Kaspa's Kasplex & Igra Pass Full EVM Benchmark — 200x Cheaper Than Ethereum

A community developer built a compatibility-testing tool, pointed it at Kaspa's two EVM layers, and got a number worth paying attention to: Kasplex and Igra executed 66 standard Ethereum operations identically to Ethereum Sepolia — at more than 200 times lower cost. The results, reported on July 16, 2026, come with honest caveats, but they mark the first concrete, reproducible proof that Kaspa's Layer-2 ecosystem can run today's most common smart-contract patterns without modification.

For anyone holding KAS, mining blocks, or thinking about where to deploy capital on a proof-of-work chain, the findings deserve a closer look.

What Merlin Actually Tested

The developer behind the benchmark — identified as Merlin in the Kaspa community — did not set out to build a benchmark suite. As Merlin explained, the project started as a guide to help builders leverage Kaspa smart contracts and "led me to create an Ethereum/Kasplex/Igra compatibility test tool." What emerged was a structured comparison across a meaningful sample of EVM opcodes and contract interactions.

The test covered 66 distinct EVM operations, spanning four categories that represent the bulk of on-chain activity today:

• Token transfers — the bread-and-butter ERC-20 send.
• DEX swaps — constant-product AMM interactions of the kind Uniswap popularised.
• Lending operations — deposit, borrow, and repay cycles through a lending pool.
• NFT functions — mint, transfer, and approval patterns on ERC-721 contracts.

For every one of those 66 operations, Kasplex and Igra produced identical execution results to Ethereum Sepolia — same gas logic, same return values, same state transitions. The only difference was price: more than 200x cheaper than Ethereum mainnet.

That number is not an abstraction. On Ethereum mainnet, a single token transfer can cost several dollars during moderate congestion; a DEX swap can run into double digits. At 200x cheaper, the same operations on Kasplex or Igra would settle for pennies or fractions of pennies — in line with what developers and users on other low-cost L2s have come to expect, but anchored to a proof-of-work base layer rather than a proof-of-stake rollup.

Why "Identical Execution" Matters More Than the Price Tag

The cost comparison is the headline, but the compatibility finding is arguably more significant. What Merlin's tool confirmed is that Kasplex and Igra do not merely approximate Ethereum behaviour — they reproduce it faithfully across a representative workload.

This is not a trivial engineering achievement. EVM compatibility is a spectrum. Some chains advertise "EVM equivalence" but deviate in edge cases around gas metering, opcode behaviour, or precompiled contract availability. Those deviations break tooling, surprise developers, and produce subtle bugs that only surface in production.

Merlin's test found that Kasplex and Igra match Ethereum Sepolia's execution on all 66 sampled operations. That means existing Solidity code, existing developer frameworks — Hardhat, Foundry, Remix — and existing testing pipelines should work without modification. A developer who can deploy on Ethereum today can deploy on Kaspa's L2s with the same codebase.

The Honest Caveats

Merlin's summary is notably candid about what is *not* solved yet: "Deployment and RPC issues remain." This is worth unpacking because it affects the practical developer experience today.

RPC (Remote Procedure Call) infrastructure is how wallets, front-ends, and scripts communicate with the blockchain. If RPC nodes are unreliable, rate-limited, or hard to connect to, developers face friction at the earliest stage of building — even if the underlying execution engine works perfectly. Deployment challenges could mean anything from incomplete tooling documentation to edge cases in contract deployment pipelines that need hardening.

None of this diminishes the compatibility finding. But it does set expectations: Kasplex and Igra are execution-ready, not necessarily ecosystem-complete. A developer can write and test a contract today with confidence that the EVM layer will behave correctly. Shipping that contract to production with a polished user experience will require continued infrastructure maturation.

This is normal for early-stage L2 ecosystems. Ethereum's own rollup-based L2s went through years of RPC instability, bridge complexity, and fragmented liquidity before reaching the relatively smooth developer experience they offer today. Kaspa's layers have the advantage of starting with full EVM compatibility rather than building toward it incrementally.

The Broader Kaspa Context

Merlin's benchmark did not happen in isolation. The same weekly report from July 16, 2026, documents several parallel threads of Kaspa ecosystem development:

• Kaspa Industrial Initiative (Kii) launched a redesigned website highlighting three flagship systems: WarpCore for ISO 20022 payment settlement, Meridian for institutional asset issuance and servicing, and KiiWORKS for trade documents, credentials, and product records. The site clarifies the separation between the Stichting Kii Foundation's public-goods work and the commercial entities operating the products. Pilot discussions are open ahead of launch.

• GigaWatt Stablecoin, intended as a settlement mechanism for the energy sector, was confirmed as still under active development despite being omitted from Kii's new website. The team cited evolving regulations — specifically the EU's MiCA framework and proposed U.S. legislation such as the GENIUS Act — as gating factors on delivery.

• DAGKnight has been running on an internal development network since February 2026. Current work focuses on implementing an incremental version of UMC for production use and onboarding additional core developers. Core developer Michael Sutton suggested acceleration is coming: *"The August rush of core knights is coming..."*

• Open ICC, a research concept exploring policy-driven distributed systems, was detailed by Sutton as a framework that expanded beyond its initial gaming-inspired use case into broader architectural implications.

Each of these threads reinforces the same picture: Kaspa is not a single-feature chain. The L2 ecosystem — validated by Merlin's benchmark — sits alongside institutional payment infrastructure, an energy-sector stablecoin, and a next-generation consensus upgrade, all under active development.

What This Means for KAS Holders and PoW Miners

For KAS holders, the practical takeaway is that the asset's utility case is broadening. KAS is no longer only a store-of-value on a fast proof-of-work DAG; it is becoming the settlement currency for an ecosystem of EVM-compatible smart contracts, institutional payment rails, and potentially energy-market infrastructure. Each additional use case that reaches production adds non-speculative demand for the token.

For proof-of-work miners, the implications are structural. EVM layers that settle to Kaspa's base layer generate transaction volume, and transaction volume generates fee revenue. PoW miners already know the long-term arithmetic: as block subsidies diminish across all PoW chains, fee revenue must eventually sustain hashrate. A thriving L2 ecosystem — one where developers actually deploy because costs are low and compatibility is real — is the most credible path to that fee revenue on Kaspa.

For self-custody-minded users, the message is about optionality. Kaspa's expanding tooling means more reasons to hold and transact KAS on-chain, and more reasons to keep your keys in your own control. Non-custodial contract interactions — whether through a DEX swap, a lending position, or a P2P escrow — are only meaningful if the user controls the signing key. The ecosystem is building toward that reality; the individual user still has to choose it.

The Bottom Line

Merlin's benchmark is not a marketing claim. It is a reproducible test, documented with specific parameters — 66 EVM operations, four contract categories, comparison against Ethereum Sepolia — and published alongside honest notes on deployment friction. The finding: Kasplex and Igra are fully EVM-compatible today and more than 200x cheaper than Ethereum mainnet.

The infrastructure still needs work. RPC reliability, deployment tooling, and developer documentation all require continued investment. But the execution layer itself — the thing that actually has to process smart contracts correctly — has cleared a meaningful threshold. Kaspa's L2 ecosystem is developer-ready in the dimension that matters most: does the code run the way it should?

For a proof-of-work chain that has always prioritised engineering substance over marketing noise, that is exactly the kind of milestone worth noting.