After Ethereum shifted away from PoW through the Merge, for a while, GPU mining had become leaderless. While coins forked from Ethereum can still be mined with GPUs, most miners are skeptical about their future prospects. Following the Merge, the ETC hashrate only grew by 100 TH/s, while Ethereum boasted a network hashrate of 850 TH/s prior to the Merge. A significant portion of the GPU hashing power was lost.

Clearly, ETC’s current narrative alone cannot sustain the whole GPU mining sector. Shortly after the Merge, Kaspa (KAS), an emerging player, surpassed ETC in terms of hashrate. In October 2022, the KAS hashrate reached nearly 300 TH/s, and the figure has continued to rise, consistently ranking No.1 among all GPU mineable cryptos. Right now, KAS maintains a stable hashrate of 1 PH/s, surpassing the pre-merge hashrate of Ethereum.

Hashrate often reflects miners’ expectations for a PoW coin and, to some extent, represents the level of community activity. The rapid growth of the KAS hashrate indicates extensive recognition of its future potential in the miner community, which can be attributed to the top-notch developer team and strong technical capacity of KAS.

Kaspa founder Yonatan Sompolinsky is a prominent figure in the blockchain industry, with notable achievements in academia. In 2013, Yonatan introduced the GHOST protocol, which was later adopted by Ethereum. As Yonatan continued to update GHOST, the protocol evolved into PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG, the latter of which is employed by Kaspa. The GHOSTDAG protocol allows Kaspa to offer both high TPS and robust security performance, making it the fastest and most scalable Layer 1 chain using the PoW consensus. With a block time of only 1 second, Kaspa outperforms all other public chains in the category.

Kaspa’s roadmap is a major reason why miners and communities are confident in the chain’s potential. In October 2022, Yonatan published a new paper introducing DAGKNIGHT, an improved version of the existing GHOSTDAG protocol. As part of the roadmap, Kaspa will first go through the RUST rewrite, launch the DAGKNIGHT upgrade, and then develop smart contracts. So far, the RUST rewrite has been completed as scheduled, and if everything goes according to the plan, the PoW space may witness the birth of a trending blockchain offering high TPS and scalability, which will allow miners to earn huge returns from their early investments.

Furthermore, since KAS was fair-launched with no pre-mine, zero pre-sales, and no coin allocations, many believe that the coin is more decentralized. In particular, fair mining means that project teams or institutional investors cannot manipulate the market by building a massive holding of low-cost coins. Instead, each KAS is mined by miners who bear the costs of electricity and mining machines.

At the moment, KAS mining is quite accessible, and most devices used for KAS mining are GPUs and ASIC miners. 

Check out the KAS mining tutorial at https://support.viabtc.com/hc/articles/19013252615065.

According to ViaBTC’s Mining Profit Rankings, with an electricity price of $0.03/kWh, a common RTX 3080 8-GPU machine would yield an estimated daily profit of around $0.48; the specialized Antminer KS3, on the other hand, could generate an estimated daily profit of $2,593.18.

Source: ViaBTC’s official website

According to miningpoolstats, among the top mining pools, only ViaBTC offers a zero-fee KAS pool (excluding solo pools), which helps miners make huge savings. Also, at the moment, ViaBTC is celebrating its seventh anniversary, and users can invite friends to mine KAS to potentially win the $7,777 grand prize.

Source: ViaBTC’s official website

Kaspa caters to both long-term investors betting on the coin’s potential and miners seeking steady returns. As the No.1 GPU minable crypto, KAS will demonstrate a more apparent Matthew effect, as its ecosystem expands. Moving forward, the PoW category will no longer be criticized for its limited utility in mining, and the combination of enhanced security, high TPS, and mature smart contracts may become the new narrative of PoW.