I was fortunate enough to witness the process behind this upgrade up close.
Half a year ago, the only thing we knew was that Kaspa had to become programmable, ASAP. This notion matured into a surprisingly complete and elegant solution in a very short period of time.
Building a development framework is a massive task, so the first attempts were to harness KIP-16's ZK verification opcodes to tap into existing ZK development frameworks, but we did not find a good enough fit.
One weekend Ori sat down with some leftover tokens, and Silverscript came out the other side.
The project grew quickly, and the compiler now enables a wide range of applications to be written and deployed directly on Kaspa in a high-level language (thanks to KIP-17 and KIP-20).
KIP-21 deserves its own post, but it allows for complex ZK-based applications and is a fundamental component of the full vProgs solution.
Together, all these turn Kaspa into an impressively expressive programmable money layer. From simple vaults, through basic contracts to complex multi-contract applications, alongside privacy apps and scalable batch-proving-based applications.
Toccata is the outcome of pure R&D -- deep research and hardcore development, done fast and in parallel (how fitting).
There’s still much work to be done to make the new capabilities more approachable, but it’s hard to understate the power, elegance, and completeness of what the best money layer in the world will soon allow us to express.
@michaelsuttonil @Max143672 @OriNewman @IzioDev - Watching you guys work has been a masterclass. Thank you.
**Official Toccata Release — Mainnet Hardfork Activation Included** (Links in reply)
We’re excited to announce the official Kaspa release containing the **Toccata Hardfork** activation logic.
Toccata is scheduled to activate on mainnet at DAA score `474,165,565`, expected around **June 30, 2026, 16:15 UTC**.
This is a consensus-changing upgrade. All node operators, miners, pools, exchanges, indexers, wallets, and infrastructure providers must upgrade before activation to remain compatible with the network.
Toccata introduces a major expansion of Kaspa L1 capabilities, including:
• **Native L1 covenant support** through transaction introspection, allowing for more expressive contracts, including stateful contracts
• **Covenant IDs**, providing stable covenant lineage across UTXO transitions, so covenant instances can preserve continuity as their state moves from one UTXO to the next
• **ZK proof verification on L1** via `OpZkPrecompile`, enabling to trustlessly offload computation off-chain.
• **Partitioned sequencing commitments**, improving support for based ZK applications by making lane-local proving scale with relevant activity rather than global throughput
Please upgrade as soon as possible and verify your nodes are running the new release well before the activation DAA score.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to designing, implementing, reviewing, and testing Toccata.