作者：Updated by & By

Compiled by: TechFlow

Marathon Digital (MARA) publicly praised Kaspa’s (KAS) technology and expanded its mining operations to KAS mining, drawing attention to altcoins that share the same technology as KAS. In particular, these altcoins are trading at a favorable price point compared to the past in the current market context.

The following are some observations and notes from BeInCrypto on DAG altcoins.

Thanks to Kaspa, DAG has once again attracted the attention of the community

DAG stands for Directed Acyclic Graph, which is a data structure model in blockchain technology. For traditional blockchain, data blocks are created sequentially as a chain. But in the DAG model, transaction data is made only by confirming previous transactions. DAG makes the blockchain structure no longer like a chain, but like a graph.

  • For blockchains that use the DAG model, users who want their transactions to go through need to confirm another transaction that was sent previously. Just like this, the person who makes the next transaction must confirm the person who made the previous transaction. The DAG model is suitable for high-performance blockchains.

  • Marathon confirmed this in its announcement, saying: “The Kaspa network is now processing one block per second, enabling faster transactions and providing Kaspa miners with the opportunity to earn more block rewards within a certain time frame.”

MARA also revealed that as of June 25, the company has mined 93 million KAS, worth about $15 million. Currently, the circulation of KAS has reached nearly 84% of the total supply, so KAS no longer faces too much pressure to unlock, and the price of KAS is more objectively determined by the market.

Is DAG the new hype?

Marathon's participation in KAS mining is a signal to many sensitive investors. Because MARA's major shareholders include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, etc., MARA's decision is a signal that large funds also accept the way of mining DAG system altcoins to diversify their income.

It’s very likely that many DAG altcoins may gain community attention from now on. Dr. Martin Hiesboeck (@MHiesboeck), the lead researcher at Uphold, seems to have foreseen this possibility, recently making a notable statement.

“DAGs have many mathematical problems and unknown consequences that have not been fully studied. Don’t get stuck on what you think is the ‘holy grail’! There is no holy grail.”

Martin actively opposes any form of technological extremism (over-promoting a certain technology or model), criticizing many people's negative views on Bitcoin technology as outdated, and pointed out that it is also wrong to think that DAG is the new "holy grail" to solve the blockchain trilemma. The blockchain trilemma refers to achieving security, decentralization, and scalability at the same time.

DAG system altcoin prices are in a favorable position

Except for Kaspa (KAS), the altcoin with the largest market capitalization and the largest recent increase, statistics from CoinmarketCap show that the prices of other altcoins based on the DAG system are still low in 2024. The prices of altcoins such as IOTA and HBAR have fallen back to the levels of early 2023.

Altcoins in DAG

Source: CoinmarketCap

Kaspa is both a PoW (proof of work) altcoin that miners can mine using existing hardware resources, and it also adopts a DAG model that shows good economic benefits. Because of this, KAS has unique growth momentum.

Since the MARA announcement, investors have begun to pay more attention to DAG technology (even though it has been around for a long time), and many projects have also begun to emphasize the application value of DAG technology.