Kusama is an early, experimental version of Polkadot that exists as an independent network. It intends to act as a sandbox for developers, allowing teams to deploy and test pre-release versions of their projects before launching them on Polkadot’s mainnet. Kusama will also serve as a testbed for Parity Technologies leading up to the mainnet launch of Polkadot. Like its sister chain, Kusama uses a native token, KSM, to power computation and give holders the ability to participate in securing the network and voting on upgrade proposals.

Consensus

Kusama uses Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS), comprising the roles of validators and nominators to maximize chain security. Validators take the role of both validating blocks and guaranteeing the finality of the chain, while nominators can help choose the set of validators by indicating their support weighted by KSM.

Usage details

KSM holders can use their tokens as follows: Bond to the network to validate transactions or launch a parachain Pay for transaction and messaging fees Vote on governance proposals or nominate validators into the capped validator set DOTs investors from previous token sales were able to claim a proportionate amount of KSM at their choosing. Parity Technologies also offered a KSM “frictional faucet” (i.e., one that limits the outputs per account) and issued token grants for those that did not invest in the DOT token sales. Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation also reserved 1% of the initial DOT supply (100,000 tokens) to Kusama stakeholders and its community. This reward serves to incentivize token sale investors and those new to Polkadot to participate within its sister network. Neither company has announced how they plan to distribute these DOT rewards.

Technology