What is Kakitu?¶

Kakitu is Kenya's digital shilling — a feeless, instant cryptocurrency designed to make digital payments accessible to every Kenyan.

The Vision¶

Kenya has a strong culture of mobile money. M-Pesa revolutionised payments, but it still charges transaction fees, requires a telecom account, and operates as a closed, centralised system. Kakitu is the next step: an open, permissionless digital cash layer that anyone can use — with no fees, no intermediaries, and no gatekeeping.

Kakitu's currency symbol is KSHS and all addresses use the kshs_ prefix.

How It Works¶

Kakitu is built on the Nano protocol — a battle-tested, energy-efficient block-lattice architecture where every account has its own blockchain. This design means:

No miners — transactions are confirmed by a network of representatives using delegated proof-of-stake voting (Open Representative Voting, ORV)
No fees — there is no block reward, so there is no incentive to charge fees
Near-instant confirmation — under 1 second in normal network conditions
Environmentally friendly — no proof-of-work mining; negligible energy use per transaction

Each account on the Kakitu network has a unique kshs_ address derived from a 256-bit seed or private key.

Key Properties¶

Property	Value
Currency symbol	KSHS
Address prefix	`kshs_`
Protocol	Nano block-lattice
Fees	0
Confirmation time	< 1 second
Supply	Fixed (no inflation)

Why Kenya?¶

Kenya is one of the world's most innovative mobile money markets. But existing solutions:

Charge per-transaction fees that add up for low-income users
Depend on a single telecom provider's infrastructure
Are not globally interoperable without expensive conversion

Kakitu is designed to fill that gap — a Kenya-native digital currency that works on any smartphone with internet access, integrates with local services, and has zero transaction costs.

Relationship to Nano¶

Kakitu is a fork of the open-source Nano node software. It uses the same block-lattice data model and ORV consensus but has its own:

Genesis block and initial supply distribution
Network magic bytes (KL for live, KD for dev)
P2P and RPC ports (44075 / 44076 / 44078)
Address prefix (kshs_ instead of nano_)
Brand, explorer, and community infrastructure

For deep technical background on the underlying protocol, see the Nano documentation.