Highlights
- Kusama passes motion for continuous parachain auctions
- The auctions will begin on October 23 and last for 48 weeks
- Unlike previous auctions, winning parachains will be onboarded at the beginning of the following lease
About Kusama
Kusama, which describes itself as “Polkadot’s wild cousin,” is an experimental blockchain platform intended to offer developers a massively interoperable and scalable framework.
Kusama was developed by the same firm that produced Polkadot, Parity Technologies, and is based on the company’s blockchain development kit, Substrate. Thus, there are several similarities between Polkadot and Kusama, including their codebase. Computer scientist and programmer Dr. Gavin Wood, one of Ethereum’s creators, is the brain behind the project.
Fast-moving applications benefit from a highly scalable, interoperable sharded network by deploying on Kusama, which has capabilities not yet available on Polkadot. Thus, Kusama calls itself a “canary network” for this reason.
Although many projects may eventually move their final product to Polkadot after testing on Kusama, the platform was built with developers seeking to create and install their own blockchain in mind. Using Kusama is easy because of the minimal bonding requirements for validators. It’s also popular with companies in the early stages and for experimentation.
Kusama 48 Weeks Parachain Auction
Council members have approved a proposal for continuous parachain auctions. The decision was made based on the community’s response to the Polkassembly post “The Case For Continuous Auctions” raised by a user. Kusama announced it through a series of tweets on its official Twitter account.
Tagged Motion 377, the auction will hold at block #9,777,777 beginning on October 23. The lease is the twelfth one on the platform and will continue every week for the next 48 weeks.
According to the announcement, the auction will be different from others held on the platform in previous times as the winning parachains won’t get onboarded immediately. Instead, they would go live at the beginning of the following lease period. The council has also reserved the right to pause the scheduled auctions should any issue arise during the 48 weeks lease period.
Current Market Analysis Of Kusama
Kusama’s current price is $373.93, and it has a 24-hour trading volume of $166,224,850. It is currently ranked #52 on CoinMarketCap, with a market capitalization of $3,167,241,911.
The total supply of Kusama is 10 million tokens, with 8.47 million in circulation as of November 2020. This maximum supply is not set in contrast to other blockchains. Instead, it rises at a 10% annual inflation rate.
New KSM tokens (created due to inflation) are allocated differently depending on the percentage of KSM that is staked. If precisely half of the KSM is staked, Kusama validators get 100% of freshly created tokens; if it is more than or less than 50%, part of the inflation incentives go to the Kusama Treasury.
Kusama was originally distributed as a free token to individuals who bought Polkadot (DOT) during the Polkadot Token Sale. People without DOT had to use a frictional faucet to get KSM, which was no longer in use. On the other hand, Kusama has not undergone redenomination to increase the amount in circulation.
