Kaspa's supply, explained. How many KAS exist — and why nobody got a single one for free.

Every KAS in existence was mined by someone's hardware. No premine, no ICO, no team allocation, no VC unlock waiting to hit the market. Here's the live count, the fair-launch story behind it, and the three traps in reading any supply number.
The short answer

Kaspa's supply approaches a hard ceiling of about 28.7 billion KAS. The live circulating figure is below — and because the emission curve decays geometrically, the overwhelming majority of all KAS that will ever exist has already been mined. Every coin entered circulation the same way: as a mining reward, starting from block one on November 7, 2021. There was no other door.

KAS in circulation · live
fetching from the kaspa network…
 
maximum supply — a hard mathematical ceiling, not a promise
still to be mined, spread over the coming decades
new supply over the next 12 months, relative to today — falls every month
All figures are fetched live from the public Kaspa API every time this page loads. Nothing here is hardcoded — check back in a year and the numbers will have updated themselves.

Where the coins came from

Kaspa launched on November 7, 2021, announced publicly before the first block. There was no initial coin offering, no tokens created at genesis, no allocation for the founders, and no discounted round for investors. The supply at block zero was exactly zero. Everything since has been minted one block reward at a time, paid to whoever contributed the mining work — on ordinary CPUs and GPUs in the early months, on ASICs since 2023.

That makes Kaspa part of a small club. Most major chains distributed a large share of their supply before the public could earn any:

NetworkHow initial supply was createdInsiders at day one
Bitcoin (2009)mined from block onenone
Ethereum (2015)created at genesis, sold in the 2014 crowdsalethe majority of initial supply
Solana (2020)genesis allocations to investors, team and foundationroughly half of initial supply
Kaspa (2021)mined from block onenone

This is a historical fact, not a value judgment — Ethereum and Solana built enormous ecosystems on their models. But it changes how you read Kaspa's supply data: there is no unlock schedule to track, no vesting cliff to fear, no foundation treasury that can hit the market. What you see on chain is the whole story.

Why the ceiling is approached, never touched

Kaspa's emission follows a smooth geometric curve: block rewards shrink by about 5.6% every month, halving every 12 months. Summed to infinity, that curve converges on the ~28.7B ceiling — each year adds half of whatever remains. The practical consequence: supply growth is front-loaded and the tail is thin. The remaining coins will trickle out over decades, with rewards mathematically reaching zero in the 2050s. The full schedule, with the current block reward live, is on the Kaspa halving, explained.

Three traps in reading any supply number

1. "Circulating supply" is defined by whoever reports it

Aggregator sites make choices: do burned coins count, do dormant coins count, do foundation treasuries count? For most chains those choices move the number by double-digit percentages. Kaspa is unusually clean — everything mined is circulating by any definition — but if you compare across sites and see small differences, that's methodology, not mystery.

2. Dilution fear doesn't transfer to a 96%-mined chain

In most of crypto, "fully diluted valuation" towers over market cap because most supply hasn't been released. For Kaspa the two numbers nearly coincide — the dilution that terrifies holders of heavily-vested tokens is arithmetically almost over here. When you see FDV-based warnings applied to Kaspa, check the live percentage above before taking them seriously.

3. Supply says nothing about distribution

A fair launch means nobody was given coins — it doesn't mean coins are evenly spread today. Whoever mined early and held, holds large positions now, and the single biggest address holds over 5% of everything in circulation. Supply tells you how many coins exist; it takes address-level data to see who has them. We track exactly that on what is entity x?

What this means in practice

0 premine
no coins existed before public mining began — supply started at zero on november 7, 2021
0 unlocks
no vesting schedules, no investor cliffs, no treasury releases — nothing scheduled to hit the market, ever
FDV ≈ market cap
with ~96% mined, the gap between fully diluted and circulating valuation has nearly closed
Fair ≠ equal
a fair start says nothing about today's distribution — concentration is its own metric, tracked separately
We publish the supply picture — emission, the reward schedule and who actually holds the coins — every Monday on the Kaspa Pulse dashboard, in plain language, not just figures.
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