Polkadot creator Gavin Wood proposes June 15 for first Kusama parachain auction

Polkadot and Kusama creator Gavin Wood has published a tentative schedule for the much-anticipated Kusama parachain slot auctions. 

According to a blog post posted on Tuesday, the first parachain auction slot will open on June 15 at 12:00 pm Central European Summer Time.

The tentative schedule, subject to the approval of the Kusama Council and other KSM stakeholders, will see the maiden parachain auction concluded by June 17, with the bidding period continuing until June 22.

If the Kusama Council approves the schedule, then the first-ever parachain slot auction winner could emerge by 11:00 am on June 22. The second parachain slot auction will then commence an hour later, with subsequent slot auctions slated at one-week intervals according to Wood’s post.

After the first five weekly auctions, Wood recommended a pause to evaluate the performance of the network before commencing another batch of five parachain slot auctions based on the aforementioned schedule.

Back in May, Cointelegraph reported that Kusama was finally ready to host parachains. According to Wood, Kusama developers are confident that there are no technical hurdles to holding slot auctions or deploying parachains.

These auctions will determine which parachains will be added to the Kusama relay chain — a canary network for Polkadot. Detailing the need to get Kusama parachains up and running, Wood said, “Kusama exists as the Polkadot canary network and therefore to help protect Polkadot from a serious issue by allowing functionality to exist in the wild for as long as possible,” adding:

“Since the amount of protection it gives is in some way proportional to the amount of time it is active prior to Polkadot, there is a clear reason for deploying this logic as soon as possible for the good of Polkadot.”

The one-week headups given for the start of the process is reported to allow the community ample time to unstake their Kusama (KSM) to fund auction bids.