What is Kaspa's codebase rewrite, and why does it matter?

Kaspa's development team identified that the original codebase had accumulated technical debt — code that works but has become fragile and hard to maintain over time — and proposed a full rewrite to fix this. Years of research and development left some components difficult to extend, which would make adding major new features, such as smart contract support or a consensus ordering algorithm upgrade, unnecessarily risky. The rewrite is intended to make the codebase accessible to new developers and to open the door to those larger capabilities. For someone holding or using KAS, this matters because a cleaner foundation is what allows the protocol to keep improving without breaking what already works.