Minted from KAS on L1. No bridge, no custodian, no one who can freeze it.Hold it, send it in about a second, or lock your own KAS to mint it.
What Ballast is for. It's a standard KCC20 token, so any Kaspa wallet that supports KCC20 can hold it.
Keep savings in dollars without leaving Kaspa, wrapping anything or trusting a bridge operator.
Kaspa confirms in about a second with tiny fees, so paying someone in dollars feels like sending a message.
A stable unit for Kaspa apps and AI agents: budgets, payment channels and invoices that don't swing with the KAS price.
Every Ballast dollar is minted against KAS locked in its owner's own vault. Borrow when you need cash, repay when you want your KAS back.
Ballast lends up to $1 for every $1.75 of KAS you lock. The price is an example; set it to today's.
Pay back what you borrowed and the full KAS is yours again. No lock-up period and no interest in this version.
When a vault drops below 175%, anyone can repay its debt and receive that value in KAS plus a 10% bonus. The owner gets the rest back.
Every other dollar on Kaspa today is imported from somewhere else. That's what you're trusting when you hold one.
| Ballast | Bridged stablecoins | L2 lending markets | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where it lives | Kaspa L1, in covenants | Another chain, plus a bridge | An EVM layer on top of Kaspa |
| What backs it | KAS locked on-chain, at least 175% | An issuer's bank reserves | Imported stablecoins |
| Who can freeze it | No one | The issuer, and the bridge operator | The issuer of the stablecoin lent |
| What you trust | Kaspa consensus and the price oracle | Issuer, bridge, custodian | Issuer, bridge, L2 sequencer |
| Trade-off | Supply is capped while KAS liquidity grows | Deep liquidity today | Familiar tools, more moving parts |
No custodianNo company, multisig or bridge holds your KAS.
Supply equals debtOne controller mints and burns exactly what vaults borrow and repay.
Circuit breakerA 20% drop below the 30-minute average pauses liquidations for up to an hour.
Only the latest priceOld signed prices can never be replayed against your vault.
Median 5-minute close across KuCoin, Bybit and Bitget, times in UTC. The shaded band is where liquidations would have paused.
Anyone can swap 1 Ballast for $1 of KAS at any time, taken out of a vault, minus a 0.5% fee paid to that vault's owner. So if Ballast ever trades below about $0.995, buying it and redeeming it is instant profit, and that buying pushes the price back up. Every Ballast is also backed by at least $1.75 of locked KAS.
When KAS falls below your liquidation price, the point where your collateral is worth less than 175% of your debt. A liquidator repays your debt and takes that value plus 10% of your KAS. The rest comes back to you.
From the Ballast Oracle, our own price service. It reads the KAS order books on seven major exchanges, weights each by how much real liquidity it has, drops outliers, and signs one price. On-chain, the contracts compute the moving average and the circuit breaker themselves, so the oracle can't switch those off. Today it runs on one signing key; moving to several independent signers is on the roadmap.
Not yet. The contracts are tested against Kaspa's own script engine, including attack cases, but they haven't been externally audited. Don't lock more than you can afford to lose.
KAS markets are thinner than they look: about $330k of buy orders sit within 2% of the price across major exchanges. Capping total debt keeps liquidations from crashing the market they depend on. The ceiling rises as liquidity does.
Minted from KAS, settled on L1, held by no one but you.
Mint with your KAS