Following the successful completion of the first installment of the Kusama parachain slot auctions throughout June and July, the Kusama team is gearing up to launch the next round of the auctions.
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Scheduled to commence September 1st, the forthcoming auctions will see the community’s most popular projects join the ecosystem via fair and secure auctions. The Kusama team will host five rounds of auctions over five weeks, whereby auctions begin within two days of initial bidding followed by a five-day ending period.
Kusama acts as the test environment, or canary network, for developers to experiment and validate the efficiency of their code and DApps before officially releasing them on Polkadot. Due to the trial-and-error nature of the Kusama testnet, developers can take advantage of a less stringent governance framework as well as lower staking requirements compared to the Polkadot network.
Kusama's live blockchain network delivers a functional market and testnet conditions that other chains cannot provide. Kusama can achieve up to four times faster performance than Polkadot while maintaining scalability and interoperability as part of the revised governance process. This is why most of the upcoming blockchain projects are lining up to deploy their DApps on the Kusama network.
Following Up The Success Of The First-Ever Parachain Auctions
The first five rounds of the Kusama parachain slot auctions witnessed tough competition as value-added blockchain initiatives bid for limited spots. The five winning projects, listed in order, included Karura, Moonriver, Shiden, Khala, and Bifrost. Each is currently working through the five-tier launch phases of their projects on the Kusama network alongside Statemine, the first parachain launched on Kusama.
While all five winning parachains are continuously exploring cross-chain collaborations, both Karura and Shiden have already utilized Kusama’s XCM protocol to enable cross-chain transfers. Karura, the first Kusama parachain slot auction winner, has also launched its decentralized exchange (DEX) platform, Karura Swap, on Kusama, with KSM/KAR as the first trading pair. Khala, the winner of the fourth auction, has also completed its one-way bridge using Kusama’s Substrate pallets.
Other than being extremely successful, the first five auctions are estimated to have locked up almost 20% of the available 5.5 million KSM tokens in circulation. As the second edition of the parachain auctions inches closer, the participating projects are expecting fierce competition, given that the demand for the next five slots has increased sharply. Meanwhile, the total distribution of KSM tokens has dropped due to inflation after the first five rounds, potentially leading to increased slot prices by the time the auctions kick off.
The Promising Blockchain Projects In The Bidding Pipeline
Several rising projects will bid to secure a place in one of the parachain slots numbered six through ten on Kusama. Among the many unique concepts emerging, a few up-and-coming blockchain projects are worth watching, especially those aiming to introduce innovations in the Web 3.0 arena.
KILT Protocol, an open-source blockchain framework for issuing verifiable, revocable, and anonymous claims-based credentials in Web 3.0, is one such project that plans to bid on slots six through ten. By employing the KILT Protocol, users can establish their identities online without exposing their data to companies and services.
Founded in 2018, KILT Protocol has been under development for over three years as the team focuses on building and auditing their product and fine-tuning it with functionalities like staking and initial token economy. These activities, in turn, enable the platform to offer incentives from day one. The platform has also launched its crowdloan initiative, seeking support from its community. To encourage community participation in their auction bid, KILT has set aside 4.5 million KILT Coins from the initial distribution to reward supporters.
Another promising project aiming to win an initial slot in the auctions is Altair, Centrifuge’s DeFi platform for funding real-world assets (RWA). Altair previously bid for a slot in the fourth parachain auction in June, where it raised more than 6,000 KSM from its crowdloan.
By bridging the Ethereum, Kusama, and Polkadot ecosystems, Altair users can tokenize assets. Once tokenized, they can collateralize loans through the lending platform Tinlake. The Altair experimental platform, built on Substrate and with almost the same codebase as the Centrifuge Chain, lets users test the limits of asset financing and new features until they can be deployed on the Centrifuge Chain.
Manta Network’s Calamari Network is another upcoming project focused on winning a slot in the forthcoming parachain auctions. Manta Network provides plug-and-play privacy for Polkadot's ecosystem, providing a suite of features that enable privacy for blockchain projects and products, including a private DEX and payment exchange.
The Calamari Network is Manta Network’s canary net, similar to how Kusama serves as the canary network for Polkadot. It is designed for the Kusama DeFi ecosystem and combines Kusama and zkSNARKs to deliver on-chain privacy for all transactions and swaps on the Kusama chain.
As Manta Network’s testnet, Calamari will be deployed on the Kusama network. It will be the first to receive the latest updates and features to be tested before eventual deployment on the Manta Network. In addition, as part of its native suite of products, Calamari Network will also offer MariPay, a token-agnostic private payment service, and MariSwap, its private AMM-based DEX, to the Kusama community.
Another Web 3.0-focused project, the Parami Protocol, a Web3 advertising protocol, will also bid for a parachain slot in the coming months. As a pioneering firm in the personal data space, Parami offers users greater control over their data and identity on a blockchain, ensuring security and privacy while contributing to global Web 3.0 adoption rates.
With the parachain slot auctions due to start in a few weeks, the Kusama team has advised that all upcoming auctions will be chaotic and competitive, as selected new projects vie to test the full functionality of their platforms and protocols on Kusama.
