Polkadots innovation hub Astar Network is thrilled to announce a partnership with the leading DeFi network Acala to supercharge DeFi on Polkadot. The two leading parachains have come together to...
KSM token prices surge as Parachain auctions launch nears.
U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has announced a “first-of-its-kind” Parachain Auction Platform enabling clients to participate directly from the exchange.
In a blog post on June 8, Kraken revealed the new platform will enable users that qualify to pledge support for Kusama projects vying for a Parachain slot by staking Kusama’s KSM tokens.
The rewards for contributors who support a winning bid vary and can include referral bonuses, early participation bonuses, and airdrops.
Polkadot’s multi-chain ecosystem will use sharded sidechains to process transactions in parallel. These Parachains are acquired in the auction process whereby projects try to outbid each other for the right to use the slot for 48 weeks with KSM tokens. Kusama is the testing and development network often dubbed Polkadot’s “Canary network.”
Only 100 Parachain slots are expected to be available, but this may change through protocol governance votes over time.The post stated:
“For Kusama auctions, the project with the most KSM bonded to support its bid, at the time the auction snapshot is taken, will generally be able to claim the auctioned parachain slot.”
The platform is not available to residents of the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia.
In its first Parachain auction, Kraken will allow clients to support the bids of at least two projects, starting with Karura and Shiden.
Karura is a DeFi hub and stablecoin platform for the Kusama network offering a crypto-collateralized stablecoin, a decentralized exchange, access to liquid staking, and an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible blockchain.
Shiden is a smart contract layer for the Kusama network upon which developers can design and build new DApps. It will be a cross-chain platform that also supports Ethereum and layer two protocols.
As reported by Cointelegraph, Polkadot creator Gavin Wood has proposed June 15 for first the Kusama Parachain auction. Following the first five weekly auctions, Wood recommended a pause to evaluate the performance of the network before commencing another batch of auctions.
In late March Acala Network was the first project to secure a Parachain slot on Polkadot's Rococo testnet. On May 17, Polkadot announced that Kusama was finally ready to host Parachains.
The impending auction launches have given a boost to Kusama’s KSM token which has defied the market slump and surged 28% over the past fortnight. According to CoinGecko, KSM is up 12% over the past 24 hours, trading at $410 at the time of writing.
The rollout of the Polkadot protocol has been ongoing since August, when the project launched its Rococo testnet.
Kusama, sister chain to Polkadot’s platform, is ready for the rollout of parachains on the network.
Polkadot and Kusama creator Gavin Wood today said in a blog post that Polkadot was entering the fourth and final phase of its mainnet launch, which involves deploying parachains to the Kusama network. According to Wood, the development arm behind Polkadot, Parity Technologies, had released an upgrade — Polkadot version 0.9 — for Kusama, which “is now finally ready to host parachains.”
Wood said the launch of the parachains would proceed following a full external audit on the new version of Polkadot and Kusama executing “at least one successful auction involving crowdloans and hosting at least one functional parachain” in the wild. He did not provide a specific timeline, but added he expected the audit to be completed “in the near future,” with the Kusama website announcing the first of five auctions one week in advance.
“After Kusama’s first auctions complete successfully, one would expect Polkadot’s auctions to happen soon after,” said Wood.
The rollout of the Polkadot protocol has been ongoing since August, when the project launched its Rococo testnet to evaluate its planned sharding implementation based on parachains. Some expected the rollout of parachains to occur in the first quarter of 2021, but there were reportedly issues with the Rococo testnet’s stability — for example, one of its parachains was apparently stuck for more than a day.
At the time of publication, the price of Polkadot’s DOT token is $39.51, having fallen more than 2.2% in the last 24 hours.