Merged mining lets Kaspa miners secure a second network with the exact same work they're already doing. No extra electricity, no switching, no hashrate leaving Kaspa. The miner earns rewards on both chains for one unit of work. If anything, it makes mining Kaspa more profitable — not less.
Think of a miner's work as a lottery ticket. Normally, one ticket enters one lottery: find a valid hash, win a Kaspa block. With merged mining, the same ticket enters two lotteries at once. The miner does the identical computation (Kaspa's kHeavyHash), and the result can satisfy Kaspa's difficulty, the second network's difficulty, or both.
This isn't a new invention — Dogecoin has been merged mined with Litecoin since 2014, and it's one of the reasons Dogecoin's security never collapsed despite its meme origins.
When Kaspa's hashrate dropped sharply in July 2026, some community members guessed miners were "switching to ZKas." That's not how it works. A merged-mined network cannot pull hashrate away from Kaspa, because participating requires mining Kaspa. The real drivers of hashrate moves are boring economics: KAS price, electricity costs, and reward reductions squeezing older machines out.
ZKas is the first network to merge mine with Kaspa, launched in late July 2026. It's a privacy-focused chain: a fork of Kaspa's codebase where every amount, sender and recipient is hidden by default (using zero-knowledge proofs, the same cryptographic family Zcash pioneered — but shielded for all transactions, not optionally). It runs Kaspa's kHeavyHash and GHOSTDAG at one block per second.
Honest context: ZKas launched as a small, unaudited network with its own separate token economics — don't confuse ZKas's supply numbers with Kaspa's. Whether it succeeds or fades, the merged-mining mechanism it uses is sound either way.
Two reasons. First, miner economics: every additional merged-mined network makes running a Kaspa miner slightly more profitable, which supports Kaspa's security budget long after block rewards shrink. Second, it's a compliment: networks choose to merge mine with Kaspa because its proof-of-work is worth borrowing. Bitcoin has this dynamic with its sidechains — Kaspa reached it less than five years after its 2021 launch.