Why did Kaspa rewrite its node software in Rust?

Kaspa rewrote its node software in Rust to unlock significant performance gains. The plan moved core consensus logic to Rust first, while external components like P2P and RPC initially remained in Go, connected through a cross-language interop layer. Two types of improvement were targeted: a 5x single-core speedup from Rust's lack of garbage collection plus DB optimizations like binary serialization and block header compression, and multi-core scaling through parallelism within consensus block and transaction processing. For a beginner, this matters because these gains are what enabled Kaspa to reach much higher transaction and block rates without sacrificing decentralization.