Kusama parachain auctions summary
First step in bringing the vision of the Web 3.0 and the decentralized future is behind us so let’s have a look on the winning projects and details of the auctions and crowdloans.
First of all, congratulations to all the winners and all the honor to the losers! We will do a brief summary, provide an overview of the winning projects, then we will look into some interesting data about the crowdloans and finally let’s peek into the future as well!
Auction summary
As you all know, auctions began on June 15th and lasted for 5 weeks. Each week there was one winning project and now we have totally 6 parachains connected to the Kusama relay chain. If you wonder why six if there were only 5 auctions — the first connected parachain was Statemine, a common-good parachain for creating both fungible and non-fungible assets on the Kusama.
Let’s face it, auctions had a really predictable outcome except for the battle for the 5th slot between Bifrost and Basilisk — which also brought really funny meme war between the projects. But other than that, there was no real competition between the projects.
On the other hand, we can also say that the slot prices were really expansive (see Winners bellow) and we can expect its price to drop significantly in the next batches of auctions.
Winners
These are the glorified winners (with total collected KSM)
- Karura (501,137)
- Moonriver (205,935)
- Shiden (138,457)
- Khala (132,280)
- Bifrost (136,817)
Karura (Acala)
Karura is going to bring the most two most important pieces of any DeFi ecosystem to Kusama — the stablecoin and DEX. Stablecoin is called kUSD and it will be usable throughout the entire Kusama ecosystem.
Karura DEX will be the central decentralized exchange of the Kusama ecosystem with micro gas fees that can be paid in any token. It’s an AMM based exchange similar to the Uniswap and offers various trading pairs for tokens from both Kusama ecosystem and Ethereum thanks to the upcoming bridges between these two worlds.
Lastly, Karura will also support liquid staking which means that user can stake via Karura’s slick user interface, receive a L-KSM token that they can further trade or farm and finally, they don’t need to face 8-day unbonding period.
Status
Karura was the first parachain winning the auctions and thus they are moving the fastest with enabling its functionality. Tokens from crowdloan have been already distributed, governance is enabled and swap of KSM for KAR tokens already works.
You can find current progress in the roadmap, following features are yet to be enabled
- Add Bitcoin and Ethereum bridges
- Enable liquid staking
- Add USDT
Moonriver (Moonbeam)
Moonriver aims to be a hub for Ethereum-based decentralized applications on Kusama. Project provides full EVM compatibility which means that you can deploy any smart contract written in Solidity to the Moonriver. This also allows Ethereum developers to use all the tooling (Truffle, Ganache and others) they are already familiar with and therefore allowing for a simple migration to the Kusama ecosystem.
Smart contracts are also enriched with publish/subscribe capabilities and transaction fees will also be much cheaper than they are on the Ethereum network right now. Moonriver has drawn a lot of attention from both community and developers and there are already many signed partnerships and projects planning to migrate to this network. Just to name a few
- DeFi (Balancer, SushiSwap or Injective protocol)
- Tools (Metamask, Ankr or The Graph)
- Oracles (Chainlink, Band protocol or DIA)
- Also, Polkadotters are proud supporters as collators :-)
Status
Full launch is estimated to happen on 26th August — network has been boostrapped, governance enabled and sudo module was already removed. You can ready about the whole launch process here.
Shiden (Astar network)
Shiden is in a way very similar project to the Moonriver since it’s also providing EVM compatibility for smart contract developers coming from the Ethereum ecosystem. However, it distuinguishes itself by two additional features — it enables for WASM/Rust based smart contracts (that are much faster and safer than traditional Ethereum contracts) and provides dApp Staking that we will explain further on.
dApp Staking
This unique feature provides an incentive for developers to build on the Shiden network. Each dApp will have so called operator and people can nominate their SDN tokens to this nominator instead of a network validator (like Kusama or Polkadot). Then, network gives 50% of block reward to validators, 40% to the dApp operators and 10% to it’s nominators.
As you can see, 40% of block reward is a huge incentive for developers to come to the Shiden network and develop their dApps here — and the best part is that they don’t need to apply for funding or grant, successful apps will be funded right out of the box!
Status
Shiden is in its early stages with just SDN tokens being distributed to the crowdloan supporters. However, team is quite well known to work hard and deliver early so we can hopefully expect the full launch soon. Launch process can be inspected on the teams dashboard with token transfers scheduled for the end of month.
Khala (Phala network)
Khala Network is going to bring one of the most important thing of our lives to the Kusama ecosystem — the privacy. Main feature of this project are so-called confidential smart contracts. As you are surely aware, all the data in permisionless blockchains like Ethereum or Polkadot are visible and readable for the entire world. Which is definitely a good thing because we need transparency but it also prevents businesses from stepping into the crypto world at the same time.
In our view, Khala Network is really crucial to a crypto currency adoption because it allows businesses to operate on the blockchain while keeping their data safe and private at the same time. You can read more about Phala/Khala in our article.
Status
Since Khala won the 4th auction, the launch process is currently in its very beginning. Crowdloan participants have already received their rewards and the network will be boostrapped soon. You can follow the entire process on Khala’s tracking dashboard.
Bifrost
On the surface, it might look that Bifrost is a bit similar to Karura because it’s a project dedicated to the liquid staking. However, Bifrost will enable liquid staking for any PoS based chain and not only Substrate-based ones! In fact, users can already use Bifrost to stake on ETH 2.0 network or on the EOS. But this not all, truly revolutional feature of Bifrost is Slot Auction Liquidity Protocol!
Enter SALP
As you are probably aware, participants of any crowdloan need to lock their tokens for the entire slot duration (which was 48 weeks on Kusama recently). This can be really tedious so that’s why Bifrost developed SALP that will mint a vsKSM for each KSM locked in the crowdloan via their interface. These voucher slot tokens can be further used in DeFi or for an exchange back to the original KSM tokens.
Current status
Bifrost is currently at the beginning of its parachain journey with enablement of transfers scheduled for the end of the August — you can track the progress here.
Honorable mention — Basilisk
We will briefly describe Basilisk as well because they have shown a really thrilling performance in the last round of auctions — they even took the lead for some time before Bifrost finally prevailed.
Basilisk is a modular Automated Market Maker (AMM) — meaning 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). It will also provide liquidity bootstrap (LBP) that will help new projects with their token distribution and successful launch.
Crowdloan data
The first batch of auctions/crowdloans is behind us and it will be very interesting to look into some on-chain data — how many people participated, average size of contribution and other statistics so we can better judge whether the auctions were successful or not. Therefore, we will explore some data using the Subscan tool.
Total KSM raised
There was total of 1,300,000 KSM raised by all projects having a crowdloan. This accounts for nearly 12% of the total circulating supply — or actually more than 20% if you account for the fact that almost 50% of all tokens are locked in the staking.
Or, in another words, it’s over 300,000,000 USD in today’s prices — does anyone need a bigger proof about rising popularity of this ecosystem? Also, to put this number in some perspective, one of the biggest ICOs was the Polkadot itself — and it raised “only” 145,593,300 USD for 50% of the entire genesis supply.
Participants
There were 33,807 contributions made to all projects that we can see from on-chain data. However, we have to account the fact that a lot of people contributed via exchanges — so the final contributor number could actually revolve around 50,000 or even more. So let’s look how many people have contributed to the each project and what was their average contribution.
Types of contributors
It is interesting to discover whether the crowdloans were controlled by whales (as this was often the case with ICOs) or if most of the money actually came from small investors and eager project supporters.
So let’s look at the breakdown of different projects — it might seem that more than a half was contributed by the whales. However, submissions from exchanges were made in huge batches (therefore falling under the whale category although it was the retail which mostly contributed). Some projects also published their own reports so we will include them as well.
Karura
As a clear winner, Karura has highest amount of both contributions and KSM collected. Report can be found here.
Moonriver
Unfortunately no report has been published for the Moonriver yet but we can see that the token distribution is almost the same as with the Karura.
Shiden
As we can see, whale ratio is a bit worse for Shiden but it’s around the half of the contribution which is not bad.
Khala
Khala had a quite big support from exchanges that explains the bigger whale ratio. You can read their full report here.
Bifrost
Bifrost has a biggest whale ratio but we have to account the exchanges (and multiple of them supported Bifrost auction) and their SALP protocol which allows for contribution directly from Bifrost protocol. You can see the full breakdown here.
Overall, we find positive that crowdloans don’t seem to be just a whale game but it attracted a lot of community attention and contributions from retail investors. And we would expect this effect to amplify with crowdloans on Polkadot that will draw attention of a wider audience.
Future
We all know there’s a big question lying around — wen auctions on Polkadot? :-) Unfortunately, we don’t have a definitive answer (and as usual, no dates were given) but we can try to make an educated guess.
In his blog post, Gavin Wood states that
After Kusama’s first auctions complete successfully, one would expect Polkadot’s auctions to happen soon after.
Polkadot auctions will hopefully follow in the month or two. The delay is caused by thorough code auditing that will done in order to make sure that everything will work 100% smoothly on the Polkadot. Actually 2 of the total 4 audits are already completed so hopefully we can expect annoucement in a couple of weeks.
Kusama
Next batch of Kusama auctions have already been published and it’s scheduled for the 1st of September! So let’s look what the second bring to the table.
Next Kusama parachains
Second batch of auctions will also bring competition between really interesting projects within the ecosystem so let’s have a brief look at some of them.
Manta Network (Calamari)
This is another privacy-oriented project that will private exchange between assets to the ecosystem. You can imagine Manta as being an Uniswap with private transactions and ability to mint anonymous tokens that can be used throught the entire Kusama ecosystem.
Kilt
This is a very important project for the entire ecosystem because it will bring decentralized credentials that we need in order to fulfill Web 3.0 vision. Their newest innovation is SocialKYC that will allow you to use KYC-based services without actually revealing your personal data like name or birth date.
Equillibrium (Genshiro)
Genhiro will bring decentralized money market together with borrowing, lending, synthetic assets and others to the Kusama. It’s a pretty comprehensive project offering a lot of DeFi features so hopefully we will see it running soon
Robonomics
Very interesting project that targets Industry 4.0, robotics and internet of things. Robonomics will serve as a central hub of an interconnected world, providing a platform for all various devices to communite and exchange messages in a trustless, decentralized way.
Centrifuge (Altair)
One of the most innovative parachains in the entire ecosystem — meet real-world assets minted as NFT on the blockchain! Centrifuge allows companies to put their real-world assets as collaterals on the blockchain and take loan from the users in the form of stablecoin to boost the company’s liquidity.
Darwinia Network (Crab)
Darwinia wants to serve as a gateway to all other blockchains projects running outside of the the Kusama ecosystem — be it Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS and whole bunch of others. Their bridge solution is fully trustless and they have already built a multichain metaverse called Evolution Land.
Crust Network
Another important project that we definitely need in the ecosystem — decentralized storage that will allows smart contracts and dApps to safely store data in a trustless and decentralized manner.
Conclusion
As you can see, auctions were quite a success! There were a lot of participants, incredible amount of KSM has been locked in the crowdloans and most importantly — it wasn’t just a whale game but real, organic interest from people who believe in a decentralized world and want to support their favorite projects in fullfiling this vision.
And we are only at the beginning! As we shown in the last section, there are really interesting projects coming to the Kusama in the next batch (and it’s definitely not an exhaustive list) and we will also see Polkadot auctions happening quite soon. We firmly believe this will be one of the most important crypto events of the year and it will change the shape of the cryptocurrency space forever!
If you like this article, consider supporting us by nominating your tokens to our Kusama or Polkadot validator going by the POLKADOTTERS name.
