Kusama (KSM) Wallet

Kusama Network Foundation

Kusama was founded by Parity Technologies, the same company that created Polkadot. Its core team consists of Gavin Wood, Peter Czaban, and Robert Habermeier in 2016. Gavin Wood has also co-founded Ethereum and an invented of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the Solidity programming language.

Kusama is a blockchain platform that is designed to provide an interoperable and scalable framework for experimental projects. It benefits from a low entry requirements and high speed. Its primary use case is to facilitate testing, therefore Kusama gives developers more flexibility and freedom. In this way, Kusama can be considered as the blockchain that allows developers to finalize the design of their Polkadot projects. Official Polkadot upgrades are also tested on Kusama before their release.

How Kusama Works

Kusama allows its users to develop two types of blockchains: the Relay Chain and Parachains. The Relay Chain is the place where transactions take place, and Parachains validate these transactions. Kusama Relay Chain is based on nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS) mechanism which is a variation of proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. In NPoS nominators back validators with their own stake. The system allows anyone who stakes KSM to perform as a validator or nominator.

Kusama encourages innovation and provides its users with a fast iteration, advanced technology, low economic barrier, engaged community, and open governance. The open governance includes three types of users: the referendum chamber, which refers to all KSM token holders, the council, which is elected by the holders, and the technical committee, which mostly participates in the case of an emergency. KSM is the native token of the Kusama network and allows developers to test out their projects and blockchains with a real cryptocurrency.

Kusama (KSM) and Polkadot (DOT)

Polkadot and Kusama are very closely related blockchains as they have been built on similar codebases and were founded by the same developers. Governance on both Polkadot and Kusama is designed to be decentralized and permissionless, so that everyone who owns the native DOT or KSM token can play their role in the development of the project. However, they operate independently and prioritize different goals.

Kusama is great for experiments and early-stage deployment. It is much up to four times faster than Polkadot. This allows Kusama to adapt and evolve faster than Polkadot. Also, becoming a validator on Kusama is easier, because the requirements for entry require less value than in Polkadot.

Polkadot is more conservative and it prioritizes stability and dependability. Polkadot is more secure and provides higher validator rewards than Kusama.