TL;DR: I built a guide to help builders leverage Kaspa smart contracts, which led me to create an Ethereum/Kasplex/Igra compatibility test tool. The results show Kasplex and Igra are fully EVM compatible TODAY and over 200x cheaper than Ethereum. Deployment and RPC issues remain, but Kasplex and Igra together open powerful opportunities for developers. This article shares my journey, findings, and the guide so you can try it yourself.
I dare you to read the full article below without falling asleep — or go straight to GitHub instead 😉
I've been in blockchain for more than 10 years now — initially skeptical when I first encountered it...
Still remember back in 2011 me saying: "Who is going to wait so long for his payment to be executed? This thing will never work."
True visionary, right? 😅
But by 2015, I was prototyping real use cases to evaluate potential threats to the products I was working on, and since 2020 I've been deep in the trenches — mining, building, and contributing to countless blockchain projects.
Discovering Kaspa
I discovered Kaspa at the end of 2021 and thought: this is what I had expected Bitcoin to be when I first encountered it years ago...
Now, as someone who's spent over a decade as a CTO leading small to very large engineering teams across SaaS and enterprise products, I was of course looking for ways to leverage this tech to build applications.
That's why, when smart contracts were announced on Kaspa, I started looking for potential projects to build and take advantage of the uniqueness of Kaspa — and the advantages of running smart contracts on it versus other blockchains.
I had several ideas but was waiting for the implementations to mature a bit first 🙂
So, a few weeks ago, I started with what should have been a straightforward task: building a DAO management system.
Tech-First, Not Price-First
While most people are waiting for smart contract releases from a purely financial perspective — wondering when they'll be delivered and when they'll pump Kaspa's price — my focus is entirely different.
I care about the technology and what applications it enables. This tech-first approach is exactly how the Kaspa team works, and it's what makes this blockchain genuinely successful rather than just another speculative asset.
First Attempts: The Hard Reality
I got a first MVP running locally (thanks to AI — that went super fast!) but when I tried to deploy the DAO contracts onto Kasplex, reality hit hard: nothing was working.
To be truly honest, the documentation published by the Kasplex team was not really enabling me to find out why...
Maybe the root cause was my lack of experience with production builds using smart contracts. If I had been building dApps for years, I would certainly have got it quickly.
I finally managed to understand the quirks and precautions to take, but I felt that if we want to enable other builders to build apps, it would be interesting to provide a set of working examples/code to deploy and use smart contracts on that platform, to migrate from other blockchain EVMs.
From Frustration to Contribution
What started as personal frustration became a mission to help other developers.
I created the Kaspa L2 Migration Guide to document everything I learned — not just the theory, but the practical steps, gotchas, and real-world testing that proves this migration actually works, with samples to:
- Run a very basic contract (just an increment)
- Create and deploy ERC-20 tokens
- Create and deploy a standard ERC-721 NFT collection
These worked and allow any developer to kickstart their journey on building Kaspa-enabled dApps.
AI’s “Helpful” Claims
Of course, I used AI to do this and build full documentation for the project...
I started seeing AI-generated statements like:
- “It’s cheaper!”
- “It’s faster!”
- “It’s fully EVM compatible!”
Isn't AI great at making things up ?
But these are powerful statements that I thought would be amazing to prove.
So I embarked on another journey to complete my initial work: make them true and tested.
Building the Network Test Tool
I spent quite a while building a network test tool — with many frustrating AI development hoops (running in circles is another specialty of AI, it seems).
I started with a set of tests on standard DeFi operations:
- ERC-20 Token operations: mint, reward, transfer, batch transfer
- DEX operations: approve tokens, create pair, add liquidity, atomic swap, perform 100s of swaps
- Lending operations: init market, supply tokens, deposit collateral, borrow, repay
- Yield farming: create pool, fund rewards, stake, claim rewards
- NFT operations: mint NFTs, stake NFT, batch stake
- Multi-sig operations: submit proposal, create proposal, batch submit
I then extended them with some technical EVM tests (contract infrastructure, hashing, assembly operations...).
All in all, about 66 different tests implemented and executed with the same code and the same contracts on both Ethereum (Sepolia) and Kasplex & Igra testnet.
The Results
The Good
- ✅ All tests passed on both networks! Both Kasplex L2 and IGRA Caravel achieved 100% EVM compatibility tests.
- ✅ Both networks also demonstrated 100% success on a complete DeFi protocol suite with excellent performance across all 7 phases with results completely identical to the same execution on ETH (Sepolia).
- ✅ Cost savings: running these operations on both was over 200x cheaper compared to Ethereum mainnet.
The Bad
- ❌ I faced issues deploying contracts and running transactions: RPC rejections forced me to implement retries with progressive gas adjustments (up to 11 retries sometimes). On subsequent runs, however, all deployments and tests passed without retries, which shows this is more of an infrastructure issue that can be fixed.
- ❌ Performance-wise, although Kaspa is faster, test runtimes were roughly similar to Ethereum. Minor timing differences weren’t significant in practice.
The Ugly
- 😬 Kasplex infrastructure isn’t fully production-ready yet. Progressive decentralization is planned, but I hit deployment constraints that highlight the cost/scale challenges of running such infrastructure.
- 😬 On the other hand, IGRA has been decentralized from day one, with community nodes processing transactions and full L1-backed security. Still, both networks will need to keep scaling their infra as adoption grows, which will require strong community support for node operation.
Some people I spoke to even said: “Kasplex is not ready... wait for Igra.” But my conclusion is that both have strengths and should be used together in the future.
Reality Check on Testnets
Both Kasplex and Igra are available as testnets today. During my tests, I encountered timeouts on both platforms, even though the workload was not yet high. This shows that production releases will need carefully planned deployment approaches. Once production goes live, we can expect a tremendous surge of excitement — with developers rushing in to test, build, and stress these systems. That enthusiasm is fantastic, but infrastructure must be ready from day one to avoid cascading timeouts or failures that could harm the perception of Kaspa L1.
Better to delay mainnet than risk cascading failures from testnet-level timeouts.
Kasplex vs Igra
Kasplex: The Application Highway
- Immediate Impact: Ethereum developers can migrate today with huge cost savings
- Proven Model: Traditional rollup architecture with Kaspa’s speed advantage
- User Adoption: Familiar tools and interfaces accelerate ecosystem growth
Igra Labs: The Decentralized Rollup
- Live Today: Already operating as a decentralized rollup built directly on Kaspa’s BlockDAG
- Security: Follows L1 sequencing for enhanced security
- Community Operation: From day one, testnet transactions are processed on external community nodes
- Canonical Bridge: Every iKAS minted is 1:1 backed and secured by L1 consensus
- Focus: Strong emphasis on resilience and miner alignment
- Ecosystem: Currently powering DeFi protocols, stablecoin initiatives, and EVM bridges
Combined Force Multiplier
Rather than choosing between them, the market will benefit from both platforms working in concert:
- Kasplex provides the foundation layer for immediate EVM compatibility, faster finality, and cost reduction.
- Igra operates as a resilient decentralized rollup aligned with L1 security and community participation, and has a roadmap for cross-VM functionality, which would enable next-gen applications leveraging multiple blockchain ecosystems — an unprecedented capability once delivered.
Together, they position Kaspa to capture unprecedented value in the blockchain market.
Why It Matters
The blockchain industry has long faced a trade-off:
- Choose Ethereum for rich ecosystem & mature tooling
- Or choose alternatives for speed/cheapness but start from scratch
Kasplex L2 and Igra together eliminate this compromise by bringing full EVM compatibility and resilient rollup security to Kaspa’s lightning-fast blockchain.
For developers like us, tired of choosing between functionality and performance, this creates unprecedented opportunities.
Data Beats Opinions
As someone who's been building enterprise software for many decades, I’ve learned one crucial lesson:
Data beats opinions every time.
That’s why I built the Kaspa L2 Migration Guide:
- Not to convince you
- But to give you the tools to convince yourself
My Journey vs Yours
But here’s the thing: I could be wrong. I have experience in software development and some blockchain exposure, but I am certainly not an expert — more someone who feels like an expert thanks to AI :)
- Maybe I missed something
- Maybe your use case is different
- Maybe infra costs spiral out of control
- Maybe the tech isn’t as mature as I think
The Challenge: Don’t Trust Me
Test it yourself.
- Clone the guide → github.com/Zorglub4242/kaspa-l2-migration-guide
- Try your own contracts → Deploy something you’ve built on Ethereum
- Use the network test tool → Evaluate performance, gas costs, and behavior across chains
- Measure the results → Document your own costs, performance, migration experience
- Share your findings → Issues, pull requests, discussions
Let’s Build Something Bigger
While most of the crypto world obsesses over price movements and token launches, we have a chance to build something that actually advances the technology.
The Kaspa team’s relentless focus on technical excellence has created a foundation that could change how we think about blockchain performance.
But it won’t happen through speculation or hype.
It will happen through:
- Developers rolling up their sleeves
- Testing the technology
- Documenting the reality (good and bad)
- Building applications that showcase what’s possible
Whether Kaspa succeeds or fails, whether Kasplex or Igra becomes the Ethereum migration path or just another experiment, whether these cost savings hold up under real-world pressure — that’s for all of us to determine.
Through rigorous testing, honest documentation, and open debate.
So...Let’s build the future of blockchain together, one verified claim at a time !
PS: And now I can finally resume my DAO work project (as well as the work I do to help the fantastic KYO team build a true real-world payment solution on Kaspa).
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