What is Kusama?
Kusama is Polkadot’s public pre-production space, where any developer may play with and evaluate new blockchains or apps before launching them on the network.
In this way, Kusama may be thought of as a laboratory for developers who want to try out early iterations of Polkadot projects using actual cryptocurrencies exchanged on a free market. Before being issued, official Polkadot updates are also checked on Kusama.
Kusama tries to allow developers greater control as they finalize the design of their Polkadot projects and its primary use case is to encourage research. Kusama, on the other hand, has less laws than Polkadot, including fewer governance criteria.
How Does Kusama Work?
Two forms of blockchains may be created on the Kusama network.
The relay chain is the largest Kusama blockchain, and it is where transfers are finalized. The Kusama Relay Chain uses a variant of proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus called nominated proof-of-stake to hold its network in agreement about the status of the scheme (NPoS).
The relay chain distinguishes the process of adding new transactions from the act of validating such transactions to reach greater pace.
Parachains are specialized blockchains that depend on the relay chain’s computational capacity to verify transaction accuracy.
Nominators protect the Relay Chain by appointing reliable validators. Validators receive nominators’ staked KSM tokens and therefore receive nominators’ ballots.
KSM incentives are available to users who stake KSM and play these tasks.
What is the History of Kusama?
Gavin Wood (a co-founder of Ethereum), Peter Czaban, and Robert Habermeier created Kusama in 2016.
Wood’s career prior to developing Kusama is noteworthy, as he invented Solidity, Ethereum’s coding language.
Kusama developers who wish to build parachains have turned to Wood’s Parity Technologies, who manage Substrate, a software development platform that Wood created in 2015.
Previously, Wood was a research scientist at Microsoft, and before that, he was the Ethereum Foundation’s first CTO.
How Do I Hold Kusama?
Users can create a Kusama wallet using the Polkadot.js browser extension.