When Kusama started rolling out parachain auctions, it was to conduct five auctions between June 15th and July 20th. The process has just ended, and five winners have been chosen.
Integrated within the Polkadot and Kusama networks, Parachains are custom, project-specific blockchains. Users can customize a Parachain for various use cases and feed them into the main blockchain as Relay Chains, empowering the network with shared security consensus and transaction settlements. Parachains, in many cases, support their own token as well.
Now, let us introduce each of them. Irrespective of their starting date, the slot duration for each of the 5 winners ends on May 13th, 2022.
Karura
Karura won the first-ever parachain slot auction with more than 501k KSM coming as contributions from the community. Its network has now gone live on Kusama and started producing its first blocks.
The number of total contributions hovered around 20,000, while the total number of locked KSM touched 501,137.66. The number of on-chain contributions was 14,164.
The Acala team worked for two years on the technical development and one year on the community and brand-building efforts before submitting Karura for the auction. As a result, Karura will meet the Kusama community’s DeFi demand while benefiting from Kusama’s plug-and-play security, high-capacity processing speeds, micro-gas fees, and multiple network interoperability.
Moonriver
Moonriver was the second entity to win the auction. It received a total of 205,935.0111 KSM from 5,977 contributors.
Moonriver is a community-driven sister network to the Moonbeam Foundation. What it offers is a permanently incentivized canary network where new code ships first. As an Ethereum compatible parachain on Kusama, Moonriver will evolve and grow over time to support use cases beyond the realm of Moonbeam.
It will serve as an easy way for developers to implement existing applications with the Ethereum tech stack. Moreover, the deployment will hardly require any alterations and benefit from its access to the Kusama network.
Owing to its community-led network strategy, the Moonriver community members will own a large chunk of the MOVR tokens. Therefore, it implies considerable control over the network’s future direction. Furthermore, with Moonriver, users can access and leverage the latest builds and features of Moonbeam in a live, incentivized CanaryNet environment, an environment that stays connected to Kusama.
Shiden
Shiden won the third parachain auction. Shiden is a sister project of the Astar Network. Previously known as Plasm Network, Astar Network is a leading Polkado-native layer-two decentralized app hub. Shiden is Astar’s sister project. Shiden won the auction with 137,020 KSM tokens bonded.
At its core, Shiden is a Smart Contract platform for Kusama dApps. It provides multi-chain support to the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the WebAssembly-based contracts. It will also offer layer-two technology on Kusama, including Plasm and Optimistic rollups. The layer-two technology paradigm has come up as a highly beneficial Ethereum scaling solution. According to Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, the role of optimistic rollups in scaling the Ethereum network will be significant. It can scale the network by as much as 100-times.
Khala
Khala was the fourth winner at the auction. It secured a parachain slot with a total of 132,280 KSM tokens. It is a Web3 cloud computing project by Phala network. K-PHA is Khala’s native token. It is swappable with ERC20-PHA and Phala’s native token PHA at a 1:1 ratio.
Phala network launched the pre-mainnet Khala Network on Kusama, with mainnet Phala to be followed on Polkadot. Up to 15,000,000 PHA were available as rewards in the Kusama auction. In addition, every KSM that came in support of Khala during the auction will win 100 PHA as a reward.
Phala, as a network, aims at building a platform for general-purpose privacy-preserving Turing-Complete smart contracts. It has the properties of confidentiality, code integrity, state consistency, availability, and interoperability. Moreover, it avoids the leakage of any input, output, or intermediate state of a confidential contract. At the same time, anyone can verify that the output is produced by a specific smart contract published on the blockchain.
Bifrost
The fifth project to win the auction is Bifrost, a staking liquidity DeFi project on Polkadot. It secured the fifth parachain slot by locking in 136,817 KSM tokens. As a DeFi protocol, Bifrost connects Polkadot and other proof-of-stake blockchains, providing staking derivatives.
It is also the first blockchain middleware to enable multichain technology. Rich with the properties of scalability, interoperability, and flexibility, Bifrost’s advantages are many. With it, users can cherry-pick blockchain protocols, customize the network, and switch between blockchains whenever they find a better one.
Bifrost is also behind BiFi, a universal DeFi platform, helping to build the most transparent, flexible, and comprehensive DeFi platform.
For now, the five Kusama parachain auctions are over. The parachain teams can bid for leases in contiguous increments for a maximum of eight 6-week periods. After the lease is over, slots will be up for auction again, and any team that is willing to retain their position will have to bid the same way a new bidder would do.