Kraken launches Kusama parachain auction platform as KSM defies downtrend

Published at: June 9, 2021

United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has announced a “first-of-its-kind” parachain auction platform enabling clients to participate directly from the exchange.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Kraken revealed the new platform will enable users who qualify to pledge support for Kusama projects vying for a parachain slot by staking Kusama’s KSM tokens.

The rewards for contributors who support a winning bid vary and can include referral bonuses, early participation bonuses and airdrops.

Polkadot’s multi-chain ecosystem will use sharded sidechains to process transactions in parallel. These Parachains are acquired in the auction process whereby projects try to outbid each other for the right to use the slot for 48 weeks with KSM tokens. Kusama is the testing and development network often dubbed Polkadot’s “canary network.”

Only 100 parachain slots are expected to be available, but this may change through protocol governance votes over time.The post stated:

“For Kusama auctions, the project with the most KSM bonded to support its bid, at the time the auction snapshot is taken, will generally be able to claim the auctioned parachain slot.”

The platform is not available to residents of the U.S., Canada, Japan and Australia.

In its first parachain auction, Kraken will allow clients to support the bids of at least two projects, starting with Karura and Shiden.

Karura is a decentralized finance hub and stablecoin platform for the Kusama network, offering a crypto-collateralized stablecoin, a decentralized exchange, access to liquid staking and an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)-compatible blockchain.

Shiden is a smart contract layer for the Kusama network, upon which developers can design and build new decentralized applications. It will be a cross-chain platform that also supports Ethereum and layer-two protocols.

As reported by Cointelegraph, Polkadot creator Gavin Wood has proposed June 15 for first the Kusama Parachain auction. Following the first five weekly auctions, Wood recommended a pause to evaluate the performance of the network before commencing another batch of auctions.

In late March Acala Network was the first project to secure a parachain slot on Polkadot’s Rococo testnet. On May 17, Polkadot announced that Kusama was finally ready to host Parachains.

The impending auction launches have given a boost to Kusama’s KSM token, which has defied the market slump and surged 28% over the past fortnight. According to CoinGecko, KSM is up 12% over the past 24 hours, trading at $410 at the time of writing.

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