Hey Kaspians! Welcome to the tenth release of Kaspa Weekly! This anniversary release is released on the exact same day as one of Kaspa's most important events happened, the long awaited and highly anticipated Crescendo Hard Fork activation, which of course we will cover in this newsletter. On top of that, we'll tell you about a new community-centric Kaspa focused channel on X, Kaspa Commons and talk about the first episode of Shai's The Deepdive. Here's a short summary:
- 🚀 Crescendo LIVE on Mainnet
- 🌎 Kaspa Commons
- 🎬 The Kaspa Deepdive
Crescendo LIVE on Mainnet 🚀
You heard that right! The Crescendo Upgrade is officially here! Around the originally estimated time (15:00 UTC, May 5th) all nodes running the latest version of Rusty Kaspa got greeted with the legendary message, "Crescendo 1 bps -> 10 bps", after which the network started adjusting to produce 10 blocks per second. The upgrade went extremely smoothly and no downtime occurred.
Of course, the community did not stay indifferent of this event, countdowns and parties in various places were hosted.
Starting with X, the weekly Blockchain Banter hosted by Levendi and Chris was moved a couple hours back so that it happened around the hard fork activation date. In total, nearly 2,000 listeners tuned in! If you'd like to listen to the final countdown, you can view the replay here, and skip to 59:55.
Next up, Kaspa Silver hosted a watch party on Youtube, 2 minutes from the activation time, almost 1,300 viewers were there! Skip to 1:28:30 to see the exact moment the hard fork went live!
On top of that, people on Kaspa's Discord server gathered to celebrate this breath taking moment together.
But keep in mind, Crescendo does not only reduce the block time from 1 second to 100 milliseconds. It also brings other amazing additions to the network, such as enabling payloads for transactions.
None of this would have been possible without the over 2 years effort from core developers. Congratulations! Below you'll find a picture of Michael Sutton (taken by Yonatan Sompolinsky himself) watching the network after the upgrade activated, must've been a stressful moment haha
And of course, we couldn't not share the exact moment in which the activation happened.
Kaspa Commons 🌎
Volunteered, managed by Chad Ballantyne (also knows as Rhubarbarian), and the team at Rhubarb Media, Kaspa Commons is a new channel that focuses on real world impacts of Kaspa, because Kaspa isn't just the technology and upgrades, it's also how these innovations impact everyday life.
A collaborative group of experienced researchers, writers, communications experts and ambassadors will be formed with a mission to spotlight the benefits, people and the adoption journey of Kaspa.
On their X account they already shared multiple posts about Kaspa's Adoption, and of course about the Crescendo Upgrade 😎
If you'd like to check them out, you can find them under the @Kaspa_Commons handle on X.
The Kaspa Deepdive 🎬
In our last release we've talked about Shai's upcoming show, the Kaspa Deepdive focusing on explaining various aspects of Kaspa, and why it's a uniquely powerful cryptocurrency. On Monday, just 21 hours shy of the hard fork activation (notice how many things happened right around that date 👀) Shai announced the first episode on his X account.
This episode focuses on three important consequences of high blocks per second. The mining decentralization, internet-fast transaction confirmation, and multi-leader consensus.
[At the time of writing] the video already gathered over 2,000 views on YouTube, and you can find it here. Great job Shai! We're excited to see more content from the Kaspa Deepdive 😉
That's it for this release! Time goes fast, and we dropped 10 releases of Kaspa Weekly already, and we're excited for the future! We hope you enjoyed it! As always, thank you for reading and see you next week! 👋
