What Is Kusama? All You Need to Know About KSM

What Is Kusama?

Describing itself as “Polkadot’s wild cousin” and “Polkadot’s Canary Network”, Kusama is an experimental blockchain platform designed to provide developers with a widely interoperable and extensible framework. Kusama is built on Substrate - a blockchain-building toolkit developed by Parity Technologies. As a result, Kusama has almost the same codebase as Polkadot - one of the most successful interoperable blockchains.

By deploying to Kusama, Rapid Projects gain access to a highly scalable and interoperable network share, with features not available on Polkadot. Thus, Kusama describes itself as a “network of canaries”.

The platform is designed to provide a test bed for developers looking to innovate and implement their blockchain and can be used as a pre-launch network on Polkadot - although many projects choose to stick with Kusama for their final product. Kusama has a low barrier of entry for parachains implementation and low federation requirements for validators and is most commonly used by early-stage startups and for testing.

Because its primary use case is to facilitate testing, Kusama strives to give developers more flexibility while refining their Polkadot projects’ design. In turn, Kusama offers looser rules than Polkadot, including less strict administrative settings. Kusama mimics many of Polkadot’s key design features. For example, Kusama uses two blockchains: a mainnet, called a relay chain, where transactions are permanent, and a user-generated network, called parachains. Parachains can be customized for any use and leverage the main relay chain for security. The potential benefit of starting a project on Kusama is that it allows Polkadot projects to build a user base and gain traction in the community before the official launch.

Kusama’s History

Kusama was built by the same team that created Polkadot, a company called Parity Technologies. Its founder is Dr. Gavin Wood, a world-renowned computer scientist, and programmer who co-founded Ethereum.

Parity Technologies has an extensive team of some of the most successful blockchain engineers in the world and a total of more than 100 employees spread across the globe.

Additionally, Kusama is funded by grants from the Web3 Foundation, which was established to help “maintain and manage technologies and applications in the areas of decentralized web software protocol”. The Web3 Foundation also supports Kusama in research and community development through its development team.

Kusama vs. Polkadot: What Is the Difference?

Kusama is known as the “canary network” for the Polkadot blockchain, which means that it provides the first version of the code that is untested and available before launch on Polkadot.

The first major difference between the two networks is the speed of the administration system. In Kusama, it takes seven days to vote in a referendum and eight days to implement post-vote changes, compared with one month for each referendum.

Second, being a validator on Kusama is much easier, as the minimum wagering requirements are lower than Polkadot. It is important to note that Kusama is an experimental blockchain that offers stability and security to increase network speed.

How Does Kusama Work? Parachains, NPoS, Relay and Transition Chain

Nominated Proof-of-Stake System

The Kusama network allows the creation of two types of blockchains.

Transition Chain

Kusama’s main blockchain, this network is where transactions are completed. To achieve higher speed, the relay chain separates the addition of new transactions from the act of validating those transactions.

Parachains and Parathreads

There is not much distinction between a parachain and a parathread regarding technology. Both the parachain and the parathread are convertible. The main economic distinction between the two is that parachains are independent blockchains with unique coins and functionality tailored to particular use cases. The system offers the entire throughput and maintains the parachain connection to the relay chain. On the other hand, a parathread is a unique type of parachain that isn’t always connected to the relay chain and is consequently charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. A network of parachains is created by Kusama using an operating system that groups multiple specific blockchains together for various uses.

The parachains are unique in that they may be customized for a wide range of uses. The parachains are additionally linked to the primary Kusama blockchain (relay chain). They gain from their network security in this way. Kusama employs so-called parachain slot auctions to establish this community. The parachains that are added to the Kusama relay chain are a market-efficient choice. Teams that gain the support of the KSM community are treated more favorably. The Kusama council and the KSM stakeholders ultimately decide everything that occurs in the Kusama network, including when the parachain slot auctions will occur.

Kusama Parachain Auction

Source: Auctions - Kusama

Relay Chain

To keep its network consistent with the state of the system, Kusama Relay Chain uses a variant of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus called Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS).

This system allows anyone to put money in KSM by locking the cryptocurrency into a special contract to perform one or more of the following roles necessary for its operation:

• Validators’ data in parachain blocks. They also participate in consensus and vote on proposed changes to the network.
• Designators - Secure the relay chain by choosing trusted validators. Nominees delegate their staked KSM tokens to validators and thus assign their votes to them. Users staking KSM and completing these roles are also eligible for KSM rewards.

Kusama’s Governance: Referendum, Board and Technical Committee

Three types of Kusama users can influence software development. These include:

Referendum

Anyone who buys KSM tokens can propose changes to the network and approve or reject major changes proposed by others.

Board

Elected by KSM owners, board members are responsible for proposing changes and determining what changes are proposed by KSM owners to the software. Kusama Council starts with seven seats but intends to grow as community interest grows.

Technical Committee

The technical committee consists of groups actively building Kusama, which can make proposals, especially in an emergency. The members of the technical committee are elected by the members of the Council.

Kusama’s User Roles: Builders and Network Maintainers

Builder

Before deploying their applications on Polkadot, these users can create and customize them on Kusama. They can therefore use the same reasoning as the Polkadot network to replicate the best and most productive outcomes from their trials on Kusama.

Parachains, bridges, parathreads, and other network components are made by builders. In essence, they are development teams and lone developers. The following are some reasons why development teams might think about utilizing Kusama for their work:

• Developers will have roughly the same experience building on Polkadot since Kusama uses the same base code.
• Kusama’s development is much faster than Polkadot.
• If desired, these Kusama projects can be easily transferred to Polkadot.
• Deploying to Kusama will almost certainly cost less than deploying to Polkadot.

Network Maintainers

The network maintainers are in charge of maintaining and controlling the platform’s operations. Collators are users who receive information from parachains and transfer it to validators via new blocks for verification. These validators receive new blocks and add them to the list once they have been verified. They also participate in future activities, such as reaching an agreement with other validators. This group of users is known as the network maintainers because they impact the network’s activities.

What Is the KSM Token?

The native cryptocurrency of the Kusama network is the KSM token (just as DOT is the native token of the Polkadot network). This token’s initial distribution follows the same rules as the DOT token distribution. This means that if you took part in the DOT ICO, you’d have access to the same KSM tokens as you did, encouraging Kusama network users to use it and aiding the team in developing the network. However, the creation of tokens through network rewards may be the most significant shift in Kusama.

The KSM currency is a governance token that controls protocol patches and updates and pays fees via parachains. While nominators can use their KSM to demonstrate support for particular validators and earn a portion of the rewards, validators stake their KSM to assure network security and collect inflation rewards. Additionally, new parachains can be supported by integrating with the KSM coin.

Is Kusama (KSM) a Good Investment?

Kusama is a “playground” for Polkadot. The project is a network for teams that want to build their dApps and parachains on Kusama or just a temporary platform to deploy Polkadot.

For example, if a project wants to open a parachain on Polkadot, it must win an auction and hold many DOT tokens to hold its parachain. When the parachain closes, they can collect your tokens. The problem is that parachains have a high cost for small projects that cannot afford this luxury. Kusama comes up with a solution. In this way, they serve as a platform for projects to test all project initiatives before being deployed to Polkadot.

Also, Kusama was founded in 2019 by Gavin Wood, creator of Polkadot and co-founder of Ethereum. Before developing Ethereum and serving as CTO, Wood worked as a research scientist at Microsoft. Among Wood’s main accomplishments are the creation of Ethereum’s coding language, Solidity, and the publication of the Yellow Book, where he explains the Ethereum virtual machine and the execution system for smart contracts. Wood left Ethereum in 2016 to co-found Parity Technologies (formerly Ethcore), which develops the core infrastructure for Ethereum, Bitcoin, Zcash, and Polkadot.

Kusama’s network uses technology from Parity Technologies and Web3 Foundation. Kusama has almost the same code base as Polkadot and uses an open-source framework called Substrate. It allows developers to create entire blockchains in minimal time, connect them to Kusama and make them compatible with Polkadot.

How to own Kusama (KSM)?

One way to own KSM is to go through a centralized crypto exchange, so the first step is to create a Gate.io account and complete the KYC process. Once you have added funds to your account, check out the steps to buy KSM on the spot or derivatives market.

News on Kusama

In October 2022, KILT Protocol made history by becoming the first parachain to complete a complete transition from the Kusama relay chain to the Polkadot relay chain. In addition to marking a technical milestone, the move also represents the first instance of a parachain that puts Kusama on the path to the Polkadot upgrade. This demonstrates an important use case for the “canary network” model pioneered by Polkadot, which allows Web3 projects to test their technology in habitats and mitigate risk before moving. to a more stable production network. Polkadot’s technology platform has helped make the historical transition from one network to another.

Useful References

For the latest updates about Kusama, you can visit:

• Kusama’s Official Website
• Twitter
• Watercooler Riot Chat
• YouTube
• Discord
• Reddit
• CrowdCast Webinars

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