Kaspa forks are dead!
I’ve come to the conclusion that the entire Kaspa fork ecosystem is effectively dead. What started as an explosion of competing projects has collapsed into toxicity, broken promises, and abandonment. Yes, shitposts like this one probably didn’t help the vibe, so I’ll take a small share of the blame.
Here’s what’s left standing as of late 2025:
- Nexell-ia — running on fumes, still dangling the same “AI integration” promises that were made two years ago. Zero meaningful progress.
- Waglayla — openly a meme coin. That’s it. That’s the whole value proposition.
- Cryptix — basically a rigged scam chain.
- Karlsen — the only one still pretending to be alive, mostly because it’s hoarding hashrate and are in Mexc.
- Hoosat — I’ll get to this one separately.
Let’s talk about Karlsen for a second, because it’s the poster child for how far things have fallen.
A single RTX 5090 reportedly does ~133.5 MH/s on KarlsenHash v2. To match Karlsen’s current top miners hashrate you’d need roughly 65,99 × RTX 5090s in one rig. That’s not retail GPU mining anymore, that’s hidden hardware. The transparency is gone.
Even more damning: one of Karlsen’s own moderators ugr_dual publicly admitted that:
- They do not have the dev talent to push the chain to 10 BPS on their own?
- The “AI” PoW features they marketed for years are still unfinished.
- They were hoping Kaspa itself would solve the hard problems for them so they could just copy the code, like Karlsen has pretty much only done.
- Cosmos integration has not been done, first of their broken promises?
- They are blaming me for their own problems?
Their GitHub? Zero commits in the last 5 months. They literally have the entire Rusty Kaspa codebase available sitting there in the open, with 10 BPS already implemented, and they still can’t copy it. Their website is full of false marketing, that’s not a technical problem anymore, that’s a dead project walking.
Update:
I have no interest in arguing with strangers. I don’t want to keep reading FUD from people I’ve never met or had an actual conversation with. This has been going on for almost two years now, and I absolutely have the right to defend myself and the Hoosat Network. Sure I’ve made mistakes too, like triggering Deshe Shai with the kHeavyHash bug. That said, I’m always open to a calm, reasonable discussion and resolution with anyone who’s willing to have one.
Xarp tried to come down to remedy the situation for Karlsen about this post, because he is leading the Kaspa NG licensing process for Karlsen. But Xarp miserably failed there. Who dares to come plead for calming the situation and have reasonable discussion when he outright shows that he accepts the belittling of Karlsen Moderator and does not see how the FUD created by Karlsen moderator is denigrating to Hoosat Network.
https://discord.com/channels/1244205688776036392/1244215203365912636/1442099059169951744
It’s actually sane that Aspectron as a company has learned to protect their projects with closed source licenses. Karlsen devs are annoyed because there is restrictions and that Kaspa NG is closed source, because the history with Kaspa and it’s forks copying stuff has not gone well. I’m to blame there? Partly with the arguments with Deshe Shai, but not as much as other scam coins which only copy what Kaspa is doing.
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Karlsen is still miserable copying what others are doing and even angry that they get restrictions on a closed source license code.
Fun fact: Xarp claimed Karlsen hasn’t moved to 10 BPS because pools are having issues with profitability at the moment. That doesn’t add up. Herominers currently controls ~45% of Karlsen’s hashrate, and I know for a fact that Herominers, Kryptex, Baikalmine, and WoolyPooly can all run Karlsen at 10 BPS without issue.
Delivering on the 10 BPS roadmap promise wouldn’t just honor the project’s commitments, it would actually increase pool profitability by reducing orphan rates and improving miner rewards and increase price of Karlsen. Win-win.
Karlsen is pretty much only a coin that is copying code from Kaspa and even failing on that, just like Pyrin did. Pyrin had same promises as Karlsen 10 BPS and AI PoW, neither has delivered more than 1 BPS network, other did exit scam in Mexc, the other is trying and throwing a fit like teenager who can’t have lollipop without working for it. Let me remind you Karlsen already promised Cosmos integration over two years ago and that is undelivered.
Hoosat being the exception:
I don’t really count Hoosat as a “Kaspa fork” in the same way anymore. We never touched the Rusty Kaspa codebase. Hoosat is built on the old deprecated Golang node (the original BTCD fork) and we’ve been rewriting and optimizing it in ways that have diverged heavily from Kaspa’s path. Different architecture, different trade-offs, different team, different goals.
On the contrary Hoosat Network with 4 epic developers!
- Delivered 5 BPS with the Kaspa Golang node as base, instead of ripping Kaspa work on the Rust version.
- Delivered core dependent CPU and GPU mineable FPGA/ASIC resistant PoW algorithm.
- Delivered from scratch ICP integration canister code.
- Delivered from scratch Typescript Node & Web APIs.
- Delivered from scratch Mobile CPU mining.
- Delivered Open Source MiningCore algorithm implementation.
- Delivered from scratch Hoominer CUDA/OpenCL and CPU miner which works on Windows & Linux.
- Delivered from scratch Foztors optimized Hoohash miners.
- Delivered from scratch stats page and updated explorer frontend.
- Delivered from scratch Chrome Extension wallet
- Delivered auto-compound to htnwallet.
- Delivered better compounding for Mobile Wallet.
- Delivering from scratch on-chain voting platform.
- Development of marketplace has started.
- Collecting dev grant for Metamask Snap wallet.
- There’s also development on other projects including HTN that i’m not ready to talk about yet.
The list is bigger if I include all the small stuff and even few deprecated things. Karlsen moderators still dare to spread FUD of another project, because they can’t have fully compatible Kaspa NG wallet??
So yeah… everything that actually tried to stay a close Kaspa fork is either dead, dying, or a meme coin.
The great Kaspa fork rush of 2023–2025 is over. Rest in peace.
