Last week, Polkadot’s canary network, Kusama (KSM), conducted an on-chain upgrade on its parachain after a vote was passed, making it the first live and fully functional parachain of the Kusama network processing permissionless transactions. The upgrade also made the project the first fully decentralized, heterogeneously-sharded blockchain.
Kusama is a permissionless network that allows developers to experiment and test dApps and blockchains before deploying them on Polkadot.
Last month, Polkadot added parachain auctions and crowd loans to Kusama and Westend. Following the addition, Kusama unveiled its first live parachain, Shell, about two weeks ago. While it ran smoothly, the Shell parachain needed to be upgraded into “something rich and functional.” Last week, it was upgraded to Statemine, a milestone development for the project.
Parachains serve as a multi-functional facet of the Polkadot ecosystem used for different purposes such as smart contract chains, privacy chains, and high-frequency trades.
While Kusama’s Shell was designed to examine the capabilities of the Kusama parachain system, the Statemine parachain is the equivalent of the Polkadot’s Statemint common-good parachain. It supports multiple functions such as low-cost KSM transfer, minting, and transferring of fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Meanwhile, KSM holders can freely transfer their tokens between Kusama and Statemine using the XCM protocol while other parachains will also be able to interact with Statemine with the same protocol.
According to the project, although Statemine’s utility as a solitary chain is substantial, there’s a need to create a community of chains to increase its utility, which will be done through the concept of Kusama’s Parachain Slot Auctions. This is a market-efficient way that allows developers to bring their ideas to life on the Kusama network.
If the governance council approves and everything goes according to plan with no significant or unexpected issues with the relay-chain logic, the first Kusama Parachain Slot auction will take place between June 15, and 22 and the highest bidder will be selected as the winner on June 22.
Following that, the second, third, fourth, and Fifth Kusama Parachain Slot auctions will be held between June 22 and July 13.