The first parachain slot auction will begin on the Polkadot Project Kusama Experimental Network on June 15th. The move brings Polkadot developers closer to launching parachain auctions on the mainnet.
In a blog post, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood laid out a timeline and some guidelines for rolling out parachain auctions – fundraising where projects block cryptoassets in order to win one of the parachain slots on the experimental Kusama network. Deploying parachain auctions on the testnet brings developers one step closer to launching them on the Polkadot mainnet.
Getting a parachain slot in Kusama or Polkadot isn’t cheap. Each auction will last a week, and in the case of Polkadot, the project will have to block at least 1 million DOT (about $ 20 million at the current exchange rate). Polkadot and Kusama have similar code and functionality, but are independent stand-alone networks. Kusama allows you to experiment more with your code and update your chain faster.
Projects can collect cryptoassets needed to win a slot using the crowdloan mechanism built into Kusama. It gives users the ability to block the cryptoasset of the KSM network until the end of the slot rental period. For this, users are rewarded.
Wood explained that the launch of the parachain auctions was marked by the upgrade of Shell’s parachain to Statemine, which can handle KSM, stablecoins and NFTs. The first parachain auction at Kusama will begin on June 15 at 8 am ET, with winners to be determined on June 22 at 7 am.
In May, the technical lead of the Web3 Foundation said that Polkadot’s interconnected blockchain network would require “a completely different paradigm of application programming.” Earlier, the founder of Polkadot announced that the experimental Kusama network of the Polkadot project is ready for the implementation of parachains. Testing for the Polkadot protocol began last summer when the developers launched the Rococo testnet.
