Polkadot's Kusama

“Expect chaos. No promises. Polkadot’s wild cousin. A canary network.”

These are the words that flash on the homepage of the recently launched Kusama network - an early, unaudited version of Polkadot ($DOT) that’s intended to serve as a sandbox for developers. For all intents and purposes, it mimics what they can expect in Polkadot - deploying parachains, staking, nomination, validation, and even participating in governance. Kusama will have the same token allocation airdropped to DOT holders and will feature the same token economics. Unlike a testnet though, it will not evolve into the mainnet and will continue to exist alongside Polkadot.

This may start sounding a bit like Litecoin, which some have viewed as the testnet for Bitcoin. For example, while Seg-Wit was being considered in the Bitcoin community, it was implemented in Litecoin first. Any upgrade comes with inherent risk, but it’s success provided confidence that it would work in a similar network. Litecoin memed its way into the “silver to bitcoins gold,” and is now has a market cap of more than $5 billion, but Kusama likely won’t follow the same path. The goal isn’t to improve on Polkadot, but rather to experiment and test the security of the chain in a realistic manner. If you look at their website they even include an Adversarial Cheatsheet which is literally a guide on how to help you break things. While Litecoin was used as this pseudo-testnet there was never an explicit intent to break it for the greater good of Bitcoin.

The native tokens in Kusama are also not intended for sale, but knowing this space I wouldn’t be surprised if a market opens up you start getting KSMA bags. It can be easy to forget, but all of these cryptonetworks are highly experimental, and yet, they often carry eight or nine digits of value. We’ve seen countless 51% attacks, wallet freezes, and smart contract bugs which have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. There are valuable lessons to be learned from each of them, however when they happen with real money on the line people involved can be severely impacted. Kusama looks to avoid this by welcoming anyone to come and try to break their protocol in whatever fashion they like. This way, they can learn from mistakes so that when the long-awaited Polkadot does launch they have already solved many of the issues that could have resulted in catastrophe.