Kusama parachain auctions #5–10 & crowdloan strategies
The first batch of parachain auctions are behind us and some of the winning projects (Karura, Moonriver and Shiden) already allowed token transfers while Karura enabled the token swap between KAR, KSM and their decentralized stablecoin kUSD. Other functionalities will be added as soon as possible.
For better utilization of Kusama, the parachain slot winners will have to run most of their functions immediately and without some fatal defects. By adding new and new projects on a regular basis, the usecase of the whole ecosystem will increase and begin to bear fruit of the hard work on the code.
Interoperability of parachains will now be the main advantage for Kusama and with the network effect that comes with its usage, Kusama (and later Polkadot) will become a perfect place for developers and users altogether!
Here we would like to have a look at the projects and their crowdloan strategies, those that didn't succeed in the first 5 auctions and have the motivation and skills to not just join but also win one of the incoming auctions and secure a parachain slot for themselves.
Kusama parachain auctions #5–10
The auctions will start on the 1st September 2021 with opening of another 5 slots. Currently we have 6 parachains running — 5 auctions winners and Statemine, a “commong-good” parachain and first functioning parachain on Kusama.
But what are the project that will compete in the parachain auctions and what is their crowdloan strategy?
KILT Spiritnet
KILT Protocol is without a doubt one of the most important projects for the entire ecosystem because it will bring decentralized credentials that we need in order to fulfill the Web 3.0 vision. Their newest innovation is SocialKYC that will allow you to use KYC-based services without revealing personal data like name or birth date.
By using a crowdloan to support Kilt, you can get 25 KILT tokens per each 1 KSM, while the minimum contribution is set to 0,1 KSM. Actually, you can get even 33 KILT on average, so hurry up! The maximum cap for KILT’s crowdloan is 220,000 KSM. You can contribute straight through your Polkadot.js account on the crowdloans page.
Basilisk (HydraDX)
Basilisk has shown a really thrilling performance in the last round of auctions when finally lost to Bifrost. This is why we will start with this project.
Basilisk is a modular Automated Market Maker (AMM) that will support different types of “decentralized exchanges” to experiment with. Imagine running Uniswap, Balancer or Curve under the same roof and trying to find the best possible AMM for various asset types (stablecoins, derivates or others).
Basilisk will also provide liquidity bootstrap (LBP) that will help new projects with their token distribution and successful launch.
Their crowdloan starts on 31st August and you can join it by entering this link https://loan.bsx.fi/. Basilisk will reward participants with 15% of the total supply, which is 15,000,000,000 BSX. Crowdloan cap is set to 222,222 KSM. That means an average reward 67,500 BSX for 1 KSM and extra bonus of 56,873,469 HDX (max).
Some more information could be found here in the official announcement.
Calamari (Manta Network)
Manta Network resp. Calamari is a privacy-oriented parachain that will privately exchange various assets in the ecosystem.
You can imagine Manta (and Calamari) as being an Uniswap with private transactions and the ability to mint anonymous tokens (anonymous ETH, anonymous UNI etc.) that can be used throughout the entire Kusama ecosystem.
Crowdloan of Calamari offers a reward of 10,000 KMA for each 1 KSM & some bonus rewards for early participation and a 2.5% referral reward. More info in this article.
https://crowdloan.calamari.manta.network
Heiko Finance
This canary of Parallel Finance is a decentralized money market protocol that offers lending, staking, and borrowing in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Parallel will go a bit beyond other DeFi players in Polkadot offering margin staking, auction loans, staking derivatives, and an AMM curve that will enable significantly higher capital efficiency for DOT and KSM holders.
One thing that hit me in the eye was the list of investors including Pantera Capital, that invested also in Acala & Karura! Besides Polkadot projects, they invested in Celer Network. Pantera is the first institutional asset manager from the U.S. focused exclusively on blockchain products.
The reward for crowdloan participants will be 50 HKO at minimum for each 1 KSM, but actually, it’s 865 HKO! More info can be found here in this article or in the guide.
Genshiro (Equilibrium)
Genhiro will bring a decentralized money market together with borrowing, lending, synthetic assets and so on to the Kusama network. Genshiro is a pretty comprehensive project offering a lot of DeFi features so their ambitions are set quite high.
For crowdloan participants, there is reserved a reward of up to 2,400 GENS for each 1 KSM plus a substantial bonus. But at this moment, with all the bonuses you can get up to 4,800 GENS! For more info visit this article.
Robonomics
Robonomics is a project that targets Industry 4.0, robotics, the internet of things (IoT) and Smart cities. Robonomics will serve as a central hub of an interconnected world, providing a platform for all various devices to communicate and exchange messages in a trustless, decentralized way.
Participants get 3,5 XRT tokens for each 1 KSM bonded on the horizon of 48 weeks. The crowdloan limit is set up to 135,000 KSM. Some more details can be found in this article.
Altair (Centrifuge)
Centrifuge connects the world of NFTs with DeFi. Altair will be one of the most innovative parachains in the entire ecosystem where real-world financial assets can be minted as NFT on the blockchain!
Centrifuge allows companies to put their real-world assets as collaterals on the blockchain and take loans from the users in the form of stablecoins to boost the liquidity of the particular company. If you will ever hear from noobs that NFTs are just jpegs without any usecase, just bring them to our article Centrifuge Protocol: making NFTs available on the DeFi market.
In Altair’s crowdloan, you can get 400 AIR for 1 KSM plus some early-bird bonus. Go check out this article for more info.
https://centrifuge.io/altair/crowdloan
Darwinia Crab Network
Darwinia wants to serve as a gateway to all other blockchains projects running outside of the Kusama ecosystem — Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS and many more other blockchains once connected through Darwinia. Their bridge solution is fully trustless and they have already built a multichain metaverse called Evolution Land.
Crab offers a reward of 25 CRING for each 1 KSM plus some extra reward in CRING and RING tokens after winning a slot. Besides that, they offer a BTC prize lotto, where the prize can be found somewhere in their Evolution NFT Land as an NFT.
For more info go to the official web of Darwinia Crab.
Crust Shadow
Another important project that we definitely need in the ecosystem is Crust Network and its canary called Shadow. It's decentralized storage that will allow smart contracts and dApps to safely store data in a trustless and decentralized manner.
For participants, there are allocated CRU tokens, that will go in 1:1 ratio to the KSM supporters + 1,000 CSM tokens for each 1 KSM as well. The cap is set up to 80,000 KSM.
Here is some more information about the Crust Shadow crowdloan.
Other projects worth to mention
At this moment, there are a few more projects, that can surprise even ourselves and overtake some of the previously mentioned projects. But this goes beyond this article, maybe we can take a look at them in some of the next ones.
- PolkaSmith (by PolkaFoundry)
- SherpaX (by ChainX)
- SubGame Gamma
- IntegriTEE Network
- Sakura (Clover Finance)
- Picasso
Conclusion
From the first 5 auctions, we could make a conclusion, that there is a big demand for them. People are locking their Kusama to contribute and support their favorite project and earn some extra reward for it.
And as we know, Kusama auctions are just the beginning of something bigger = Polkadot parachain auctions. Those will take place a few weeks after the start of the auctions no #5–10 on Kusama and the successful audit of the Polkadot code.
We are not just excited about the competition between those amazing projects, but even more to see them connected as parachains and working! While reading this, be sure that you are part of one of the most important crypto events of this year, and it's not going to finish at all, it's just a beginning. But a successful one!
If you like this article, consider supporting us by nominating your tokens to our Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.
