Why does Ethereum's whitepaper name the mind behind Kaspa?

Most people know @ethereum's whitepaper as Vitalik Buterin's founding document. Fewer notice that it credits two other researchers by name, and that those two researchers went on to build one of the most technically distinct proof-of-work blockchains in the market today.

The GHOST Protocol and Its Origins

The "Greedy Heaviest Observed Subtree" (GHOST) protocol is an innovation first introduced by Yonatan Sompolinsky (@hashdag) and Aviv Zohar (@Avivz78) in December 2013. The core problem it addressed was straightforward: fast blockchains produce a large share of stale blocks, valid blocks that lose the race to the main chain and are simply discarded. GHOST solves the network security problem by including stale blocks in the calculation of which chain is the "longest," adding the stale descendants of a block's ancestor to the calculation of which block has the largest total proof of work backing it.

Ethereum adopted the idea, but only partially. Ethereum implements a simplified version of GHOST. A note later added to the whitepaper acknowledges that the protocol was never fully applied. The paper does, however, credit both men by name, an unusual acknowledgment for a founding document of that kind.

From GHOST to GHOSTDAG and Kaspa

Sompolinsky did not stop at GHOST. The Kaspa whitepaper was written and published by Yonatan Sompolinsky, Shai Wyborski, and Aviv Zohar on November 10, 2021. Their follow-on protocol, GHOSTDAG, takes the original insight further. Kaspa's design introduces the BlockDAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) structure, combined with the PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG protocols, allowing parallel blocks to coexist and reach consensus, thereby avoiding the orphan block problem in traditional blockchains.

Where a standard blockchain discards any block that does not win the race onto the main chain, GHOSTDAG orders all valid parallel blocks and keeps them. No miner work is wasted, and throughput scales without sacrificing proof-of-work security.

Kaspa launched on November 7, 2021 with no premine, no ICO, no venture capital, and no token allocation to founders. Every single KAS token in existence was mined through proof-of-work, following the same fair distribution model as Bitcoin. The project, which trades under the ticker $KAS, is fully open-source and community-managed.

The lineage is direct: a 2013 academic paper designed to fix a Bitcoin security problem was cited in Ethereum's founding document, refined into GHOSTDAG, and eventually became the consensus engine for #Kaspa. The two names Ethereum's whitepaper credits are the same two names on Kaspa's.

Sources:
Ethereum Whitepaper, ethereum.org
Kaspa Whitepaper via Bitget
Kaspa Overview, Coinstancy Academy