Kaspa ecosystem's "Uniswap moment": Behind Zealous's tenfold rise, is it a meme frenzy or the cornerstone of Decentralized Finance?

Written by: Luke, Mars Finance

Amidst the clamor of the cryptocurrency market, a signal quietly emerges in a relatively silent corner. A project named Zealous ($ZEAL), a Kaspa KRC-20 project, has achieved an astonishing growth of over ten times in a short period, with its 7-day increase once exceeding 300%. This event took place outside the mainstream view, raising a profound question: Is this merely another fleeting speculative frenzy in the world of micro-cap tokens, or does it signify that an emerging public chain ecosystem is entering a new stage of qualitative change?

The answer may be more complex than it appears on the surface. The rise of $ZEAL is not accidental; it is more like the product of a perfect storm: a powerful Layer-1 technology platform has finally welcomed its first piece of critical financial infrastructure, and has been ignited by the combined effect of a savvy community strategy and key market catalysts. This may very well be the Kaspa ecosystem’s “Uniswap moment”—a turning point from theoretical potential to a tangible, operational economy.

Why is Kaspa the stage for this grand performance?

To understand Zealous, one must first understand the soil it is rooted in — Kaspa. Kaspa is not just another mediocre blockchain; its core technology creates the necessary conditions for the prosperity of high-performance decentralized applications (dApps).

Breaking the “Impossible Triangle” with BlockDAG

Traditional blockchains, such as Bitcoin, have long been trapped in the “scalability trilemma,” which makes it difficult to achieve decentralization, security, and high speed simultaneously. To prevent “orphan blocks” (conflicting blocks produced at the same time) from undermining network consensus, they must sacrifice speed by adopting longer block times, which greatly limits transaction throughput.

Kaspa has revolutionized the situation with its groundbreaking BlockDAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) architecture. At its core is the GHOSTDAG protocol, which allows for the parallel creation of blocks instead of a linear chain. It does not discard parallel blocks but cleverly weaves them all into a unified DAG structure and orders them, forming a single, consistent transaction history. This technological breakthrough enables Kaspa to achieve an extremely high block production rate while maintaining the security and decentralization characteristics of the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism—currently, the mainnet has reached 10 blocks per second (10 BPS) and plans to progress to 32 or even 100 BPS, leading to sub-second transaction confirmations. This high throughput and low latency are fundamental prerequisites for any serious decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, especially performance-intensive applications like decentralized exchanges (DEX) to run smoothly.

The spiritual core of “fair launch”

Since its inception, Kaspa has strictly adhered to Bitcoin’s “fair launch” principle—no pre-mining, no pre-sale, and no token distribution to teams or venture capital (VC). This core spirit is particularly precious in today’s VC-driven projects; it is not only a technical choice but also a powerful cultural and economic declaration. It attracts and unites a strong, loyal grassroots community, whose beliefs are rooted in the project’s long-term technological value rather than short-term speculation. It is this fertile soil that provides the initial support and impetus for organically grown, bottom-up projects like Zealous.

Catalyst: The Birth of the KRC-20 Standard

If Kaspa’s technology is the stage, then the emergence of the KRC-20 token standard is the direct catalyst that ignites this ecological explosion. It has triggered a “Cambrian explosion” of asset creation on Kaspa and directly generated an urgent demand for the trading market.

Kaspa’s ERC-20 Moment

KRC-20 is a token standard built on the Kaspa blockchain, similar to Ethereum’s ERC-20, implemented through a protocol called Kasplex. A unified token standard means that any developer can easily create and issue their own fungible tokens on Kaspa. This marks the evolution of the Kaspa network from a purely value transfer tool ($KAS token) to a platform capable of supporting diverse assets and applications.

Meme Coin’s “Wild West”

After the release of the KRC-20 standard, the first wave of emerging projects were mostly Meme coins. Projects like Nacho the Kat ($NACHO), inspired by Kaspa core developer Shai Wyborski’s pet cat, and Kasper ($KASPER), themed around the Kaspa ghost image, rapidly accumulated a large user base and considerable market value due to their strong community cohesion and viral spread.

Although Meme coins are often seen as purely speculative, this phase is crucial for an emerging ecosystem as a “stress test” and user acquisition engine. It has generated enormous trading demand, attracted market attention, and introduced thousands of new users to Kaspa wallets and browsers for the first time. However, the trading methods for these new assets appear primitive and clumsy, primarily relying on Telegram bots (such as KSPR Bot) or dedicated wallet applications for peer-to-peer transactions, lacking a centralized, efficient, and user-friendly on-chain trading venue. This significant market gap and user pain points have paved the way for the emergence of Zealous.

Main character: Zealous ($ZEAL) what exactly is it?

The emergence of Zealous precisely fills this market gap. It is not just another Meme coin, but rather the “shovel seller” in this KRC-20 “gold rush”—a fundamental financial facility.

The first AMM DEX on Kaspa

Zealous Swap is the first decentralized exchange (DEX) with an automated market maker (AMM) model on the Kaspa blockchain. AMM DEX is the cornerstone of any DeFi ecosystem, allowing users to trade any token pair on-chain without permission and trust, providing critical liquidity and price discovery features for the ecosystem. As the first mover, Zealous enjoys a significant competitive advantage.

Innovative design and strategic positioning

Zealous Swap isn’t just a replica, it’s designed with a lot of innovative thinking in mind. It introduces an “NFT-based fee system”, where users who hold specific NFTs may receive a discount on transaction fees, thereby enhancing user stickiness; At the same time, it adopts the “Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL)” model, which aims to ensure that exchanges have sustainable long-term liquidity, and solves the problem of liquidity depletion after the end of “liquidity mining” that new DEXs generally face. In addition, the project mentions advanced features such as “Flash Swaps”, which shows that the team is not only looking at the present, but also planning for more complex DeFi applications in the future.

This design positions its value far beyond that of a simple trading tool. In the emerging economy of KRC-20, value must inevitably flow through the trading market, the critical artery. Zealous positions itself as the central hub of this economy, and the value of its token $ZEAL is thus deeply tied to the overall health and activity of the KRC-20 ecosystem. Each time a new Meme coin is created and traded, it contributes to Zealous’s trading volume and transaction fees. This is precisely the classic investment logic of “selling shovels during a gold rush,” and the market’s tenfold valuation reassessment is a recognition of this strong economic positioning and its future potential.

Deconstructing Tenfold Growth: A Perfect Storm

The explosive surge of $ZEAL is the result of three major catalysts concentrating and erupting in a short period of time, together creating a perfect growth storm.

Catalyst One: Symbiotic Growth Flywheel with $NACHO

From the very beginning, Zealous adopted an exceptionally clever native market strategy for cryptocurrency. Instead of opting for traditional advertising, it established a deep strategic partnership with the largest and most active community in the KRC-20 ecosystem at that time—$NACHO. The two parties held a joint AMA (Ask Me Anything) event on April 3, 2025, to officially announce their partnership.

This cooperation is not limited to verbal agreements, but is deeply integrated through token economics and product mechanisms. In Zealous’s token distribution, a portion is explicitly allocated to the NACHO community and creators. Even more attractively, holders of Nacho NFTs can earn by staking their NFTs.

The airdrop rewards of ZEAL. This initiative can be described as a stroke of genius, instantly bringing thousands of highly active initial users and loyal supporters to Zealous. Meanwhile, the $NACHO community also gained the opportunity to share in the growth dividends of the core infrastructure of the ecosystem, forming a powerful, mutually beneficial growth flywheel.

Catalyst II: Liquidity Shock from CEX Listing

If the partnership with $NACHO is to fuel the rocket, then the listing on a centralized exchange (CEX) is the match that ignites the lead. On May 30, 2025, Zealous (ZEAL) was officially listed on CoinEx Exchange. Before that, buy

ZEAL requires users to go deep into the internal operation of the Kaspa ecosystem, and the threshold is high. The listing of the CEX provides a simple and direct investment channel for a wider range of investors around the world. This is not only an important endorsement of the project, but also opens the floodgates of external capital inflow. The sharp rise in prices is highly consistent with this point in time, indicating that the CEX listing is a key trigger to attract a large amount of new money to enter the market.

Catalyst III: The Powerful Narrative of “The First and Only”

In the crypto world, storytelling is productivity. Zealous succeeds in capturing the powerful and concise narrative of “Uniswap on Kaspa”. It enables investors to do pattern matching, projecting the huge success of Uniswap on Ethereum and PancakeSwap on BNB Chain onto Zealous. As the “first” AMM DEX, coupled with its claimed innovative features and community information disclosure that has been audited by the well-known security company Hexens, its “first and only” narrative is particularly credible and powerful, thus building a strong market consensus in a short period of time.

Grand Vision: The Future and Path of Kaspa’s DeFi

Placing the rise of Zealous within the broader development blueprint of Kaspa, we find that this is just the first step.

Kaspa KRC-20 Ecosystem Initial Snapshot

The table clearly shows the current landscape of the KRC-20 ecosystem: Meme coins dominate, with Zealous being the only and most crucial infrastructure among them. However, the current functionality of the KRC-20 standard is relatively basic and does not possess the complex smart contract capabilities like Ethereum; its application scenarios are mainly limited to token issuance and NFTs.

The next evolution of ecology will rely on more powerful programmability. This is already included in the roadmap of Kaspa. The core team of Kaspa is working on achieving smart contract functionality through upgrades, while third-party teams like Igra Labs are also building EVM-compatible Layer 2 solutions on Kaspa, with plans to launch a testnet in 2025. The arrival of smart contracts and Layer 2 will unlock a whole new DeFi world for Kaspa: lending, derivatives, stablecoins, and complex decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) will all become possible. All these future applications depend on a robust and liquid on-chain trading center. Zealous’s early layout not only serves the current Meme market but also lays a solid foundation for becoming the central bank and trading hub of the entire Kaspa DeFi economy in the future.

Conclusion: Overture to the Final Chapter

The tenfold growth of Zealous is not an isolated market anomaly, but rather an inevitable convergence of a series of factors: excellent underlying technology, the birth of new markets, strategically positioned infrastructure, superior community growth strategies, and key market catalysts.

Its success marks the end of Kaspa’s “pure theoretical potential” stage and the beginning of a vibrant and real economic ecosystem. Although the road ahead remains fraught with volatility and challenges, the solid establishment of the first DeFi cornerstone is undoubtedly a milestone in Kaspa’s development history. The question now is no longer whether a prosperous economy can be established on Kaspa, but rather how far this economy can go. And Zealous Swap, at least for now, holds the key to this future.