Bidding is about to begin among projects looking to secure a place within the Polkadot ecosystem, a scalable network of interconnected blockchains, known as “Parachains,” created by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood.
In a blog post published Tuesday, Wood outlined a schedule and some recommendations for the rollout over the coming weeks of the Parachain Slot Auctions, the bidding process by which projects can secure a lease to build on Kusama. Kusama, Polkadot’s pre-production environment, is also known as a “canary network.”
As Ethereum has become increasingly overloaded and expensive, thanks to the explosion of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), credible alternatives such as Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, NEAR and others are starting to elbow their way into the base layer conversation.
Winning a parachain slot on Kusama or Polkadot once it’s fully deployed, is an expensive business. Each auction will last a week, and in the case of Polkadot, this is said to require a minimum of 1 million of the network’s native DOT tokens (approximately $20 million at today’s prices).
Projects can crowdfund the tokens required to win a slot using Kusama’s built-in “crowdloan” mechanism, which allows people to contribute by agreeing to lock up their own KSM, Kusama’s native token, until the end of a lease period, for which these contributors can earn rewards.
The start of the parachain auctions was heralded by last week’s upgrade of a Shell parachain, a kind of empty, featureless vessel, to Statemine, which can handle a mix of KSM, stablecoins and NFTs, Wood explained.
In terms of the first Kusama Parachain Slot schedule, this is slated to take place in a week’s time – at 12:00 GMT on June 15, according to Wood (and subject to final approval by the Kusama council). Winners will be determined on June 22 at 11:00 GMT.
Source: Coindesk
