Disclosure: Disruption Banking announced a content partnership with Quai Network on 15 July 2026. This article was researched independently and reports figures from third-party sources.
Two proof-of-work chains set out to solve the same problem: move more transactions without giving up the decentralization that makes proof-of-work worth having. Kaspa went first, in November 2021. Quai Network launched its mainnet on 29 January 2025, marking roughly 18 months of operations, compared with its rival’s 5 years. Both spent years arguing that the other’s architecture was a dead end. Kaspa’s headstart in mining, listings, and community is real and material, but its emissions schedule is now working against it.
Toccata Shipped Covenants, Not DeFi
For years, the case against Kaspa was that a blockDAG could not support programmability. That claim died on Tuesday, 30 June 2026, when the Toccata hard fork activated on mainnet. It delivered native Layer-1 covenants, zero-knowledge verification opcodes, and consensus-level KRC-20 tokens, replacing an inscription-style mechanism that leaned on a third-party indexer. It followed the Crescendo fork of May 2025, which lifted block production from one per second to ten. DAGKnight, targeting block times of 25–40 milliseconds, is next, with an end-of-Q3 target and no fixed date.
Toccata did not deliver a general-purpose smart contract environment. There is no global virtual machine on Kaspa’s L1, and the vProgs research track is not an imminent mainnet feature. AMMs, lending, and composable DeFi still route through Layer-2s such as Kasplex, a based rollup whose state is maintained by indexers. The Kaspa Eco Foundation’s own technical paper concedes the risk of an indexer “presenting an incorrect state,” and notes the decentralized indexer network needed to fix this has not yet been implemented.
Quai put the EVM on the base layer at launch. In early July, it added Quainance, a native venue for swaps and liquidity pools running on L1 rather than on a rollup. Toccata gave Kaspa some of the tools. Quai has had the full set for eighteen months, without the L2 trust stack.
The Market Has Punished Both
Both tokens sit far below their highs. KAS trades near $0.028 with a market cap of around $758 million, 86.7% below its August 2024 peak and down 7.3% over the past week. QUAI trades near $0.015 with a market cap of around $15.57 million (Kraken), wellbelow its February 2025 high, though it was rallyingover the last few weeks after an all-time low of $0.009 set on 30 June.
Liquidity separates them more than price does. Kaspa turns over roughly $5.3 million a day across 63 markets on 46 exchanges. Quai turns over about $214,000 across eight markets on seven. That gap matters for anyone trying to enter or exit a position at size.
The Revenue Line Only One of Them Has
Since 17 December 2025, Quai has run SOAP, the Subsidized Open-market Acquisition Protocol. Quai miners merge-mine Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ravencoin, and those parent-chain coinbase rewards route to a protocol address that sells them, buys QUAI on the open market, and burns it. Miners are paid in QUAI for the same work, so the external subsidy arrives as buy pressure.
The figures are third-party tracked. DefiLlama’s chain page for Quai shows roughly $30,000 in fees over 24 hours. The burn is verifiable on Quaiscan, where 157.6 million QUAI sit at the protocol burn address.
Kaspa’s L1 is not listed on DefiLlama’s fee dashboard, so no comparable tracked figure exists. This is an absence of measurement rather than a measurement of absence. What can be said is that Kaspa’s on-chain fee revenue is small in absolute terms, running on the order of a few hundred dollars daily against miner income in the tens of thousands.
Neither ecosystem has organic traction. Quai’s DeFi TVL is about $60,000; Kasplex holds roughly $370,000. But protocol revenue visible on a neutral tracker is not nothing, and only one chain has it.
Supply Is Moving in Opposite Directions
Quai’s first year looked like every young L1’s: on-chain supply grew 88%, much of it genesis unlocks. That curve has since broken. The Singularity fork of 19 March 2026 permanently deleted 1.67 billion QUAI of future genesis unlocks, 81% of everything still scheduled, cutting the eventual baseline from 3 billion to about 1.33 billion. Monthly SOAP burns have climbed from 3.9 million QUAI in December to 32 million in July, and with roughly 35 million mined against burns in that range, net issuance is now close to flat. The remaining unlocks of 12–13 million per month keep it marginally positive.
Kaspa’s supply story runs the other way. Its fair launch has delivered 27.5 billion of a maximum 28.7 billion into circulation, which is about 96%. What remains is a long tail of shrinking rewards, and that tail is the problem.
The Fair Launch Bill Comes Due
Kaspa’s fair launch was real, and it was front-loaded. In May 2022, miners earned 440 KAS per block, a nod to the concert pitch A440. The chromatic schedule has cut the reward by roughly 5.6% every month, compounding to a halving every year. Today, the reward is about 2.45 KAS per block, worth roughly $59,000 a day network-wide at current prices, and the next monthly cut lands on 5 August.
Fees do not fill the gap. A Kaspa transaction costs a few thousandths of a cent, and daily fee revenue sits under 1% of miner income. The fee market does not currently exist (about $500 per day in fees are paid), and the security budget shrinks with the reward. The strain is showing. The network hashrate has fallen roughly 30% since May, and mining analyses this spring found most Kaspa ASICs unprofitable at standard power rates.
Quai’s emissions scale with the logarithm of difficulty rather than a countdown clock. This means that rewards drift up as hashrate grows instead of halving on schedule, while the inflation rate trends toward zero. SOAP stacks an external stream on top that grows with merge-mined hashrate rather than decaying against it.
That said, absolute security still favors Kaspa by a wide margin. A network spending roughly $59,000 a day on proof-of-work is materially harder to attack than one spending a fraction of that, whatever the trend lines say. Kaspa’s problem is direction; Quai’s problem is scale.
What Actually Separates Them Now
Kaspa’s pitch is proven distribution, deep liquidity, and covenants that now exist rather than being promised, with EVM DeFi delegated to L2s that carry indexer trust assumptions. Quai’s pitch is architectural: a base-layer EVM, a dual-token design pairing QUAI with Qi (a UTXO asset linked to energy expenditure, still a small experiment at about 244,000 Qi outstanding), sharding targeting 50,000+ TPS that remains theoretical, a shrinking supply, and protocol revenue on neutral trackers.
The mining ecosystems are trading places. Kaspa convinced manufacturers to build dedicated kHeavyHash ASICs from 2023, a real achievement, but those machines mine Kaspa and little else, and as the reward decays, the fleet shrinks with it. Quai made itself mineable by SHA-256, Scrypt, and KawPoW hardware simultaneously, so rigs already mining Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ravencoin can point at Quai without new capex.
Both networks still need the same thing, and neither has it: developers who build, and users who transact. Kaspa converted its head start into a market cap nearly forty times Quai’s and liquidity twenty-four times deeper. What it has not yet converted is emissions into a durable security budget, or covenants into applications.
Author: Ayanfe Fakunle
The editorial team at #DisruptionBanking has taken all precautions to ensure that no persons or organizations have been adversely affected or offered any sort of financial advice in this article. This article is most definitely not financial advice.
See Also:
How Quai’s Singularity Fork Reframed Proof-of-Work Tokenomics | Disruption Banking
Quainance Launches: The New Central Hub for DeFi on Quai Network | Disruption Banking
