists, and is sold as the first one |
There is one place where the answer stops being a flat no, and the yield sites never explain it, so we will.
Kaspa now has layer 2 networks on top of it, chiefly Kasplex and Igra, which brought a mainnet EVM layer live in march 2026. Both are based rollups, meaning they hand transaction ordering back to the Kaspa layer 1 rather than running their own sequencer or validator set. That design detail matters here more than anywhere else: a based rollup has no validators to stake against either. The property that removes staking from Kaspa layer 1 carries straight up into its layer 2.
What does exist on those layers is ordinary DeFi. On Igra, lending markets such as Kaskad let you supply assets and earn interest paid by borrowers, plus a separate incentive token. That is a real product, and it can be a reasonable thing to use with eyes open. It is simply not staking, and three differences decide whether you should care:
So the complete answer is layered rather than complicated. On layer 1 there is no staking and never has been. On layer 2 there are yield products that are worth judging on their own merits, none of which are staking, and all of which sit further from your keys than simply holding does.
We could not find any staking or yield product on Kasplex, so we make no claim about one. Where we have not verified something ourselves, we say so rather than filling the gap.
One protocol level answer, one market level answer, and a straight admission about the third.
Miners are paid the block reward shown live at the top of this page, and it falls by 5.613% every month, a factor of (1/2)1/12 per step. Twelve of those steps compound to exactly one half, so Kaspa halves its issuance once a year, delivered smoothly rather than as a single overnight cliff. There is no four year halving and no halving day to trade. Mining today needs a kHeavyHash ASIC and cheap electricity. With roughly 320 PH/s securing the network, solo mining is a lottery ticket for a private setup, so payouts in practice come through pools. Full detail is on our mining page and the schedule is on the halving page.
Supplying assets to lending markets or liquidity pools on Igra pays real yield from real borrowers. Judge it as what it is, a credit and smart contract position, and size it accordingly.
This is the part the yield sites cannot say out loud. A Kaspa in your own wallet produces no income. What it produces is the absence of counterparty risk. Nobody can freeze it, lend it out, become insolvent while holding it, or change the terms on you. If a coin in your control is worth less to you than 37% promised by an unlicensed platform, that trade is available. We would just rather you make it knowing exactly what you are being paid for, which is the risk that the platform does not give the coins back.