Every Proof-of-Work network eventually has to face this question. Kaspa simply gets there sooner, and that’s not an accident — it’s a design choice.
Kaspa’s emission is front-loaded. Most coins are issued early, and block rewards decline quickly over time. In the beginning, miners are paid largely through newly created KAS, which is exactly how PoW networks are supposed to bootstrap themselves. Inflation provides security while the network is still finding real demand.
But inflation isn’t meant to last forever. As rewards shrink, they stop being the main reason miners show up. And at that point, a simple but uncomfortable question takes center stage: if block rewards are no longer enough, who pays for security?
The answer is straightforward. Users do, through transaction fees.
Miners don’t secure the network out of belief or ideology. They secure it because it makes economic sense. Strip it down to first principles and the entire security model can be summarized by one relationship: the security budget equals block rewards plus transaction fees, multiplied by the market price. When block rewards fall, something else has to rise. If fees don’t grow, the network’s security naturally reprices lower. There is no emergency switch, no governance lever, and no invisible backstop waiting in the background.
Right now, Kaspa is still subsidy-secured. Fees exist, but they’re small relative to block rewards, which is exactly what you would expect at this stage of the network’s life. The real question isn’t where Kaspa stands today, but whether the direction of travel makes sense as rewards continue to decline.
A simple way to think about the math helps clarify the scale of the challenge. Kaspa currently runs at ten blocks per second, which comes out to roughly 864,000 blocks per day. Imagine a future phase where the block reward is around one KAS per block. That would mean about 864,000 KAS per day still coming from issuance. For transaction fees to fully replace that subsidy, the network would need to generate roughly the same amount in fees every day.
If current daily fees are on the order of tens of thousands of KAS rather than hundreds of thousands, the gap is obvious. Closing it requires something like a fifty-plus-times increase in total fee volume. That sounds dramatic, but it doesn’t mean fifty times more users or absurdly high fees. Growth can come from a mix of more transactions, modest fee pressure during real demand, higher economic activity on-chain, and even a higher KAS price amplifying the dollar value of fees.
Resilience doesn’t require an overnight jump to a fee-only model. A healthy transition is gradual. Even fees covering a small share of miner revenue would already signal that people are willingly paying to use the network. As that share grows, confidence in long-term security grows with it. Full maturity only comes later, once fees clearly dominate miner incentives.
There’s an uncomfortable truth hiding underneath all of this. If adoption doesn’t materialize, fees remain low, hashrate adjusts downward, and security settles at a lower level. That isn’t a sudden collapse — it’s the network aligning its security with its real economic value. Kaspa doesn’t try to disguise that reality behind decades of inflation. It forces the question early, while there’s still time to grow into the answer.
These numbers aren’t meant to be definitive. They’re deliberately simple, meant to frame the problem rather than close the discussion.
This is a conversation worth having early. The future of Proof-of-Work security isn’t about belief. It’s about math, real usage, and being honest about both.
