What is Kusama?

Kusama is considered an early, unaudited, and unpolished version of Polkadot. Kusama seeks to act as a proving ground, enabling teams and developers to design and deploy a parachain or review Polkadot’s governance, staking, nomination, and validation features in a real context.

Kusama is a public pre-production environment for Polkadot that allows any developer to create and test new blockchains or apps before publishing them on the network. In this sense, Kusama is a sandbox for developers looking to test early versions of Polkadot projects, but with real cryptocurrency traded on an open market.

The Kusama network is powered by its own native token, KSM, which can be used to participate in the network’s governance.

A brief history of Kusama

Kusama was developed in 2016 by Polkadot developers Gavin Wood (a co-founder of Ethereum), Peter Czaban, and Robert Habermeier.

Wood’s career is noteworthy since he created Solidity, the programming language used by Ethereum developers to create decentralised applications (dapps). He was also the Ethereum Foundation’s first CTO and worked as a research scientist at Microsoft prior to that. In 2015, Wood founded Parity Technologies, which maintains Substrate, a software development platform used by Kusama developers to construct parachains. Wood is also the head of the Web3 Foundation, a nonprofit that oversaw Polkadot’s token sales, generating around US$200 million from investors.

KSM tokens are the Kusama network’s native token. In July 2018, Polkadot (DOT) token holders received KSM tokens through Ethereum transactions. The transactions were successful, and the DOT token holders received a spot on Kusama’s genesis block. However, after one-and-a-half months, Kusama modified the method of claiming KSM tokens by adopting the proof of authority (PoA) paradigm. As a result, only validators who received KSM had authority by parity and Web3 to generate blocks.

Validators had just one purpose at the time — to indicate their desire to validate. It was a chaotic period, but it did not continue long, since Kusama switched to POS within a few months. According to a Polkadot Network report released in February 2021, there were 700 validators on Kusama network — a significant rise from the 130 validators in December 2019.

How Kusama works

Kusama refers to itself as Polkadot’s Canary Network. Similar to when coal miners would use canaries to determine whether a mine was safe to enter, Kusama works in that way for Polkadot, which is becoming more popular among blockchain developers. Thus, Kusama is an excellent choice to test its apps before putting them on Polkadot.

The platform serves as a test bed for developers looking to innovate and deploy their blockchain. Kusama is a preliminary network for projects before they are ultimately released on Polkadot — but many projects choose to utilise Kusama as their ultimate product.

Kusama has a low barrier to entry for establishing parachains and low bond requirements for validators. It is typically used by early-stage startups and for experimentation.

Initially, to ensure the safe startup of Kusama, the team decided to implement a POA system for the soft launch, with nodes run by the Web3 Foundation. During this time, much of the functionality of Kusama’s network would be disabled to make sure it could onboard more validators in a safe and secure process. Later, Kusama switched to a nominated proof of stake (NPoS) system for its network. Kusama transformed from the original centralised POA system from Web3 nodes to a new decentralised system.

What is Kusama used for?

On Kusama, users gain the capacity to vote on network enhancements by owning and staking KSM cryptocurrency, with each vote proportional to the amount of KSM they stake.

Kusama rewards these users with freshly minted KSM, depending on the number of tokens staked, with validators and nominators getting additional rewards.

Investors should note that there are no restrictions on the supply of KSM. Instead, the protocol issues fresh KSM in perpetuity at a predetermined inflation rate.