Kusama (KSM) Hits Significant Milestone as First Parachain Auction Nears Launch 

Kusama (KSM) has announced via Twitter on June 2, 2021, that its network council has successfully passed a vote to upgrade Shell to Statemine and make it the network’s first live and fully functional parachain. If all goes as planned, projects will be able to bid for a slot in Kusama’s Statemine parachain in a few days, via a parachain auction.

Kusama’s First Parachain Auction Imminent

Kusama (KSM), Polkadot’s canary network, has achieved a significant feat in its development, as its governing council has voted unanimously to upgrade Shell, Kusama’s first common good parachain, to Statemine.

For the uninitiated, the primary function of the shell parachain is to test the functionality of the Kusama parachain system. However, with the upgrade to Statemine, the parachain will be able to support a vast array of functions, including the minting of both fungible and non-fungible tokens on the Kusama network.

As stated in a tweet by the Kusama team, once the upgrade is successful, with no significant frictions after a three-day enactment period, it will release details about its parachain auction, which will enable projects to bid for a slot to launch their solutions on the Statemine parachain.

A Great Time for Kusama (KSM) & Polkadot (DOT) Holders

These are exciting times indeed for holders of KSM and DOT tokens, as the ecosystem is now beginning to take shape. It’s worth noting that a successful Statemine parachain upgrade will serve as a green light for projects interested in going live on Kusama to start making preparations to conduct their crowdloan activities or parachain loan offerings (PLO)

While PLOs are similar to initial coin offerings (ICOs), as they both require participants to make financial commitments (in the form of established tokens) in exchange for the project’s native crypto, (which could even end up as a “shitcoin”) the former is, however, less risky than the latter.

Specifically, in PLOs, participants will be given back their initial tokens (in this case KSM) plus the project’s native crypto immediately after the parachain auction is concluded, provided the project emerges as the highest bidder.

Though parachain auctions offer participants a nearly risk-free way of getting new tokens without directly purchasing them with their hard-earned money, the major drawback is that their lent crypoassets could get locked up in the project’s crowdloan module from six to 48 weeks or even more, especially if the project they are supporting fails to win the auction and wants to try again.

As reported by BTCManager on May 31, 2021, Karura (KAR), the DeFi hub of Kusama, released details of its parachain auction. Karura says it’s offering participants 12 KAR tokens for every KSM they contribute.

At press time, the price of Kusama (KSM) is up by 16.47 percent in the past 24-hours, trading at $462.12, with a market cap of $3.86 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.